How Snakes Lost Their Legs - 80 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

fossil of Tametara mirim

Agustin Martinelli

80-million-year-old snake fossil sheds light on why lizards lost their limbs and started slithering

Of all the primitive ‘just-so’ stories in Genesis, the tale of how the serpent was condemned to crawl on its belly must rank among the most transparently mythological. Having supposedly tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit, God curses the serpent to go on its belly and ‘eat dust’ for the rest of its life. Although the story never explicitly says that the serpent previously had legs, the curse plainly implies a change and has traditionally been understood as an explanation for why snakes slither instead of walking.

Like so much of Genesis, it begins with an observation familiar to its authors—snakes have no legs—and invents a magical tale to explain it. It is an ancient example of an etiological myth: folklore devised to explain why something in the natural world appears as it does, long before anyone had the evidence or intellectual framework needed to understand its real history.

Even as mythology, however, the story is strangely incoherent. Genesis itself does not identify the serpent as Satan but introduces it as the most cunning of the wild animals God had made. Nevertheless, this supposedly ordinary animal can speak, reason and somehow knows about a prohibition that God had given to Adam before Eve had even been created. The text makes no attempt to explain how it acquired either this knowledge or the power of speech.

More awkward still for anyone insisting that the story is literally true, the serpent’s predictions prove substantially more accurate than God’s warning. God tells Adam that he will die on the day he eats the fruit. The serpent tells Eve that they will not die, that their eyes will be opened and that they will become like God, knowing good and evil. They eat the fruit, their eyes are opened and they do not die that day. God then confirms that the humans have indeed become ‘like one of us’ in knowing good and evil. According to Genesis itself, Adam goes on to live for another 930 years.

On the most straightforward reading of the story, therefore, the serpent tells Eve the truth while God’s threat to Adam proves false. Later theologians have attempted to rescue the tale by inventing a ‘spiritual death’, or by claiming that Adam merely began to die that day, but neither qualification appears in the text. These are apologetic repairs added by people who can see the problem but cannot admit that the story’s authors created it.

Science, meanwhile, has uncovered a very different account of how snakes acquired their extraordinary bodies—one involving neither talking reptiles nor fruit, curses or human disobedience, but descent with modification over immense periods of geological time. Snakes are highly modified members of the squamate reptile radiation. Their ancestors progressively elongated their bodies, increased the number of vertebrae and reduced their limbs as different lineages adapted to particular ways of life. Their evolutionary history extends back at least to the Middle Jurassic, about 160 million years ago.

Now, a paper published in Nature by an international team led by Tiago R. Simões describes an exceptionally well-preserved early snake from the Late Cretaceous of Brazil. Named Tametara mirim, the animal lived approximately 85–75 million years ago, when non-avian dinosaurs still dominated terrestrial ecosystems. It is the first articulated snake fossil known from Brazil and preserves a three-dimensional skull together with more than 100 connected vertebrae.

The preserved portion of its skeleton appears to have lacked forelimbs. Because the region around the pelvis is missing, the researchers cannot determine whether it retained vestigial hindlimbs, as some other early snakes did. Its skull also combines recognisably snake-like specialisations with ancestral features resembling those of other squamate reptiles—precisely the sort of mosaic of old and new characteristics expected in an evolving lineage, but not from the instantaneous transformation of an animal by a divine curse.

Refuting Creationism - The Unbroken History of China

Carving stone at Shimao city.

Image by IVPP.

The landscape of Shimao city.

Image by IVPP.

New DNA Study Unlocks Origins, Social Structure of Neolithic Shimao Civilization----Chinese Academy of Sciences

In my last blog post, I pointed out that ancient Egypt’s archaeological and written record extends continuously from long before the date young-Earth creationists assign to Noah’s Flood, through that supposed catastrophe and into biblical times. Nowhere is there any sign that Egypt was destroyed by a global flood and subsequently repopulated by migrants from Mesopotamia. I also showed that the biblical writers who set stories in Egypt possessed only a tenuous understanding of its real history and culture.

Ancient China presents creationists with much the same problem. Its archaeological record contains long regional sequences extending across the supposed date of the Flood, with local populations, cultures and economies continuing to develop. If every human outside Noah’s immediate family had been exterminated, the existing peoples of East Asia should disappear from the record and be replaced by a rapidly expanding population of recent Mesopotamian origin. That is not what archaeology shows—and ancient DNA now provides an especially clear test of the claim.

The evidence comes from a paper published in Nature in November 2025 by an international team led by Professor Qiaomei Fu of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, working with researchers from several other Chinese institutions.

The team analysed genome-wide data from 169 ancient individuals recovered from Shimao and surrounding settlements in northern China. Population analyses were conducted using 144 unrelated individuals, while the remaining close relatives enabled the researchers to reconstruct pedigrees extending across as many as four generations.

Shimao, in northern Shaanxi Province, was one of the largest fortified settlements in Late Neolithic China. Occupied from approximately 2300 to 1800 BCE, it covered about four square kilometres and contained massive stone walls, separate inner and outer enclosures, specialised craft production, elite cemeteries and unmistakable evidence of a highly stratified society. Its occupation therefore began at about the very time when, according to the conventional young-Earth creationist chronology, the world should have been struggling to recover from a global extermination and repopulation by Noah’s immediate descendants.

Instead, the genomes showed that the people associated with Shimao were predominantly descended from populations already living in northern Shaanxi at least 1,000 years earlier. Those earlier inhabitants were associated with the Yangshao cultural tradition of the Yellow River’s Loess Plateau. The researchers found regional genetic continuity from the Middle to the Late Neolithic—continuity extending from before the supposed Flood into the centuries following it.

This was not a completely isolated or genetically static population. The researchers detected continuing contact with Yumin-related people from Inner Mongolia, close connections with the contemporary Taosi population farther south, and some ancestry from southern East Asian populations, possibly associated with the northward spread of rice cultivation. These were the ordinary movements, exchanges and intermarriages expected among neighbouring prehistoric farming and pastoral communities. They did not interrupt the dominant local ancestry, and there was no sign of wholesale population replacement by descendants of a family recently arrived from Mesopotamia.

The genetic evidence also revealed much about the organisation of Shimao society. Pedigrees reconstructed from elite burials indicated a predominantly patrilineal system in which status and wealth commonly passed from high-ranking men to their sons. Male members of these lineages showed relatively little diversity in their Y-chromosome ancestry, whereas the women displayed much greater mitochondrial diversity. This is consistent with women frequently marrying into communities dominated by established male lineages, although the evidence for strictly patrilocal residence remains suggestive rather than conclusive.

The study also uncovered a possible sex-related pattern in Shimao’s practice of human sacrifice. Nine of the ten sampled victims buried beneath the East Gate were male, contradicting earlier identifications based on skeletal anatomy. In contrast, most sampled sacrificial victims accompanying elite burials were female: six of seven at Hanjiagedan and fourteen of nineteen at Huangchengtai. This suggests that male and female victims may have been selected for different rituals conducted in different places, although the researchers caution that the number of genetically sexed victims remains too small to establish the pattern conclusively.

Creationism Refuted - The Unbroken History Of Egypt

Egyptian Middle Kingdom princesses at archery practice

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Warrior princesses of ancient Egypt? Skeletons show women used the weapons buried with them

The writers and editors who composed the Pentateuch clearly possessed some knowledge of Egypt. It was, after all, a powerful neighbouring civilisation with which the peoples of the Levant had interacted for centuries. But a sprinkling of Egyptian names, loanwords and geographical details does not turn a theological story into an accurate historical account. When the biblical narratives are compared with Egyptian records, chronology and archaeology, Egypt often appears less as a real country than as an exotic stage on which the authors could set their morality tales.

The biblical use of the word ‘Pharaoh’ illustrates the problem, although not for the reason sometimes claimed. ‘Pharaoh’ is not a Hebrew expression meaning ‘owner of an estate’. The Hebrew par‘ō was borrowed from the ancient Egyptian pr-ꜥꜣ, meaning ‘Great House’. It originally referred to the royal palace and only during the New Kingdom came to be used for the king himself. Its use as the personal designation of a ruler in Genesis, whose supposed events are conventionally placed centuries earlier, is therefore probably anachronistic.

More revealingly, the biblical authors never identify the rulers in the Joseph or Exodus stories by any of their regnal names. Egyptian kings possessed elaborate formal titles and names, yet the Bible gives us only an anonymous ‘Pharaoh’. This makes it impossible to place either story securely within Egyptian chronology and contrasts sharply with the detailed records left by the Egyptians themselves.

There is likewise no independent evidence for an Exodus on anything resembling the scale described in the Bible. No Egyptian record mentions ten devastating plagues, the death of the firstborn, the destruction of a substantial chariot force or the sudden flight of an enormous enslaved population. Egyptian royal inscriptions were selective and rarely advertised defeats, so their silence alone would not be conclusive. However, there is also no corresponding demographic, economic or archaeological disruption in Egypt, and no material trace in Sinai of the immense population demanded by a strictly literal reading of the story.

The narrative also contains striking internal difficulties. Exodus 9 describes a pestilence affecting the Egyptian livestock in the fields—including horses—and then declares that ‘all the livestock of the Egyptians died’. Yet the same chapter subsequently refers to more Egyptian livestock, while Exodus 14 has Pharaoh assembling 600 chosen chariots, together with his other chariots, all of which would have required teams of surviving horses. Apologists can invent unmentioned groups of sheltered or unaffected animals, but that is an attempt to repair the story, not a literal reading of what it says.

Nor is the geography as straightforward as the familiar Sunday-school version suggests. The Hebrew Yam Suph, traditionally translated as the Red Sea, more probably means the ‘Sea of Reeds’, and its intended location remains uncertain. Moreover, at the dates commonly proposed for an Exodus, Egypt maintained forts, roads and mining operations in Sinai and exercised imperial control over much of Canaan. Even after leaving Egypt proper, the Israelites would not necessarily have escaped Egyptian power.

Exodus 12:37 gives a figure of about 600,000 adult men, besides women and children. Read literally, that implies a total population of perhaps two or three million people, together with their animals. It is absurd to imagine such a population living and travelling in Sinai for 40 years without leaving campsites, hearths, tools, pottery, animal bones, human burials or any other archaeological footprint remotely commensurate with its supposed size.

An even greater problem for biblical literalists is the continuous archaeological record of Egypt itself. Young-Earth creationist chronologies commonly place their global Flood somewhere around the middle of the third millennium BCE, by which time Egypt had already been a unified state for centuries and the great pyramids of the Old Kingdom had been built. Egyptian society certainly underwent political and economic changes, but there is no point at which its entire population disappears and is replaced by descendants of eight survivors from Mesopotamia.

Nor is there a synchronous horizon of catastrophic erosion, inundation, mass death and repopulation throughout Egypt—or anywhere else—that could represent a global Flood. Instead, archaeologists find settlements, tombs, temples, administrative records and evolving cultural traditions extending through and beyond the period in which the Flood supposedly occurred. It is a vast body of mutually consistent evidence that simply could not exist in its present form if the biblical story were literal history.

Refuting Creationism - Death More Than 66 Million Years Before Mythical 'Sin'

A Tyrannosaur stalking an edmontosaurus

AI-Generated Image (ChatGPT 5.5 Thinking)

"The Bite"

Paleoartist Jenn Hall.

Rare fossil at Montana State’s Museum of the Rockies records Tyrannosaurus attack

A paper published on 17 February 2026 in PeerJ by Taia C.A. Wyenberg-Henzler of la of Montana State University, USA, reports on a remarkable fossil from the Hell Creek Formation of eastern Montana: a nearly complete, articulated skull of an adult Edmontosaurus annectens with the broken tip of a tyrannosaur tooth still embedded in its left nasal bone.

The fossil dates from the closing stages of the Late Cretaceous, roughly 66 million years ago, shortly before Edmontosaurus, Tyrannosaurus and all other non-avian dinosaurs disappeared during the Cretaceous–Palaeogene mass extinction. The bone surrounding the embedded tooth shows no evidence of healing or remodelling, indicating that the bite occurred at, very near or shortly after the death of the Edmontosaurus.

In other words, this is physical evidence of a violent interaction between predator and prey tens of millions of years before humans existed—precisely the sort of evidence that creationists are conditioned to reject because it cannot be accommodated within their mythology. According to young-Earth creationism, there was supposedly no death, predation or suffering before human ‘sin’ allowed evil to enter the world and ruin their omnipotent creator’s previously perfect creation—apparently without that omnipotent creator either foreseeing or preventing it. And all this supposedly happened only 6,000–10,000 years ago, shortly after ‘Creation Week’.

The doctrine that no animal died before ‘the Fall’ is not stated explicitly anywhere in the Bible. It is a theological inference imposed upon the text because young-Earth creationism requires it. It belongs to the category of reasoning that says: ‘This must be true for the rest of my beliefs to be true; my beliefs cannot be wrong; therefore, this must also be true.’

Having granted themselves this assumption of infallibility, creationists must then protect it from every fact that contradicts it. The belief cannot be mistaken, so the evidence must somehow be misunderstood, fraudulent, planted by Satan, created with the appearance of age or otherwise unworthy of consideration. Anything, in fact, is preferable to the intellectually honest admission that the belief itself has been falsified.

In almost every other field of human endeavour, such a supremely arrogant claim to personal infallibility would be laughed at and its proponent told to grow up. Yet, when packaged as religious faith, it is not merely tolerated but frequently treated with respect. Its advocates demand—and often receive—special privileges and social status: ‘You must listen to me, allow me to make laws governing your life and let me shape society according to my beliefs because I have an invisible friend and wear special robes.’

And so creationism staggers on, obliged to deny a veritable deluge of scientific evidence rather than concede that its mythology bears no resemblance to the history of life on Earth.

We Can Tell The Bible Was Written By Ignorant People - Not Just By What's In It, But By What Isn't

Araucaria forest at sunrise.

Photo by Douglas Scortegagna (CC BY-SA 3.0, from Wikimedia Commons)

Araucaria augustifolia (Brazilian pine)

Brazil’s highland forest has been shaped by climate change and Indigenous people for 6,000 years

One of the clearest indications that the Bible was written by people with a severely limited knowledge of the world is, in addition to the factual errors in it, such as Earth being flat with a dome over it, there is the evidence of what is not in it. Its authors wrote as though the small part of the ancient Near East familiar to them was effectively the whole inhabited Earth, so there is nothing in the Bible from outside a small area around the Middle East. They had no conception of a southern hemisphere, knew nothing of continents such as South America, and had no awareness of the peoples, cultures and complex histories that had existed there for thousands of years.

That parochial view of the world is exposed every time archaeologists and palaeoecologists reconstruct the history of regions the Bible’s authors did not even know existed. Far from being a divinely inspired account of the whole planet, the Bible reflects the geographical horizons and cultural assumptions of the scientifically illiterate people who composed it.

The latest example comes from the cold highlands of southern Brazil, where an international team of researchers has reconstructed how climate, fire and Indigenous land management shaped the distinctive mosaic of Araucaria forest and campos grassland during the past 6,000 years. The research is described by Oliver J. Wilson, a lecturer in the School of Natural Sciences at the University of Lincoln, in an article in The Conversation and was published in Scientific Reports.

The researchers combined several independent sources of evidence: pollen and microscopic charcoal preserved in continuously accumulating bog sediments, radiocarbon-dated archaeological evidence, a rainfall record preserved in a cave speleothem, and ecological models showing how the forest should have responded to climatic change. Together, these sources reveal a detailed history of gradual climatic shifts, changing fire regimes, forest expansion and human modification of the landscape.

Refuting Creationism - Humans And Wolves Share A Long Evolutionary History

View from the Stora Förvar cave on Stora Karlsö. The cave was explored between 1888 and 1893. The limestone-rich bedrock has contributed to the skeletal material found there being very well preserved.

Photo: Jan Storå

Ancient wolves on remote Baltic Sea island reveal link to prehistoric humans - Stockholms universitet

A point I have made several times in these blog posts, and one that creationists typically prefer not to address, is that the Bible presents living things as part of a world made for human use and dominion. Yet the history of animal and plant domestication tells a very different story. The domesticated forms often bear little resemblance to their wild ancestors, not because they were created perfectly fitted for human needs, but because humans altered them by selective breeding over many generations.

For an honest creationist, the question should be obvious: why did an allegedly omniscient creator god fail to anticipate human needs and create animals and plants already ideally suited to them? Why did humans need to do the improving? But, as so often, creationists appear to prefer belief in an incompetent designer to the simpler conclusion that their creation myth is wrong.

No domestic animal illustrates this better than the dog. Domestic dogs are descended from wolves, yet the vast range of dog forms, behaviours and abilities shows what prolonged selection, human preference and cultural need can do. Herding dogs, guard dogs, hunting dogs, sled dogs, lapdogs and companion animals are not the result of a single act of perfect creation; they are the result of human-managed evolution.

Now, new research by scientists from the Francis Crick Institute, Stockholm University, the University of Aberdeen and the University of East Anglia, published online in November 2025 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS), shows that human relationships with wolves were more varied and complex than a simple tale of fear, hunting or eventual dog domestication. The researchers report wolf remains from the isolated Baltic island of Stora Karlsö, in a context strongly suggesting that prehistoric people were managing, feeding or otherwise controlling wolves thousands of years ago.

This research resonates with me because two of my books, The Girl and the Wolf and The Way of the Wolf: A Stone Age Epic, are fictional accounts of how wolf domestication might have begun. In those stories, the process is initiated by a single act of compassion: a woman raises an abandoned wolf cub alongside her own child. That act becomes a legend, and the legend later inspires another tribe to form a relationship with wolves, helping them to survive hardship and setting humanity on a path that would eventually produce the many varieties of domestic dog, each shaped for different human purposes.

The stories are also framed to illustrate the hardships of Ice Age life for our ancestors, and the same social forces that still shape human societies: conservatism versus progress, suspicion of novelty, and the struggle to be different in a culture that demands conformity. In both stories, teenage girls must negotiate those pressures and, in doing so, help change the future.

How We Know The Bible Was Made Up By Ignorant People - Just Look At The Facts

Potm2605a (NGC 4501)

ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Thilker and the MAUVE-HST Team

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.(Gen 1: 6-10)

And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth. (Gen 1: 16-17)

Journey to the centre of a galaxy cluster | ESA/Hubble

This analogy needs careful handling because creationists are adept at ignoring the point of an argument and attacking a caricature of it instead. So, to be clear from the outset, this is not a claim about what the Bible says. It is a simple thought experiment about how we test claims against reality.

Suppose someone wrote a book in which he claimed to give an accurate description of the Bible. In it, he said the Bible consisted of only four books, two in the Old Testament and two in the New Testament; that it had only 120 pages; and that the entire story was about Adam and Eve and their sons, Noah and Moses.

How would we test those claims?

The answer is hardly complicated. We would get a Bible and compare the claims with the book itself. In other words, we would test the description against the reality it claimed to describe. And once we had done so, only two serious conclusions would be available: either the author was deliberately lying in order to deceive his readers, or he was so ignorant of the facts that he simply invented them. What we could not sensibly conclude is that the Bible was wrong for failing to match his description of it.

That, in its simplest form, is how science works. A claim is tested against reality. We begin with the assumption — the null hypothesis — that there is no meaningful difference between the claim and the facts. We then look. If the evidence shows a real difference between the claim and the observable facts, the claim has failed the test. It is not reality that must be adjusted to rescue the claim; it is the claim that must be rejected or revised.

This may sound like a “Janet and John” explanation of basic science, but it is remarkable how consistently creationists get even this wrong. They have a book which, when read literally, makes claims about the age, origin and structure of the universe. With modern science, it is a straightforward matter to compare those claims with the real universe. When we do that, we find that the description and the reality are not merely different, but radically, irreconcilably different.

Yet instead of concluding that the ancient description is wrong, creationists conclude that the evidence must be wrong. The facts are not judged against reality; reality is judged against the prior demand that the Bible must be right. This is not science. It is wishful thinking dressed up as certainty.

In effect, creationists believe their beliefs trump the evidence.

So what claims does the Bible make about the age and structure of the universe, and how do those claims compare with observable reality?

To be fair, the Bible gives no explicit numerical age for the universe. The familiar young-Earth figure of about 6,000 years comes from calculations based on biblical genealogies, most famously by the 17th-century Archbishop James Ussher, who placed creation in 4004 BCE. Modern young-Earth creationists often stretch this to somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years, not because evidence requires it, but because the older figure is now too obviously absurd to defend with a straight face.

The Bible is more explicit, however, about the structure of the universe as understood by its ancient authors. It describes a world in which the Earth lies beneath a firmament, or dome, which separates the waters below from the waters above. The sun, moon and stars are described as lights set in this firmament to illuminate the Earth. Elsewhere, the stars are treated not as distant suns and galaxies, but as objects that can fall from heaven and be trampled underfoot. This is the cosmology of a small, human-centred world, not the universe revealed by astronomy. (Genesis 1:6-10; Genesis 1:16-17; Daniel 8:10)

So how does that ancient description compare with what we find when we actually look? Take, for example, this tiny fragment of the sky visible to the Hubble Space Telescope:

How we Know The Bible Is Wrong - Evidence That wouldn't Be there if The Bible Myths Were True

Examples of different treatments and states of preservation of human remains at Vráble-Veľké Lehemby.

Furholt M, et al (2026).

Drone footage of the excavation site.

© Nils Müller-Scheeßel

Headless skeletons offer new insights into farming societies 7,000 years ago

A problem for biblical literalist creationists is that they are wedded to the absurd and demonstrably false notion that the Bible is a literal account of real history, including a catastrophic, genocidal flood just a few thousand years ago. Such a flood would have left a tell-tale, globally recognisable layer of flood sediment containing the jumbled remains of the animals and plants it had killed. It would also have destroyed, displaced or buried earlier human settlements beneath one unmistakable flood horizon.

This, of course, flies in the face of abundant evidence to the contrary. The predicted global layer of flood silt is not there, and the archaeological record continues, uninterrupted, through the very period in which creationists need their flood to have occurred. Practically every archaeological find older than the various creationist dates for Noah's Flood — from the pyramids at Giza to the less spectacular but more numerous Neolithic and Bronze Age burial grounds, field systems, settlements, tools and artefacts that litter the African and Eurasian landscape — should not be where it is, least of all in the Middle East, the supposed epicentre of the alleged catastrophe.

And yet archaeologists are regularly digging up evidence of human activity that long predates the creationist timescale. A recent example is the grim, 7,000-year-old evidence of headless human bodies at Vráble-Veľké Lehemby in Slovakia, reported in Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society. The refutation of creationist mythology is, of course, entirely incidental. The archaeological question is what this extraordinary find tells us about an Early Neolithic farming society. The indications so far are that the heads were not removed by violent decapitation as a form of execution — which might have suggested a society in crisis or conflict — but were skilfully removed around the time of death. That points instead to some form of social, ritual or funerary practice, although the precise meaning of that practice remains uncertain.

The site at Vráble-Veľké Lehemby comprises more than 300 house outlines arranged in three neighbourhoods, with up to 80 buildings inhabited at the same time. The settlement existed for several centuries, approximately between 5250 and 4950 BCE. One neighbourhood was enclosed by a ditch, probably marking a boundary, and it was in or around this ditch, especially near the entrance to the settlement, that archaeologists found the remains of at least 78 individuals. Of these, 77 lacked heads, the single exception being a child whose skull was still present.

Refuting Creationism - Wild Cattle Roamed The Grasslands Of Europe - 4 million Years Before Creation Week

Half-ton early Bovines roamed 4-million-year-old grasslands in Europe | EurekAlert!

Palaeoartistic reconstruction of the environment in the surrounding of Camp dels Ninots maar lake during the early Pliocene.

Artwork by Mauricio Antón.

Nowhere in the Bible will you find any mention of wild cattle roaming the land, nor any indication that domestic animals are highly modified descendants of wild species, reshaped by human selection because their wild ancestors were not conveniently suited to human use. Instead, we find the childish claim that all animals were created for the exclusive benefit of humankind — which raises the obvious question: did the creator not know what humans would later need, or did it simply get things wrong, leaving humans to correct the design by selective breeding?

This is easily explained once we recognise that the authors of Genesis had a narrow, parochial view of the world. They knew little or nothing of Earth’s history or of the origins of life on it, so they made up stories that conformed to their own cultural assumptions and superstitions, often borrowing from neighbouring cultures.

They were completely unaware of the rest of Eurasia beyond their limited view from the Canaanite hills, and equally unaware of the great age of the Earth or the cycles of glacial and interglacial periods that had characterised it for the previous several million years. Indeed, the concept of such deep time seems to have been far beyond their comprehension. They could therefore have had no concept of the early forms of cattle-like bovines that once roamed Europe, already fitted by evolution for life in the changing environments of the Pliocene.

One such animal was a large bovine species, weighing up to about half a ton, which lived in what is now north-eastern Iberia about 4.41 million years ago. The discovery and re-analysis of this animal has just been published in PLOS One by Leonardo Sorbelli of the Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science, Germany, and colleagues.

The fossils, from the Camp dels Ninots site in Catalonia, include remains from at least 14 individuals, among them eight nearly complete and partly articulated skeletons. The species, Parabos tigneresi, helps fill a gap in the evolutionary history of Eurasian bovines, including the wider lineage that eventually gave rise to modern cattle, bison and buffalo. Although smaller than many living domestic cattle, these animals were larger than comparable bovids of their time, suggesting an early stage in the increase in body size that later became characteristic of the bovine lineage.

The researchers suggest that this increase in size may have been associated with the climatic and environmental changes that characterised Pliocene Europe. The anatomy of Parabos tigneresi also indicates an animal adapted mainly to humid, vegetation-rich environments, consistent with the reconstructed setting of Camp dels Ninots as a water-rich maar lake ecosystem.

This incidental confirmation of an earlier reconstruction of the lake ecosystem at Camp dels Ninots is a good example of how independent strands of evidence converge on the same conclusion. It also illustrates the strength of Darwinian evolutionary theory: organisms are expected to show adaptations to the environments in which they lived, rather than appearing as arbitrary, ready-made forms. In this case, the anatomy of these bovids is consistent with animals adapted to a humid, vegetation-rich lakeside habitat, exactly as the geological and palaeoecological evidence had already indicated.

Refuting Creationism - The Evidence Shows How Wrong The Bronze Age Myths In The Bible Were

A crouched burial of a 40 year old man in Oostwoud, the earliest known Bell Beaker grave identified by the researchers.

Source: Provincial Depot for Archaeology Noord-Holland.

DNA study uncovers continental origins of Britain’s bronze age population

Leaving a side the long history of archaic hominins such as the Neanderthals and their ancestors inhabiting Western Eurasia for about 250,000 years before the arrival of large numbers of anatomically modern humans, which itself is deeply problematic for creationists, there is also the archaeological record of the complext history of modern humans going back at least 40,000 years which simply would not be there if the Bible narrative of a recent spontaneous magical origin and a later global genocidal flood were true.

As reported in a paper in Nature last February (2026), the history of Northwest Europe and the Bristic Isles is far mpre complex and interesting that the simple Bronze Age fairy tail in Genesis.

Of course, the arcahaeolgeneticists never set out to disprove the Bible. The facts they revealed did that as a matter of course, because unlike Genesis, the facts record real events.

The contrast could hardly be more stark. Genesis gives us a world populated from a single specially-created human pair, followed by a later repopulation of the world from Noah’s family after a global flood, and then the dispersal of peoples after Babel. That is a story of magical manufacture, catastrophic reset and sudden dispersal. The ancient DNA tells a completely different story: long-lived regional populations, gradual migration, intermarriage, cultural exchange, local ecological adaptation and no global genetic bottleneck compatible with a recent universal flood.

How we Know The Bible Is Wrong - This Evidence Wouldn't Exist If The Genesis Myths Were Real History

An artist’s reconstruction of a Marathousa 1 paleolithic woman producing a digging stick from a small alder tree trunk with a small stone tool. This kind of wood was used for the Marathousa 1 digging stick. Use-wear analysis of stone tools at Marathousa 1 shows evidence of woodworking.

Credit: Original art by G. Prieto, copyright K. Harvati.

Earliest evidence of wooden tools used by humans - University of Reading

This is another of those pieces of evidence that should not exist if the Bible narrative were true — yet it does. The only honest conclusion is that the Bible narrative is false. It simply never happened. In scientific terms, this is falsification.

The evidence was published on 26 January 2026 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). It consists of two worked wooden objects discovered at Marathousa 1, in Greece’s central Peloponnese, by an international team led by researchers from the University of Reading, the University of Tübingen and the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment. The tools have been dated to about 430,000 years ago, making them the earliest known hand-held wooden tools and pushing back direct evidence for this kind of technology by at least 40,000 years.

That is awkward evidence for creationists, because the Bible is commonly interpreted by them as saying that humans were created only about 6,000–10,000 years ago, followed by a catastrophic global flood that supposedly covered even the highest mountains. Such an event should either have obliterated fragile evidence of wooden tool use or buried it beneath a thick, worldwide layer of flood sediment containing the remains of the animals and plants destroyed in that catastrophe. And, of course, loose wooden tools submerged in a global flood would hardly be expected to remain neatly preserved in the archaeological context in which they were used.

Yet these wooden tools exist. They were recovered from secure Middle Pleistocene deposits, not from some chaotic jumble of flood debris. They are associated with stone tools, worked bone and butchered animal remains, including elephant, showing that Marathousa 1 was a lakeshore site used by early humans for a range of activities, including butchery and woodworking. In other words, the evidence is not floating around without context; it forms part of a coherent archaeological scene about 420,000 years older than the creationist date for the magical creation of Earth and everything on it.

One of the objects is a small alder trunk fragment with clear traces of shaping and use-wear, consistent with a multifunctional digging stick probably used at the edge of the ancient lake. The other is a much smaller worked piece of willow or poplar, possibly representing a previously unknown type of small Pleistocene wooden tool. A third piece of alder, initially investigated as a possible artefact, appears instead to have been marked by a large carnivore, possibly a bear — another indication that humans and carnivores were exploiting the same lakeshore environment.

The Marathousa 1 site lay in the Megalopolis Basin, a region that appears to have acted as a glacial refugium during a critical period in human evolution, when more complex behaviours and more diverse technologies were developing. The finds show early humans using not just stone, but wood and bone too — exactly what we should expect from intelligent, adaptable hominins making use of the materials around them, and exactly what is so rarely preserved because wood normally decays long before it can fossilise or survive archaeologically.

Creationism Refuted - Australian Crocodiles Are Fatal To Creationism

Saltwater crocodile, Crocodylus poros

By Molly Ebersold
St Augustine's Alligator Farm,
Public Domain, Link

Jorgo Ristevski, CC BY

129,000 years of crocodiles: what we know about Australasia’s ancient apex predators

According to Bronze Age Biblical mythology, existing species should have no ancestors because they were all supposedly magicked into existence fully formed during a few days of creation, just a few thousand years ago.

That childish belief has to be clung to by creationists despite the evidence of the real world, which tells a very different story: not of sudden manufacture, but of deep evolutionary history, extinction, replacement and survival. The iconic saltwater crocodiles of northern Australia provide a good example. They are not isolated products of a one-off act of creation, but living survivors of a much richer Australasian crocodylian history stretching back tens of millions of years, during which crocodile relatives occupied a variety of ecological niches, including those of formidable predators.

Modern Australia has only two native crocodile species: the freshwater crocodile, Crocodylus johnstoni, and the Indo-Pacific or saltwater crocodile, Crocodylus porosus. But the fossil and archaeological evidence shows that these are merely the remnant survivors of a once more diverse crocodylian fauna, including the now-extinct mekosuchines, a distinctive Australasian group whose members included species very unlike the crocodiles familiar today.

Now a group of researchers from the University of Queensland and Griffith University, together with colleagues from several other institutions, has pieced together the fragmentary evidence from 26 fossil and archaeological sites across Australasia to build a clearer picture of the crocodylians that once lived in the region, and of their interactions with humans. Their review of the evidence was recently published, open access, in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

The study shows that the late Pleistocene record of Australian crocodylians is still incomplete and often difficult to date securely, but it nevertheless reveals a lost diversity. The extinct mekosuchines appear to have declined and disappeared on mainland Australia around the same broad period as other Australian megafauna, while some survived much later on south-west Pacific islands such as New Caledonia, Vanuatu and Fiji. There, their remains occur in archaeological contexts, suggesting that they persisted until after human arrival and may have been affected by human activity.

Three of the authors have also written an article in The Conversation, explaining their research and its significance for understanding the evolutionary history of these reptiles. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Creationism Refuted - The Complex Origins of Modern Humans Revealed - No Magic Required

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

View of the village of Kuboes, on the border of South Africa and Namibia. DNA samples were collected from Nama individuals who have historically lived in the region.

Brenna Henn/UC Davis.

New UC Davis Research Using DNA Changes Origin of Human Species | College of Biological Sciences

Research first published in Nature in 2023 shows just how wide of the mark the Bronze Age authors of the Bible’s origin myths were when they guessed at human origins. Of course, in the absence of any knowledge or understanding of the true age of Earth, the history of life on it, or the existence of deep human ancestry, their guesses were no better than we would expect from people trying to explain the world with folklore rather than evidence.

In fact, as the evidence in the 2023 paper by a team co-led by Professor Brenna Henn of the University of California, Davis, and Simon Gravel of McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, shows, modern humans did not emerge from a single founding couple, or even from one simple, isolated ancestral population. Instead, our origins lie in a complex, dynamic network of human groups that diversified within Africa, evolved in partial isolation, and later exchanged genes as populations moved and merged.

In that respect, human evolution resembles other cases in nature where populations diverge, remain partly distinct, and yet continue to exchange genes — such as the carrion crow/hooded crow Corvus complex, the Eurasian complex of the great tit (Parus major) and its related forms, and the circumpolar herring gull/lesser black-backed gull Larus complex. These examples show evolution not as a neat ladder or a set of separately created “kinds”, but as a branching, reticulating process in which boundaries can be blurred by gene flow.

This process of diversification and later remixing continued in Eurasia, where Homo sapiens interbred with Neanderthals, Denisovans and, possibly, other human populations. Neanderthals eventually disappeared as a distinct population, or were partly absorbed into expanding Homo sapiens populations, around 40,000 years ago.

Far from the single ancestral couple that may have seemed intuitive to parochial Bronze Age pastoralists, modern humanity emerged from a population history that looks less like a single line of descent and more like a tangled bush with cross-linking branches.

The researchers reached this conclusion by analysing DNA sequenced from saliva samples from 44 modern Nama individuals from southern Africa, an Indigenous population known to carry exceptionally high levels of genetic diversity compared with many other modern groups. From that genetic data, the team developed a model suggesting that the earliest detectable split among ancestral human populations occurred between 120,000 and 135,000 years ago, after two or more weakly differentiated Homo populations had already been interbreeding for hundreds of thousands of years.

Even after that split, migration continued between the populations, producing what the researchers describe as a “weakly structured stem” for modern human origins in Africa. Rather than a single stem from which humanity simply sprouted, human evolution is better understood as a reticulated process: branching, merging, and branching again.

Refuting Creationism - Hominin Diversity In Middle Pleistocene China

Middle Pleistocene humans in China

AI-generated image (ChatGPT Latest)

A new study places China at the center of the debate on human evolution | CENIEH

1 million-year-old stone tools from the Nihewan Basin

Continuing the theme from my last post, that the human evolutionary story is vastly richer and more complex than the childishly simplistic fairy tale in the Bible, this paper by a team led by the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) in Beijing, together with researchers from the Spanish Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), and published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, argues that East Asia may have been a major centre of evolution within the genus Homo outside Africa.

At the heart of the study is a systematic reassessment of the so-called ‘transitional’ hominin fossils from the Chinese Middle Pleistocene. These fossils show intriguing mixtures of primitive and derived traits, and refuse to fit neatly into the tidy, linear progression that older models liked to assume between Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens. In other words, the human story in Asia was not a simple ladder of progress but a tangled evolutionary bush, with several populations, overlapping traits, and probably more than one lineage sharing the landscape at different times.

Some of these fossils may represent Denisovans, while recently proposed species such as Homo longi and Homo juluensis hint at an even greater diversity of archaic humans than had previously been recognised. It is also entirely possible that there were other hominin groups in East Asia that remain unidentified. As so often in palaeoanthropology, the more evidence scientists uncover, the less plausible the old cartoon version of human evolution becomes — and the more absurd the Biblical fantasy of humanity springing fully formed from a single magically created couple just a few thousand years ago appears by comparison.

This work also resonates with the recent findings from Atapuerca in Spain, where Homo antecessor has been interpreted as representing a basal population from around a million years ago, potentially close to the ancestry of later human lineages. Far from showing a simple, straight-line march toward modern humans, the fossil evidence increasingly suggests a deep and branching history, with different populations spreading, diverging, mixing, and adapting across Eurasia over hundreds of thousands of years.

The study also re-examines the evidence for the arrival of Homo sapiens in China, suggesting that our species may have been present there as early as 100,000 years ago, rather than only around 50,000 years ago as often assumed. If that interpretation is correct, then modern humans were dispersing across Asia earlier, and in a much more complex pattern, than traditional models allowed. That would mean repeated movements of populations, interaction with other human groups, and probably episodes of interbreeding — all of it part of a dynamic evolutionary process that creationists are forced either to ignore or grotesquely misrepresent.

Taken together, the evidence points to East Asia as an important arena in human evolution, occupied by adaptable and innovative hominin populations capable of surviving in a wide range of environments. This increasing adaptability, associated with larger brains and behavioural flexibility, helped lay the foundations for the eventual spread of Homo sapiens across the globe. Once again, the real story of human origins turns out to be not the childish simplicity of myth, but the far more fascinating complexity of evolution.

Refuting Creationism - Archaic Hominins In Spain - 390,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Homo antecessor working at the Gran Dolia butchery site

AI-generated image (ChatGPT Latest)

The Gran Dolina site at Atapuerca reveals an almost exclusive use of local chert 400,000 years ago | CENIEH

In stark contrast to the simplistic Bronze Age mythology of the Bible, in which all humanity is supposedly descended from a single magically created couple with no ancestors just a few thousand years ago, followed by a biological reset in a global genocidal flood a mere 4,000 years ago, archaeology continues to reveal a far richer and more complex human story. Instead of a single recent origin, the evidence shows a deep evolutionary history stretching back hundreds of thousands of years, involving multiple related human species and regional populations, with occasional interbreeding. Part of that long history was played out in Eurasia.

A study led by scientists from the Spanish Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), just published in Quaternary International, has identified 400,000-year-old human artefacts at the Gran Dolina site in Atapuerca, Burgos, Spain, together with what may be the earliest evidence of communal hunting. The findings show the sophisticated manufacture of stone tools from locally available chert. The site is also associated with the remains of 60 bison, strongly suggesting a communal butchering site that implies strategic planning, cooperation, and large-scale social coordination.

What makes this especially striking is that these activities took place before the hominin lineage had diversified into Neanderthals, Denisovans, and modern humans. Taken together with other evidence from Atapuerca, including discoveries from Sima de los Huesos (‘Cave of Bones’), the findings indicate that archaic hominins such as Homo antecessor had established themselves in Iberia long before Homo sapiens entered Eurasia.

The Fallible Bible - How We KNow The Bible's Is Not The Inerrant Word Of A Creator God

Leopard Gecko, Eublepharis macularius

Researchers discover leopard gecko produces females at cooler incubation temperatures and mostly males at warmer ones. This clear sex-determination pattern of leopard gecko has established it as a key model for studying environmental effects on development.

Credit: Professor Shinichi Miyagawa from Tokyo University of Science, Japan.

New study clarifies how temperature shapes sex development in leopard gecko | EurekAlert!

Bible literalists insist that every word in the Bible is true and without error, yet the text itself contains statements that cannot all be true at the same time, so at least one of them must be false*. The Bible also contains factually incorrect statements, such as the assertion in Genesis 6:19 and 7:15–16 that males and females of every ‘kind’ were brought onto the Ark, reflecting the same assumption found in Genesis 1:27 that living creatures were created as male and female.

We now know, unlike the authors of Genesis, that not all species exist as fixed male–female pairs. There are many examples of hermaphrodite creatures that are both male and female; some species that are entirely female, such as the New Mexico whiptail lizard and the marbled crayfish; many aphids and some beetles such as the vine weevil; and species that can change sex during their lifetime, such as certain fish. And, as a recent paper in the journal Developmental Biology by a team of researchers led by Professor Shinichi Miyagawa from the Department of Biological Science and Technology, Tokyo University of Science, Japan, shows, there are also species such as the leopard gecko, Eublepharis macularius, in which sex is not determined by inherited chromosomes at all but by the temperature at which the embryo develops in the egg.

In other words, in some species the difference between male and female is not fixed at conception at all, but depends on something as mundane as the temperature of the nest.

The team showed that there is a discrete window, known as the temperature-sensitive period, during which temperature triggers temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD), activating specific sets of genes that control the development of either testes or ovaries, thereby determining the sex of the developing embryo.

Refuting Creationism - Creationists Rebutted By Old Irish Goats From Before The Legendary Genocidal Flood

Old Irish Goat carries 3,000 years of Irish history - University College Dublin

If the biblical flood really wiped the slate of life almost clean a few thousand years ago, we should expect to see unmistakable genetic signatures of that event across modern species. Instead, what scientists repeatedly find is exactly the opposite: long, continuous lineages stretching back thousands of years before the supposed catastrophe.

A good example comes from Ireland, where geneticists at University College Dublin, in collaboration with colleagues at Queen’s University Belfast and international partners, have shown that the ‘Old Irish Goat’, an Gabhar Fiáin – the wild goat – is a descendant of goats living in Bronze Age Ireland some 3,000 years ago, and thus ultimately of an older population introduced by Neolithic agriculturalists about 5,900 years ago. Their paper is published open access in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

According to Bible literalists, there was a general reset of Earth’s biology a few thousand years ago when their god supposedly decided to destroy everything in a fit of pique because its creation had gone wrong and, rather than undertaking an entirely new creation, chose instead to start again with a few survivors, hoping the outcome would be different this time. However, time and again we find evidence not of a general reset but of uninterrupted continuity of cultures and ancient species, such as the Old Irish Goat, which existed both before and after the supposed reset.

The problem for creationists is that, although they claim there was a period of miraculous hyper-evolution in which a handful of ‘kinds’ that survived the genocide radiated into all the modern species—an event which appears to have gone unnoticed and unreported by the people who supposedly lived while it was happening, and a belief for which there is no Biblical basis—the Old Irish Goat shares its common ancestry with other goats long before the alleged flood, not within the last few thousand years. Within the creationist paradigm, therefore, it must trace its ancestry to just two survivors. However, although there is evidence of a genetic bottleneck, this is very recent and is due to population collapse brought about by human activity; there is no evidence of the narrow bottleneck of just two individuals about 4,000 years ago.

How We Know The Bible Is Wrong - ESA/Hubble Picture Of The Week

The N159 star-forming complex in the Large Magellanic Cloud,
approximately 160,000 light-years away

A neighbouring vista of stellar birth | ESA/Hubble

The simplest way to tell whether the Bible is the inerrant description of reality that creationists claim it to be, or the work of ignorant people doing their best to fill the gaps in their knowledge and understanding with stories that complied with the prevailing culture which imagined a world that ran on magic in which invisible spirits made things happen, is by comparing what it says with what science is revealing.

Almost invariably, what we see is that the descriptions in the Bible bear little or no resemblance to the real world, as we can see most clearly by comparing the biblical description of the universe with what the universe is really like. The Bible describes it as consisting of a small, flat planet with a dome over it, at the centre, with all the celestial bodies such as the sun moon and stars attached to the dome, above which is water.

This was conjured into existence out of nothing by some magic words spoken in a language no-one was alive to understand, apparently.

So, lets remind ourselves of the Bible's description again, and compare it to the latest image of a tiny fragment of the universe from the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Hubble space telescope - the ESA/Hubble picture of the week.

Creationism Refuted - Messages From Nearly 70,000 Years Ago.

Adhi Agus Oktaviana illuminating a hand stencil.

Max Aubert

Humanity’s oldest known cave art has been discovered in Sulawesi.

There's nothing quite like leaving a message behind to tell future generations that you were here.

Creationists, of course, have a message from about 5,000 years ago telling them that there were ignorant Bronze Age storytellers living in the Middle East — but sadly the only truth in their stories was the one they didn’t explicitly state: that they were making things up to explain what they didn’t know, which meant a great many stories to invent. They couldn’t have guessed, of course, that their tales would later be written down, bound up in a book, and then proclaimed to be the inerrant word of a creator god; otherwise they might have made more of an effort to get it right, or at least admitted they didn’t know. As it is, all we really learn from them is just how ignorant they were, and how vivid their imaginations must have been.

To be fair, it may not have been their intention to mislead and misinform, but that has been the result — mostly, it has to be said, through the fault of those who later declared their tales to be the authentic word of a god, because that conveniently suited their political agenda.

People living much earlier, on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, left a much clearer and more honest message in the form of cave art, and particularly hand stencils. All they really say is, “Hi there! I was here!” — with no attempt to elevate themselves to a special status or claim to know things they didn’t know. Where they depicted the animals around them, they showed them just as they saw them: wild and free.

This cave art, which precedes the celebrated art of the French and Spanish caves by tens of thousands of years, has now been identified as the oldest known cave art, telling an unambiguous story of people living there around 70,000 years ago — long before anatomically modern humans made their presence felt in Western Eurasia. The discovery and the methods used to date the art were published in Nature, in a paper that marks a defining moment in our understanding of early symbolic behaviour.

Four of the researchers — Maxime Aubert, Professor of Archaeological Science, Griffith University; Adam Brumm, Professor of Archaeology, Griffith University; Adhi Oktaviana, Research Centre of Archeometry, Badan Riset dan Inovasi Nasional (BRIN), Jakarta, Indonesia; and Renaud Joannes-Boyau, Professor of Geochronology and Geochemistry, Southern Cross University, New South Wales, Australia — have also written an article in The Conversation that explains the significance of the find in accessible terms. Their piece is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

How Do We know The Bible Is Wrong? - We Look At The Real-World Evidence, Of Course!

An example of a binary star system

Hubble uncovers the secret of stars that defy ageing | ESA/Hubble

A paper in Nature Communications by an international research team of astronomers led by Professor Francesco R. Ferraro of the Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia “Augusto Righi”, Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna, Italy, reveals a universe utterly at odds with the description of it in the Bible. It should be a simple matter to compare this real universe with the one described in the Bible and draw the obvious conclusion from the glaring differences — but not, it seems, for creationists.

The connection between opinion and evidence appears to be lost on creationists who are determined to cling to patently wrong beliefs, despite the evidence, as though evidence has no right to intrude on their thought processes. In this worldview, truth is unrelated to real-world evidence and must comply with a creationist’s beliefs.

Let’s take a couple of simple examples and apply creationist “logic”.

Firstly: you need to cross a road. How do you know it’s safe before you step off the kerb?

You look at the evidence — how busy is the road? Are there any vehicles approaching, especially on your side? If there are, the evidence tells you that you can’t safely cross and need to wait.

Applying creationist “logic”: you ignore the evidence as unwanted and unwelcome and conclude that the road is safe to cross because you want it to be, and reality is obliged to comply.

What do you think your chances of surviving for long would be using that methodology?

Secondly: you’re waiting at a bus stop to catch a bus. How do you know the bus has arrived?

You can see the bus, of course. It has stopped in front of you and the doors have opened. Other passengers may be getting on or off, so you get on the bus and take your seat.

Applying creationist “logic”: you ignore the evidence and assume the bus must have arrived because you want it to have done so, so you step off the pavement and imagine you’re getting on a bus.

You now look pretty foolish and might even step into the path of the real bus you’ve been waiting for. What you almost certainly won’t do is get on the bus — because it isn’t there.

In both examples, only evidence reveals the real world, and creationist faith may let you down very badly, simply because creationist faith has no relationship to the real world. It reflects only blind imagination and wishful thinking, coupled with the absurd belief that the real world is obliged to comply with personal preferences. Evidence, on the other hand, is the real world, and a rational person allows evidence to determine their beliefs.

So now a third example: how do you know you can rely on the information in the Bible? You compare it with real-world evidence, of course, just as you would when crossing the road or catching a bus.

And if you do that, what do you find?

You find a description of the universe that bears no resemblance to the real universe — just as your faith in a safe and empty road bears no relationship to a real road, or your imaginary bus bears no relationship to a real bus. In other words, the real-world evidence is so far removed from the description in the Bible that the Bible is plainly, obviously, and irrefutably wrong. As such, it is utterly unreliable as a source of factual information about the universe.

What we see in the Bible is a description of a universe consisting of a small flat planet with a dome over it. We see a demon-haunted world that is just a few thousand years old and runs on magic. It has talking snakes and donkeys; it endorses slavery and misogyny, autocratic government and peremptory justice with no right of appeal, and a draconian penal system in which the penalty of choice is death for even minor transgressions. It describes virgin birth and promotes blood sacrifice as absolving people of responsibility for their wrongs.

And doubt itself is treated as a crime carrying the death penalty, as though the worst thing the authors could imagine was people questioning their claims.

With that in mind, let’s look at the real-world evidence as revealed by the European Space Agency (ESA) in conjunction with NASA and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), and compare it with the Bible’s description of the universe: