Refuting Creationism - Fine Tuned For Catastrophe

Source: Canadian Geographic.

Researchers find evidence of cosmic impact at classic Clovis archaeological sites | The Current

A new paper in PLOS One presents compelling evidence that a comet exploding in Earth’s atmosphere around 13,000 years ago played a major role in the extinction of megafauna such as mammoths and mastodons across Eurasia and North America, and in extinguishing the Clovis Culture, the archaeological sites of which provided the evidence for the impact. The study was led by James Kennett, Professor at University of California, Santa Barbara, working with an international team of collaborators.

The findings cut directly across a familiar creationist trope: the claim that Earth is “finely tuned” to be a benign and stable haven, perfectly suited for human life. This notion, often promoted by parochial American creationists, quietly assumes that the wider world is a trivial backdrop where nothing of consequence ever happens. It ignores the obvious realities of earthquakes, floods, famines, volcanic eruptions and climate shocks—realities that dominate both human history and the deep geological record.

That record tells a very different story. Earth’s past is marked by repeated catastrophes, ranging from abrupt climate shifts to mass extinctions, many triggered by astronomical or geological events. Impacts from space, massive volcanism, plate tectonics and cascading ecosystem failures have repeatedly reshaped life on this planet. Far from being a delicately balanced paradise, Earth is a dynamic and often hostile environment in which survival has always depended on adaptation—and, frequently, sheer luck.

Refuting Creationism - A Frightening Image for Batty Creationists on Halloween

RCW 94, RCW 95

European Southern Observatory

This chart shows the location of the RCW 94 and RCW 95 nebulae between the Circinus and Norma constellations. This map shows most of the stars visible to the unaided eye under good conditions. The location of the nebulae is marked with a red circle.

ESO, IAU and Sky & Telescope

New image captures spooky bat signal in the sky | ESO

For Bible literalists who insist on clinging to the absurd and demonstrably false belief that the Bible is an inerrant science textbook, the latest image from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Survey Telescope (VST) in Chile may induce a bout of cognitive dissonance — and fittingly so, given that it's Halloween. The image shows an immense ‘bat’ shape appearing to hover ominously in space.

But fear not — this ‘bat’ is simply a striking example of pareidolia. In reality, it’s a vast cloud of interstellar gas. And even if it *were* a cosmic creature flapping its wings across the heavens, it’s about 100,000 light-years away, meaning we’re seeing it as it appeared when our early African ancestors were honing the physical and social capabilities that would one day enable them to successfully migrate into colder Eurasian environments. Or, if you prefer the creationist timeline, roughly 90,000 years before ‘Creation Week’.

The so-called ‘bat’, properly known as the RCW 94/95 nebulae, is a stellar nursery. The young stars forming within it emit intense, ionising radiation that excites the hydrogen atoms in the surrounding gas, causing them to glow a vivid red.

If they could see it, which they couldn't, of course, because they lacked the technology, imagine the terror the Bronze Age authors of the Genesis tales would have felt seeing an image like that hovering over the Middle Eastern night sky. They cowered in a demon-haunted world in which natural phenomena were attributed to supernatural gods, so something like that might well have started a new religion.

Refuting Creationism - Earth - Fine-Tuned for Disaters

Scientists find proof that an asteroid hit the North Sea over 43 million years ago | Heriot-Watt University

According to new findings reported in a paper in Nature Communications, a mere 43 million years before creationists believe their god created a small flat planet with a dome over it in the Middle East and fine-tuned it for (human) life, an event occurred which, had it happened today, would have been an almost unimaginable global catastrophe.

A 160-metre-wide asteroid or comet struck what is now the southern North Sea, about 80 miles off the coast of Yorkshire, creating Silverpit crater — a 3 km-wide impact crater surrounded by a 20 km zone of concentric faults. The resulting tsunami, exceeding 100 metres in height, would have swamped the coastal regions bordering the North Sea: the Low Countries (the Netherlands and Belgium), northern France, Denmark, Norway, and much of eastern England and Scotland.

If such an impact were to occur today, it would devastate major population centres and send massive tidal waves surging up major European rivers such as the Rhine and Thames. The death toll would be in the tens of millions, and the resulting economic and infrastructural collapse would almost certainly tip Europe and the UK into terminal decline.

Just 23 million years earlier, another impact event at Chicxulub crater, on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, had exterminated 75 % of all species, including all but the avian dinosaurs. This catastrophe plunged the world into a prolonged global winter, radically reshaping the trajectory of life on Earth and enabling mammals and birds to supplant reptiles as the dominant vertebrate groups.

And all this, on a planet in a universe which creationists insist — in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary — was created perfect for human life by a benevolent god who wanted the best possible world for his “special creation”. That comforting narrative seems curiously blind to the frequent natural disasters inherent to a tectonically active planet orbiting in a cosmic shooting gallery of drifting rocks and icy bodies.

The origins of the Silverpit Crater have been debated since its discovery in 2002. Early hypotheses suggested that movement of subsurface salt or volcanic collapse of the seabed might explain its structure. Now, a research team led by Dr Uisdean Nicholson, a sedimentologist at Heriot-Watt University, together with Dr Tom Dunkley Jones of University of Birmingham, believe they have finally settled the debate: the crater was formed by the impact of an extraterrestrial body.

Refuting Creationism - Waving Goodbye To Childish Superstitions

The Milky Way.

ESA - Gaia discovers our galaxy’s great wave

Astronomers, using data from the European Space Agency's (ESA's) Gaia space telescope, have discovered a vast wave passing through the Milky Way Galaxy, spreading out from the centre like ripples in a pond but with a wave length of about 13,000 light-years. The origins of this wave are still a matter for speculation and will require further data before they can be determined.

With evidence such as this, only a creationist eager to prove that they’re too tough to be persuaded by mere facts could believe that the description of the universe in Genesis is a complete and accurate account of reality, far surpassing in accuracy and reliability anything that science can produce. And only someone desperate to believe it could imagine that the description in Genesis is some sort of metaphor or allegory with a deeper meaning, rather than a hopelessly bad guess made by ignorant Bronze Age storytellers.

How our knowledge of the Milky Way has improved over time is a measure of the extraordinary progress cosmology has made in just over a century. When Albert Einstein was writing his papers on relativity, it was widely assumed that the Milky Way *was* the universe. Then, about a hundred years ago, astronomers discovered that the galaxy rotates around a centre, and in the 1950s it was found to be warped. Meanwhile, Edwin Hubble demonstrated that the Milky Way is just one of billions of galaxies and that the universe is vastly larger than previously imagined — and still expanding. Now, we can detect the motions of stars within the galaxy that reveal this ripple spreading outwards.

Meanwhile, Bible literalists are stuck with an understanding that has not advanced since the Bronze Age, based on a book which says Earth is fixed and immobile at the centre of everything, and that the stars are tiny lights attached to a dome over the world. Until around 600 years ago, the Church vigorously persecuted anyone who argued otherwise, desperate to preserve its power based on the claim that its holy book was the inerrant word of God. It was not until 1992 that the Catholic Church finally admitted that Galileo Galilei was right — 41 years after it had accepted the evidence for the Big Bang. Such is the muddle that religious dogma based on ancient, evidence-free superstitions creates.

The news of the wave spreading across the Milky Way comes in the form of a paper in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and a news release from ESA.

How Science Works - And Why Religion Fails

Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia: Unipd develops new model to understand the origins of the Universe

Credit: NASA/WMAP Science Team

Unlike religion, science does not claim to know exactly how the universe began. What we do know, however, is that at the moment when time (t) = 0, both time and space came into existence. This means that in the conventional sense of time, there was no ‘before’, because ‘before’ presupposes the existence of time. Questions about what existed before the Big Bang are therefore meaningless, even though our intuition insists that there must have been something.

Religion, by contrast, has claimed to know how the universe began ever since creation myths were first invented in the Bronze Age or earlier — and those claims have remained unchanged. The problem is that they substitute genuine explanations with “God did it!” — a statement that explains nothing, is untestable, unfalsifiable, and devoid of any predictive power. It provides comfort only to those who are content not to know the details and unconcerned with truth.

This highlights another crucial difference between science and religion as tools for understanding reality: science continuously updates its knowledge and understanding. It never settles on convenient certainties, no matter how emotionally satisfying they may be, nor does it declare the search for answers to be over.

For many years, the consensus in cosmology has been that the initial few microseconds of the Big Bang involved a period of hyperinflation — a rapid expansion driven by a massive increase in space. Now, however, a team of researchers from Spain and Italy has revived a model first proposed by Albert Einstein and the Dutch mathematician Willem de Sitter, known as De Sitter space. Using this framework, they argue that gravity alone can explain the first few microseconds of space-time. Their new theory has been published, open access, in Physical Review Research.

One key advantage of this explanation over the inflationary model is its relative simplicity. It also, unlike the 'inflation' model, doesn't need elements that have never been observed, but relies solely on gravity and quantum mechanics. Applying Occam's razor, the simpler explanation with fewer elements or 'entities', is more likely to be correct.

Creationism Refuted - The Cosmos Is Not Fine-Tuned For Life

An artist’s impression of a red supergiant star in the final year of its life emitting a tumultuous cloud of gas. This suggests at least some of these stars undergo significant internal changes before going supernova.

W.M. Keck Observatory/
Adam Makarenko.

An artist’s impression of a red supergiant star in the final year of its life emitting a tumultuous cloud of gas.

W.M. Keck Observatory/Adam Makarenko.

Astronomers capture red supergiant’s death throes - Northwestern Now

Although now rather old news, the observation of the death of a red supergiant star in 20222 has just been reported in Science Daily, prompting me to look again at the 'fine-tuned universe' argument beloved by (usually American) creationists, and often repeated uncritically with little or no understanding of the subject.

Briefly, the argument is that the universe is so “finely tuned” that changing even a single parameter by the smallest amount would make life impossible. The superficiality of this argument is revealed by the fact that many of the same individuals also claim that radiometric dating is unreliable because radioactive decay rates were supposedly much higher in the past. Yet, if that were true, their fine-tuning claim would collapse entirely: accelerated decay would have released so much energy that not only would life have been impossible, but atoms themselves could not have formed at the time they claim their deity magically created everything.

The fine-tuning argument collapses almost immediately when creationists are asked to explain any of the supposed parameters in detail. Specifically, they cannot show the theoretical range of values that parameter could take, nor can they demonstrate how the probability of its current value was calculated without access to multiple universes where it differs. In practice, no such calculation is ever performed; instead, a vanishingly small probability is simply asserted without evidence. Yet if no other values are actually possible, then the probability of the parameter having its current value is not small at all — it is certain (i.e. 1).

Refuting Creationism - The Vast Cosmos - That the Bible Says Is Centred On A Small Flat Planet With A dome Over It.

Yellow and blue, old and new | ESA/Hubble

Creationists have a choice - they can either be ignorant of what the Bible says, or remain ignorant of what science is discovering - or both. They can also arrogantly assume that their beliefs must be right so they trump any evidence science can produce.

But what they can't do is reconcile the reality as science reveals it with the description of it in the Bible. The difference is so wide that the Bible can't even be explained away as some sort of metaphor or allegory. It's no more a metaphor or an allegory than a child would produce if asked to look up at the sky then describe the universe. The Bible's description is no more a detailed description of the cosmos than the description of a glass of tap water by a six-year-old is a detailed description of the Pacific Ocean

As though to rub salt in creationists' wounds, although the scientist's regular refutation of creationism is merely incidental, the European Space Agency (ESA) in association with NASA and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) or the Hubble Space Telescope, keep on producing these images of the week. This week it's a stunning picture of the blue and yellow spiral galaxy, NGC 6000, 102 million light-years away in the Scorpius constellation.

Refuting Creationism - The James Webb Space Telescope Continues to Highlight The Ignorant Authorship Of The Bible.

Pismis 24 (NIRCam Image)

Glittering Glimpse of Star Birth From NASA’s Webb Telescope - NASA Science

Pismis 24 (NIRCam Image)

NASA/JWST

If a creator god had truly inspired the writing of the Bible, as creationists claim, and genuinely wanted us to believe in it and understand the supposedly vital message it contains for humankind, it could easily have included descriptions of things unknown to the people of the time — such as germ theory, atoms, electricity, photosynthesis, cells, and DNA — along with a more accurate description of the cosmos than the laughably naïve nonsense the authors recorded. Then, as science discovered these things, we would have become increasingly convinced of the Bible’s divine authorship.

Instead, we find nothing beyond the limited, parochial knowledge of its Bronze Age authors, who imagined the sky as a solid dome with water above it. Consequently, as science reveals more and more about the universe, we have no choice — if we wish to retain our intellectual integrity — but to conclude that the claim of divine authorship is false, and the Bible can therefore be disregarded as such. Any message or moral imperative it contains was written by people who believed women existed to serve men, that slavery, land theft and genocide were moral, and that the death penalty was a just punishment for trivial transgressions — such as gathering firewood on the Sabbath or failing to scream loudly enough while being raped.

Compare the Bible’s description of the universe with even a tiny glimpse of reality — for instance, this image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), recently released by NASA. Inexplicably, there are still adults who cling to the belief that the Bible’s depiction remains the best available description of the universe, far surpassing, in their minds, the accuracy and reliability of anything science can produce.

Refuting Creationism - What's Happening In the Real Universe?

Location in the sky of the rogue planet Cha 1107-7626 (visible light)

Six billion tonnes a second: Rogue planet found growing at record rate | ESO

Artist’s impression of Cha 1107-7626.

Location in the sky of the rogue planet Cha 1107-7626 (infrared)

With their childishly naïve grasp of the structure of the universe, the Bible’s authors could no more have imagined the true nature of the cosmos than a Bronze Age farmer could have designed a particle accelerator. They pictured a flat Earth covered by a solid dome, beneath which the sun and stars moved like lanterns suspended on invisible tracks. Believing rain came from “waters above” this dome, they assumed the sky itself must be a vast ocean — blue, like the sea — and that some celestial sluice gates opened when it rained.

Such primitive guesswork, born of ignorance and untested imagination, could never have encompassed even a single heliocentric solar system, let alone the staggering reality of trillions of such systems scattered across billions of galaxies.

And yet, while creationists still cling to those same Iron Age misunderstandings as “divinely inspired truth,” modern science continues to reveal a universe so vast and dynamic that it mocks the limits of ancient superstition. One striking example is the discovery of a planet that has slipped the gravitational leash of its parent star and now drifts aimlessly through the cosmos—sweeping up tons of cosmic dust every second and steadily growing in mass.

Refuting Creationism - Scarey Days For Creationists As More Signs of Life on Other Bodies Are Found

Artist's impression of Saturn's icy moon Enceladus. With a frozen surface covering a deep ocean, Enceladus is a fascinating target to search for signs of habitability elsewhere in our Solar System.

Graphic composition: ESA; Surface: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/Lunar and Planetary Institute
(CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)

An artist's depiction of water erupting from the "tiger stripe" fractures in the surface of Enceladus's south pole

© ESA.

ESA - Cassini proves complex chemistry in Enceladus ocean

In a soccer manager’s jargon, this is squeaky bum time for creationists who cling to the notion that science will never demonstrate that abiogenesis is even possible, let alone explain how it happened.

Squeaky bum time for a football manager is when the team’s league position — and with it qualification for European tournaments, and often the manager’s job — hangs on a single unpredictable result.

So it is with creationism. One single piece of definitive evidence that life has arisen independently on another world in the Solar System, or on an exoplanet orbiting a distant sun, would comprehensively consign creationism to the dustbin of history where it has been struggling to avoid ending up since 1859. Such a discovery would refute the claim that ‘life from non-life’ is impossible. Instead, it would show that under the right conditions, life is simply a natural product of chemistry and physics.

And the signs are as dire for creationism as for the embattled football team that finds itself 2–0 down in stoppage time. Scientists at the European Space Agency have just announced the detection of possible signs of life in the ocean beneath the icy crust of one of Saturn’s moons, Enceladus, as revealed by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. This follows close on the heels of strong evidence that life once existed on Mars.

The tentative evidence from Enceladus points to processes in its subsurface ocean producing organic precursors to amino acids — the basic building blocks of proteins and a fundamental requirement for prebiotic chemistry that could eventually lead to organised cells. Researchers also report the detection of previously unknown molecules, including aliphatic and (hetero)cyclic compounds, esters, alkenes, ethers, and tentatively nitrogen- and oxygen-bearing compounds.

These organics were detected by Cassini’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA) in ice crystals ejected in plumes through cracks in Enceladus’ ice covering. These plumes are thought to form when water seeps into the moon’s rocky core, is heated, and then forced back up to the ocean floor as hydrothermal vents — much like those found in Earth’s oceans. The hot water increases the pressure in the subsurface ocean until the ice cracks and jets of vapour and ice crystals erupt. Most fall back to the surface, but some escape Enceladus’ weak gravity and contribute to one of Saturn’s rings, within which the moon orbits.

Refuting Creationism - How Earth Was Really Formed - No Magic Spells Required

The Collision that created the Earth-Moon complex and gave us seasons and tides.

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5)

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Artistic illustration of the early formation phase of the solar system. At the time, the young sun (in the centre) was surrounded by a pro-planetary disc - a rotating collection of gas and dust.

© ESO/L. Calçada.

No collision, no life: Earth probably needed supplies from space

According to creationists who treat the Bible as both science and history, the Earth was created ex nihilo as a small, flat world beneath a dome, sitting at the centre of the universe. This happened, they claim, when a male deity with magical powers spoke some special words – in a language no one else could have known, since no other sentient beings yet existed.

And all of this supposedly took place instantaneously, just 6,000 to 10,000 years ago.

Creationists also like to imagine that the Earth, and indeed the whole universe, was purpose-built and fine-tuned, with a grand plan designed so that they could live comfortably here and now.

The scientific reality, however, could not be more different.

Earth formed some 4 billion years ago, condensing out of an accretion disc around a young, second- or third-generation star – our Sun – amid the chaos of the early solar system. Planets jostled for stable orbits, minor planetoids collided or were absorbed, and gravity ruled everything.

Now, two scientists at the University of Bern have shown that the Earth which first emerged was dry, barren, and stripped of the essential building blocks of life. It was only thanks to a colossal chance collision with a wandering planetoid, rich in water and volatile elements such as hydrogen, carbon, and sulphur, that Earth acquired the raw ingredients for habitability. The debris from this impact later condensed to form the Moon, while the tilted axis of Earth’s rotation – which gives us our seasons – was another by-product of that chaotic event.

None of this was inevitable. It was the result of blind chance shaped only by natural forces such as gravity, directly refuting the creationist mantra that “order cannot come from chaos.” To insist it was all preordained as part of some cosmic plan to produce humans (and, more parochially, white Americans) is to deny the fragility of existence and the extraordinary good fortune of being alive now, able to appreciate the wonder of how it all came to be.

Atheists do not live for death; they live for life.

The Childish Bible - The Contrast Between The Bible's Description Of The Universe and the Real Thing

A spiral galaxy, NGC 7456. It shines brightly at the centre, and most of its disc also glows in warm colours. Its two spiral arms, which wind outwards from the centre, are made up mostly of large patches of bright blue specks. They also contain thin, reddish clouds of dust, and bright pink bubbles of glowing gas, where stars are forming. Distant galaxies can be seen around the galaxy as small orange spots, on a dark background.

A galaxy with lots to see | ESA/Hubble

For the Bible’s description of the Universe, try doing something creationists rarely seem to do – actually read it (you don’t need to read much!). In the very first chapter we find a story of a universe created from nothing by a few magic words. This universe is described as a small, flat, dome-covered world, with stars portrayed as tiny lights stuck to the dome. The Sun and Moon are described as lamps hanging from it. Later, we read of stars shaking loose and falling to Earth during earthquakes, and of the Moon hiding in a valley during the day (Genesis 1:6-10, Genesis 1:14-17, Joshua 10:12-14).

The contrast with what science has revealed could hardly be more stark. Given what we now know of the cosmos, the Bible’s account reads like the imaginative attempt of a five-year-old child asked to describe the Universe after a glance at the night sky. It can scarcely be regarded as a definitive scientific account of reality, and yet there are adults who still believe it is just that.

What this tells us about the education and credulity of those creationists who insist on believing such absurdities I will leave for readers to decide. Meanwhile, here is the NASA/ESA Hubble Picture of the Week to compare with the biblical version. It shows the spiral galaxy NGC 7456, located more than 51 million light-years away in the constellation Grus (the Crane). The image reveals glowing pink reservoirs of gas where new stars are forming, their light causing the surrounding gas to emit its tell-tale red glow.

Refuting Creationism - Biblical Ignorance Exposed By Science Again

A spiral galaxy, tilted nearly face-on to us, with a slightly unusual shape. Its spiral arms form an oval-shaped ring around the galaxy’s disc, filled with blue light from stars, as well as pink glowing gas bubbles where new stars are forming. Threads of dark red dust swirl around the brightly glowing core, blocking some of its light. The dust lanes extend into and follow the spiral arms.

Taking a third look | ESA/Hubble

Messier 96

NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope

This week’s exposure of the child-like naivety of the Bible's authors comes again in the form of the NASA/ESA/Hubble Space Telescope image of the week. This week, we have a stunning view of an asymmetric spiral galaxy, Messier 96; a mere 35 million light-years away. Even more amazing is the evidence of baby suns actively forming in this galaxy while it is being stretched by gravity.

Refuting Creationism - How Earth Was Really Made - No God-Magic Needed

High-energy Venus Impacts

An SwRI-led team compared the early impact history of Venus and Earth, determining that Venus experienced higher-energy impacts that created a superheated core. Models show these conditions could create Venus’ extended volcanism and younger surface.

Evolution of Terrestrial Planets
A new SwRI-led paper highlights the scientific progress made in understanding the evolution of terrestrial planets, including the effects of late large impacts on pre-existing modes of tectonics. For instance, the Earth experienced transient subduction, when one tectonic plate slides beneath another. Because Venus’ surface is covered by a single plate, a high-velocity impact led to a superheated core and long-lived volcanism. On Mars, a large, low-velocity impact facilitated variations in its hemispheres. Impacts also modify the atmospheres of terrestrial planets in profound ways, including eliminating or supplementing existing gases.

SwRI-led paper summarizes notable progress in understanding the evolution of the terrestrial planets | Southwest Research Institute

Creationist myths describe Earth as a flat world under a dome at the centre of the Universe, made just a few thousand years ago. The real story is far more extraordinary: a fragile chain of chance events and natural forces that made life possible on this small rocky planet.

Earth orbits an ordinary star on the edge of the Milky Way, one of billions in one of trillions of galaxies. That it exists at all is down to gravity, physics, and luck. Out of this came a beautiful world teeming with life—including one species able to marvel at the Universe and ask how it all began, and in it's fearful, ignorant infancy, make up the myths to explain it that now pass for science in some scientifically backward cultures.

One early collision with a smaller planetoid gave us the Moon, tides, and seasons; this or a later impact may, according to this study, be responsible for tectonic plates, giving us a forever changing, dynamic planet, driving evolutionary divergence. While not required for life to appear, these events shaped the planet into the diverse, life-rich world we know today.

Refuting Creationism - Look How Wrong The Bible's Authors Were!

Fly through Gaia's 3D map of stellar nurseries

So that creationists can rehearse their excuses for dismissing science and retaining their childish delusion that Genesis is an accurate description of the universe, written or inspired by an omniscient creator god, in spite of the evidence to the contrary, here are some recent images and videos from the European Space Agency (ESA).

They were created from the most accurate three-dimensional map of star-formation regions in our Milky Way galaxy, based on data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope. The star-formation region that is mapped out (contoured by a circle) reaches out to 4000 light-years from our Sun. The Sun is located at the center of this region. The star-formation map is plotted on an artist impression of our Milky Way, based on Gaia data.. Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, S. Payne-Wardenaar, L. McCallum et al (2025)

Refuting Creationism - Beyond The Comprehension Of The Bible's Authors

The 'Cigar Galaxy' (Messier 82). A close-in view of the centre of galaxy M82. Bright, bluish light radiating from the centre is due to stars actively forming there. A thick lane of gas, black in the centre and red around the edges, crosses the centre and blocks much of the light. Thinner strands and clumps of reddish dust cover much of the rest of the view.

The smouldering heart of a celestial cigar | ESA/Hubble

Location of the Cigar Nebula (M82).

Here we have yet another image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and released by the European Space Agency—not to belittle the Bible’s account of creation in Genesis, though that happens automatically. The biblical description reflects the view of a pre-scientific people who imagined a flat Earth under a solid dome, with stars as tiny lights stuck to it and the Sun and Moon moving across the sky like lamps hung for our benefit. It reads exactly like the report of someone told to look up and describe what they see without any understanding of what lies beyond.

Modern astronomy shows us something utterly different. The universe is not a small stage with a few lights above it, but a vast, dynamic cosmos shaped by natural processes. Stars are born, live, and die in titanic cycles of creation and destruction; galaxies collide and merge; black holes sculpt their surroundings with unimaginable power.

This particular image, ESA’s Picture of the Week, captures the so-called Cigar Galaxy (Messier 82), a starburst galaxy just 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major (the Great Bear). Here we see the turbulent heart of a galaxy where new stars are forming in great swathes, driving winds of gas and dust thousands of light-years into space.

The contrast could not be greater: a childlike tale of a sky-dome with a few lights versus the grandeur of a living universe billions of years old and on a scale our ancestors could never have imagined. Contrast the Bible's description with that of ESA's description of the image:

Refuting Creationism - A Picture of Reality Far Removed From The Childish Tale In The Bible

LMC N44C

ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray, J. Maíz Apellániz

LMC N44C
Stars in a star cluster shine brightly blue, with four-pointed spikes radiating from them. The centre shows a small, crowded group of stars while a larger group lies out of view on the left. The nebula is mostly thick, smoky clouds of gas, lit up in blue tones by the stars. Clumps of dust hover before and around the stars; they are mostly dark, but lit around their edges where the starlight erodes them.

ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray, J. Maíz Apellániz

Cloudy cluster | ESA/Hubble

This week’s NASA/European Space Agency (ESA) Hubble picture of the week is a stunning cloudy starscape from an impressive star cluster. The scene lies within the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a dwarf galaxy about 160,000 light-years away in the southern constellations Dorado and Mensa. With a mass equal to 10–20% of that of the Milky Way, the LMC is the largest of the dozens of small galaxies orbiting our own.

The light captured in this image began its journey 160,000 years ago, when early Homo sapiens were making their first tentative steps beyond Africa, following in the paths of Homo erectus and encountering Neanderthals, who had already lived in Eurasia for some 100,000 years.

That very distance — 160,000 light-years — alone undermines the biblical timeline. The contrast between this breathtaking glimpse of just a tiny fragment of the universe and the childishly naïve picture painted in Genesis is a near-superfluous refutation of the idea that its description came from an all-knowing creator.

Creationism Refuted - Scientists See A Planet Being Born - No God(s) Involved

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A growing baby planet photographed for first time in a ring of darkness | University of Arizona News

Astronomers led by University of Arizona’s Laird Close, alongside Leiden Observatory graduate student Richelle van Capelleveen, have directly observed a planet in the making — WISPIT 2b — nested within the rings of a protoplanetary disk around a young Sun-like star in the constellation Aquila, about 430 light-years away. The planet is confirmed to be about five times Jupiter’s mass, actively accreting gas, and clearing a prominent gap in the disk. This observation aligns almost perfectly with the long-standing scientific model of planet formation—and stands in stark contrast to the biblical narrative of instant land-mass creation, involving no orbit, disk, or extended evolutionary process.

This discovery will be depressing news for creationists, especially when contrasted with the biblical account of Earth’s creation — where magic words allegedly call a small, flat land mass into existence consisting of a few square miles of land around the Canaanite Hills, with no hint of orbiting a star or forming within a protoplanetary disk. The stark mismatch extends beyond metaphor — the actual physical process astronomers observe has no room for magic, and more importantly, aligns precisely with predictions from scientific theories of planetary formation.

The Universe Is Nothing Like The Description of it in The Bible 5

A planetary accretion disk forming around a star.

AI-generated (ChatGPT 5)

Unusual carbon dioxide-rich disk detected around young star challenges planet formation models - Stockholm University

This, the last in this series - at least for a while - is on the discovery made by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) of a disk rich in carbon dioxide around a young star. Apart from again highlighting the yawning gap between the Bible's child-like description of the universe and the real thing, it also showcases how, contrary to creationist conspiracy theorists’ claims that scientists are not allowed to publish anything which challenges “scientific orthodoxy,” a discovery that challenges the current consensus is openly flagged to the scientific community in peer-reviewed publications.

The problem this raises for cosmology is that, in the standard model of planetary formation, icy grains from the colder outer regions of a disk drift inward. As they cross the so-called snow lines, the ice sublimates into gas: first carbon dioxide, then closer in, water vapour. Because both species are expected to follow this process, astronomers normally expect water vapour to be at least as abundant as, if not more abundant than, carbon dioxide in the warmer inner regions. Yet in the disk surrounding a young star in the star-forming region NGC 6357, JWST found the reverse of what models predict — little or no water, but a striking abundance of carbon dioxide.

Intriguingly, the observation may also help explain another puzzle: the unusual isotopic fingerprint found in meteorites and comets. The imbalance of gases could be linked to intense radiation altering chemical pathways in the disk.

For Bible literalists, however, such details have no bearing on their imagined universe of a small, flat Earth with a dome overhead and fixed, immovable stars. There is no recognition in their text of star formation, accretion disks, or the vastness and dynamism of a changing cosmos. The Bible’s universe doesn’t even contain planetary systems.

The Universe Is Nothing Like The Description of it in The Bible 4

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Figure 1. Image stamps of example very bright dropouts in F090W, F115W, F150W, and F200W, arranged from top to bottom. Two example objects are shown for each group. The stamps are 2″×2″ in size and are oriented with north being up and east being left. The images are from the HST ACS, JWST NIRCam, and JWST MIRI, with the passbands as noted. Most of the very bright dropouts are either disk-like (∼40%) or compact (∼45%) in morphology in F356W, and one each is shown for the F090W, F150W and F200W dropouts. The example F115W dropouts include a disk-like object and an irregular object. Only ∼15% of the very bright dropouts have irregular morphologies. The color stamps in the last column are constructed based on the NIRCam images, using F090W + F115W + F150W as blue, F200W + F277W as green, and F356W + F410M + F444W as red.

Sun, Bangzheng & Yan, Haojing (2025).(CC BY 4.0)

Early galaxies — or something else? Mizzou scientists uncover mysterious objects in the universe

In this fourth article in the series contrasting the real universe with the one described in the Bible, I look at the announcement that two cosmologists from the University of Missouri have discovered about 300 objects that are brighter than they should be if they are what researchers think they are – some of the first galaxies in the early universe. If that's what they turn out to be, it will require a reassessment of what cosmologists thought they knew about the formation of galaxies.

This highlights a frequently repeated contradiction in creationist claims: on the one hand, they insist scientists are only allowed to publish papers that conform to existing consensus, so "creationist science" never gets published; on the other hand, they complain that scientists keep changing their minds and rewriting the science books, unlike the Bible which never changes. They claim this means science is unreliable and not to be trusted. Obviously, both can't be right, but that doesn't stop creationists from claiming both simultaneously.

The other problem this paper highlights is the sheer scale of the universe and the timeline involved, which make the Bible's account look laughably naïve, even childish in its simplicity.

These mystery objects, discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope, are in the order of 13–14 billion light-years in look-back time, meaning we are seeing the light that left them when the universe was only a few hundred million years old. Because the universe has been expanding ever since, their actual present-day distance is much greater — probably 25–30 billion light-years away.

This doesn’t contradict the 13.8-billion-year age of the universe: the light has only been travelling for 13 billion years, but in that time the fabric of space itself has stretched. It’s a bit like two ants on a rubber band: one ant flashes a signal when it is 13 cm away, but by the time the other ant sees it, the band has stretched so much that they are now 30 cm apart. The signal only travelled 13 cm, but the current separation is larger because of the stretching. To suggest, as creationists must, that the well-established methods of cosmological distance measurement are so wrong that they confuse a universe a few thousand years old with one tens of billions of light-years across, is to cling to absurdity.

In fact, this paper shows science at its best. The researchers are effectively saying to their colleagues: “Look, we may have found a fundamental problem that could mean we were wrong all along. Let’s investigate further and be prepared to change our minds if the evidence demands it.” Now imagine a creationist announcing that they had discovered a contradiction in the Bible that forced them to question its divine authorship, or a Discovery Institute fellow admitting to evidence that could only be explained by Darwinian evolution. Such an admission would simply never happen — and certainly never be published in a creationist outlet.

Science is reasonable uncertainty; religion is unreasonable certainty.