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:

How We Know The Bible is Wrong - Cosmology

NGC 2566, a spiral galaxy located in the constellation Puppis

potm2412a

These two galaxies are named NGC 4490 and NGC 4485, and they’re located about 24 million light-years away in the constellation Canes Venatici (The Hunting Dogs). Aside from the Milky Way’s own dwarf companions (the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds), this is the closest known interacting dwarf-dwarf system where astronomers have directly observed both a gas bridge and resolved stellar populations. Together NGC 4490 and NGC 4485 form the system Arp 269, which is featured in the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies. At such a close distance (and with Webb’s impressive ability to peer through dusty cosmic clouds) these galaxies allow astronomers to witness up close the kinds of galaxy interactions that were common billions of years ago.

Source: potm2511a

Just a gentle reminder, if any were needed, that we can tell the Bible is wrong by comparing its descriptions with what we can observe. To take a silly-simple example that even a creationists should be able to understand: supposing I told you that the Bible had 7 chapters in three sections, the Old, Middle And New Testaments, and was just 50 pages long, you could simply look in the Bible and see that I was wrong. It would be no use me trying to claim that I was right really because my statement was an allegory or a metaphor, because you could see that it was neither; it was simply wrong, unequivocally and irrefutably so.

Well, it's the same with the description of the Universe in the Bible. We can look at the Universe now, using technology the Bronze Age authors of the Bible could never dream of, and see that it is nothing like the description in the Bible.

So, just as my whimsical description of the Bible was not even close, so we can see that the Bronze age authors of the Bible were not even close. The difference of course is that while my mistakes were deliberate, theirs were the result of ignorance.

So, let's see again how the Bible describes a small, flat universe consisting of a single planet with a sun and moon hanging over it, and the whole covered by a dome to keep the water out.

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. (Genesis 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, And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.(Genesis 1.16-18)

How the Bible's authors saw the Universe.

And now let's look at what some tiny fragments of the Universe are really like, as shown by the James Webb Space Telescope and published by the European Space Agency (ESA):

Bible Blunder - Archaeologists Find Evidence For a Creation Myth - But NOT the Bible Version.

[left caption]

[right caption]

Extracting drilled sediments.

Origins of Ancient Egypt’s Karnak Temple revealed – Uppsala University

An international team of archaeologists led by Dr Angus Graham of Uppsala University has shown that the temple to Amun-Ra at Karnak Temple Complex was originally built more than 3,000 years ago on an island formed when the Nile split into eastern and western channels. Their findings were published last October in the journal Antiquity.

One can easily imagine the jubilation with which Christian circles would greet the discovery of any credible archaeological evidence for Adam and Eve or Noah’s Ark. In practice, judging by the regular declarations of “proof” that appear on social media, almost any claim — no matter how tenuous or poorly authenticated — that can be retro-fitted to a biblical story is enthusiastically celebrated. It is hard to avoid the impression that this eagerness betrays a certain underlying insecurity.

Yet when archaeological discoveries appear to lend support to the origin myths of other cultures, the reaction is very different. The usual response is indifference, outright dismissal, or an appeal to the tentative nature of the evidence and the dangers of confirmation bias—precisely the same grounds on which much supposedly “biblical” evidence can be rejected, of course.

It will therefore be interesting to observe the reaction in Christian circles to this research from Karnak and its relevance to ancient Egyptian creation mythology, in which the land is caused to rise from the primordial waters by the creator. This bears an obvious resemblance to the later biblical motif of land being divided from the waters. The relatively high ground at Luxor is the only plausible candidate in the region for such a formation, and during periods of high Nile flood it would indeed have appeared as an island within a lake—an environment readily imbued with sacred significance by the temple builders.

Such parallels are not especially surprising. The ancient Near East was a densely interconnected cultural landscape in which ideas, myths, and cosmological frameworks circulated freely over centuries. Egyptian conceptions of creation—particularly the emergence of land from primeval waters—pre-date the composition of the Hebrew Bible by many centuries and would have been well known, directly or indirectly, throughout the eastern Mediterranean. When the authors of Book of Genesis framed their own creation narrative, they were not writing in a cultural vacuum, but drawing upon a shared mythological vocabulary that had long been established in the region.

The team also uncovered evidence that the eastern Nile channel was deliberately infilled with sand, accelerating a silting process that was already under way. These conclusions are based on detailed analysis of 61 sediment cores taken from in and around the temple complex, along with thousands of ceramic fragments recovered from the site.

Creationism Refuted - Scientists Show What Earth Was Like When Life Got started - 3.5 Billion Years Before 'Creation Week'

Ancient African bedrock reveals the violent beginnings of life on our blue planet

One reliable way to recognise that the Bible is the product of ancient ignorance is simply to compare its claims with what science has since revealed. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Genesis, which turns out to be a ludicrously simplistic attempt to explain the origins of the universe and life on Earth. Its compressed timescale cannot possibly accommodate what we now know about the age of the universe, the age of our planet, the deep history of life, or—most conspicuously—the emergence of human cultures and the migration of humans across every continent except Antarctica, as revealed by the archaeological record.

The gap between biblical mythology and reality is so vast that it cannot plausibly be rescued as allegory or metaphor, and the evidence continues to accumulate relentlessly, with nothing being discovered that remotely validates the biblical account. The year 2025 ended badly for creationism with the discovery of a 37-million-year-old transitional snake fossil from southern England, and 2026 has begun no better. A new book, The Oldest Rocks on Earth, by Simon Lamb, Associate Professor of Geophysics at Victoria University of Wellington, describes the surface conditions on Earth when life first emerged more than 3.5 billion years ago—conditions utterly incompatible with the biblical creation narrative. The research behind this book is summarised in an article in The Conversation, also by Associate Professor Lamb. That article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

Ancient African bedrock reveals the violent beginnings of life on our blue planet

Simon Lamb, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

You have probably seen the images of the surface of Mars, beamed back by NASA’s rovers. What if there were a time machine capable of roaming Earth during its remote geological past, perhaps even going right back to its beginnings, beaming back pictures of similar quality?

This is not science fiction. In remote corners of the world, geologists have found tiny relics of Earth’s very ancient surface.

I have been part of this scientific endeavour, looking at the treasure trove of information in the bedrock of the Makhonjwa Mountains in South Africa and the adjacent small kingdom of Eswatini.

These rocks reach back more than three quarters of the way through our planet’s long history of nearly 4.6 billion years. In my new book, The Oldest Rocks on Earth, I describe the graphic images “beamed back” by this geological time machine.

Beneath the remote and rugged landscape of the Makhonjwa Mountains, in Eswatini, is a bedrock that holds a record of Earth’s surface from 3.2 to 3.5 billion years ago, when our planet was about a quarter of the way through its history.

Copyright: © Tony Ferrar Source

World of oceans

The ancient rocks reveal a world with extensive oceans and intense volcanic activity on the sea floor.

Deep beneath the crust, Earth was much hotter than today, giving rise to an unusual white-hot magma, rich in elements from its interior. Huge volumes of super-heated water continually gushed out of underwater cracks, building up chimneys of valuable metals. And life was thriving around these undersea vents.

Volcanic islands rose up from the ocean depths. These were dangerous places. Pools of hot bubbling mud dotted their shores, and clouds of volcanic ash periodically exploded from volcanic craters.

Life was already there, forming microbial mats in the sheltered nearshore waters.

Periodically, large earthquakes violently shook the bedrock, triggering submarine avalanches that cascaded down into the deep ocean, creating vast jumbles of rock on the sea floor. Giant asteroid impacts disturbed this world, but crucially, did not extinguish it.

Deep-seated forces were pushing up new land, creating the early continents.

Ocean waves moved back and forth on sandy beaches along coastlines with bays, lagoons, inlets and estuaries, with tides similar to those today.

During floods, large rivers brought muddy water from the continental interior. Farther in the distance, their headwaters drained a mountainous terrain, often enveloped in thick cloud.

It was a blue planet because, like today, the oceans scattered light in the blue part of the colour spectrum.

But the atmosphere contained a lethal cocktail of gases, including high concentrations of methane and carbon dioxide. These greenhouse gases kept the surface at the right temperature for liquid water, at a time when astrophysicists calculate the Sun was much weaker. But there was no oxygen.

The earliest life forms were anaerobic microbes, although brightly coloured – pink or purple have been proposed.

Oceania today

Oceania, in the southwestern Pacific, may illustrate best what this early world was like. Here, the ocean is peppered with volcanic islands and small continents, rocked by great earthquakes where tectonic plates rub against each other. There are even clues to how life began.

The 2022 eruption of the Hunga volcano, near Tonga, created a mushroom cloud of ash that burst out of the ocean and reached up into space with an estimated energy of a 60-megaton atomic bomb. It generated more than 200,000 lightning strikes and left behind a deep underwater crater filled with a chemical soup derived from numerous underwater hot vents.

Experiments show that lightning strikes can trigger the synthesis of basic organic molecules needed by living organisms. Millions of Hunga-like eruptions on early Earth would have created myriad opportunities to kick start the chemistry of life in underwater volcanic craters – life was born out of extreme geological violence.

Staying blue

Going back in time beyond the Makhonjwa Mountains, we still find evidence for oceans, life and, I argue, plate tectonics. Earth became blue within the first tenth of its history.

Mars and Venus may have started this way, too. But our planet uniquely lies in the so-called Goldilocks Zone, receiving just the right amount of solar energy to avoid becoming a boiling Venusian hell or freezing Martian world.

It is also big enough to have a magnetic field and pull of gravity sufficient to retain its atmosphere. And right at the start, a dramatic collision with a Mars-sized asteroid spalled off our Moon, stabilising Earth’s spin axis so that day and night were less extreme.

Finally, the biochemistry of living organisms may have played a key role in keeping Earth this way by helping the bedrock absorb greenhouse gases in the face of a steadily warming Sun.

We must not be the first to let Earth lose its distinctive life-giving blue, a colour so wonderfully referred to in the Siswati language of Eswatini as luhlata lwesibhakabhaka, literally “green like the sky”.

Simon Lamb, Associate Professor in Geophysics, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Published by The Conversation.
Open access. (CC BY 4.0)

What emerges from this work is not a minor disagreement over interpretation, nor a gap that can be papered over with metaphor or selective reading. The world described by geology, geochemistry and planetary science is fundamentally incompatible with the universe imagined by the authors of Genesis. Earth was not a gentle, pre-prepared garden awaiting life, but a violent, unstable planet shaped by impacts, volcanism and relentless geological recycling over billions of years. Life did not appear suddenly by decree, but clawed its way into existence under conditions that would have been lethal to almost anything alive today.

This matters because creationism depends on the claim that its sacred text offers a privileged insight into reality. Yet when examined against the physical evidence locked into Earth’s oldest rocks, Genesis is not merely wrong in detail—it is wrong in kind. Its authors had no conception of deep time, planetary formation, plate tectonics, or the chemical and physical constraints under which life emerged. Their account reflects the worldview of Bronze Age pastoral societies, not hidden wisdom awaiting modern confirmation.

As discoveries like these continue to accumulate, the creationist position becomes ever more untenable. There is no convergence, no narrowing of the gap, no sense in which science is “catching up” with scripture. Instead, each new insight into Earth’s early history widens the chasm between myth and reality. The Bible does not describe the world we inhabit, the planet on which life evolved, or the processes that made our existence possible—and no amount of reinterpretation can change that.

As Anticipated In My Novels - Wolves Lived With Humans 3,000-5,000 Years Ago

View from the Stora Förvar cave on Stora Karlsö where 3,000-5,000 year-old wolf remains were found.

Photo: Jan Storå

Illustration from "The Way of the Wolf: A Stone Age Epic"

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

This article struck a chord with me — not primarily because it refutes creationism, although it certainly does that by presenting evidence that simply should not exist if the biblical flood genocide story contained even a kernel of truth. Such evidence ought either to have been swept away entirely or buried beneath a thick layer of flood-deposited silt containing a chaotic jumble of animal and plant fossils from unrelated landmasses. It was neither.

What resonated more personally, however, is that I have just published a novel in which a clan of Neolithic hunter-gatherers forms a close association with wolves, with the animals playing a central role in both their hunting strategies and their folklore. In the novel, The Way of the Wolf: A Stone Age Epic — the second volume in the Ice Age Tales series — Almora is raised alongside a wolf cub that becomes her inseparable guide and protector. This relationship gives rise to several versions of a mythologised hunt in which the wolf, Sharma, saves the day and defends the hunters. Together with her Neanderthal partner, Tanu, Almora later leads a group of exiles who encounter a clan already familiar with these legends, and who have begun adopting abandoned wolf cubs and raising them as part of the community.

It is fiction, of course — but a deliberately realistic depiction of how wolves could have been domesticated through mutual benefit, cooperation, and prolonged social contact with humans.

The article itself concerns the discovery by researchers at the Francis Crick Institute, Stockholm University, the University of Aberdeen, and the University of East Anglia of wolf remains on a remote Baltic island that could only have been transported there by boat. Isotopic analysis shows that these wolves consumed the same food as the humans, and skeletal pathology in one individual indicates long-term care. The findings are reported in a research paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

How We Know The Bible is Wrong - Human Artifacts That Would't Exist If The Bible Was Real History

World’s Earliest Botanical Art Discovered By HUJI Archeologists, and Evidence of Prehistoric Mathematical Thinking - The Canadian Friends of Hebrew University

Geometric and mathematical patterns on Halafian pottery.

Scientists have once again — almost certainly unintentionally — produced evidence that the Bible is profoundly wrong about human history. This time it comes in the form of pottery shards dating back more than 8,000 years to the Halafian culture of northern Mesopotamia (c. 6200–5500 BCE). These artefacts show that people were not only producing sophisticated ceramics, but were decorating them with complex mathematical patterns long before the formal invention of numbers and counting systems.

The findings of the archaeologists, Professor Yosef Garfinkel and Sarah Krulwich of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, are published, open access, in the Journal of World Prehistory.

According to the biblical account of global history, Earth was subjected to a catastrophic genocidal reset, inflicted in a fit of pique by a vengeful god who had failed to anticipate how his creation would turn out. Rather than simply eliminating humanity and starting again with a corrected design, this deity allegedly chose to preserve the same flawed model in a wooden boat while drowning everything else beneath a flood so deep it covered the highest mountains. The implicit hope appears to have been that repeating the experiment would somehow yield a different result.

As implausible as that story already is, we now possess a vast body of archaeological and palaeontological evidence showing not only that Earth is vastly older than the biblical narrative allows, but that this supposed catastrophic reset never occurred. The latter is demonstrated by the existence of civilisations that predate the alleged flood and continue uninterrupted through it, as though it never happened at all. Their material remains include artefacts that would have been completely destroyed or displaced by such a deluge, and settlement sites that show no sign of burial beneath a chaotic, fossil-bearing sedimentary layer containing mixed local and foreign species.

No such global layer exists. Instead, human artefacts are found precisely where they were made and used, unaffected by any mythical torrent scouring the planet clean.

The designs on the Halafian pottery themselves are particularly revealing. They include repeating patterns — for example, binary progressions such as 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 — suggesting that this culture possessed systematic ways of dividing land or goods to ensure equitable distribution.