Creationism Refuted - Don't Laugh At the Bible's Authors, They Were Only Doing Their Best!

NGC 3285B (137 million lightyears from Earth)

NGC 3285B

A spiral galaxy with a disc made up of several swirling arms. Patchy blue clouds of gas are speckled over the disc, where stars are forming and lighting up the gas around them. The core of the galaxy is large and shines brightly gold, while the spiral arms are a paler and faint reddish colour. Neighbouring galaxies - from small, elongated spots to larger swirling spirals - can be seen across the black background.

Swirling spiral in Hydra | ESA/Hubble

Take a grain of rice and hold it between your thumb and forefinger at arm’s length while looking up at the night sky. The patch of sky hidden behind that tiny grain of rice probably contains thousands of galaxies—each with around half a trillion stars. Some of these stars are ancient, nearing the end of their tens-of-millions-of-years lifespans; others are just beginning to form from clouds of gas and debris left behind by older stars that exploded as supernovae.

What lies behind that grain of rice is a tiny fragment of a dynamic, evolving, ever-changing, and expanding universe. A universe of which our ancient prophets were completely unaware as they crafted imaginative descriptions of its origins—descriptions written just a few thousand years ago that portrayed it as a small, unchanging cosmos, with a flat Earth at the centre covered by a dome.

But let’s not be too hard on them. As they stood in their Canaanite pastures, the Earth must indeed have looked flat and small, and the sky would have seemed like the roof of a great tent, adorned with tiny lights and with the sun and moon suspended from it. To them, the Earth appeared fixed and immobile while the dome overhead turned slowly, or perhaps invisible spirits moved the lights across the heavens each night. They didn’t know where the sun went after sunset and imagined the moon might hide in a deep valley during the day.

Creationism Refuted - A Planet Is Born - And The Bible Tale Looks Even More Absurd

This image, taken with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), shows a spiral disc around the young star HD 135344B.

ESO/F. Maio et al.

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This image, captured with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), shows a spiral disc around the young star HD 135344B. The image, which was released in 2016, was obtained with the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet Research (SPHERE) instrument.

Astronomers witness newborn planet sculpting the dust around it | ESO

It takes a special form of self-deluding immunity to facts and reason for creationists to cling to the absurd belief that the Bible’s description of a small universe formed *ex nihilo* in a few days — by nothing more than a few magic words spoken in a language no one was alive to understand — could possibly reflect reality.

Meanwhile, science continues to produce evidence for a very old, immense universe that is constantly changing and evolving, where new stars and planetary systems are being observed as they form. Many of these systems lie so far away that the light from them has taken billions of years to reach us — in stark contrast to the few thousand years allowed by the Biblical narrative.

As I’ve previously explained on this blog, modern astronomy and the wealth of evidence it provides shows that the Biblical account is not merely inaccurate — it is irredeemably wrong. It can’t even be salvaged as metaphor or allegory. It is exactly as wrong as one would expect from people who believed the Earth was a small, flat disc with a dome over it, and that life was created out of soil, fully formed, just a few thousand years ago.

Today, we have yet more evidence that utterly refutes the Bible’s creation myth — and this time, it doesn’t come from events billions of years ago, but from a mere 440 light-years away. That means the light we’re seeing now set off on its journey in 1585 — the same year Sir Walter Raleigh attempted to found the ill-fated Roanoke Colony in North America, and the Anglo-Spanish War broke out.

Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory (ESO), using the Very Large Telescope (VLT), have observed a giant planet forming within the accretion disk of a young star — exactly as the modern theory of planetary formation predicts. In other words, the universe is still forming and evolving, in complete contradiction to the static, one-time-only creation described in Genesis.

Abiogenesis News - Not Random Chance Or Divine Magic But Natural Selection

The sugar ribose is more quickly phosphorylated compared to other sugars with the same chemical formula but a different shape. This selective phosphorylation could explain how ribose became the sugar molecule in RNA.

Credit: Scripps Research

Where did RNA come from? | Scripps Research

One fallacy with which anyone who has tried to engage a creationist in debate will soon become familiar is the false dichotomy. This is where a creationist attempts to make a "god of the gaps" argument appear logical by presenting it as a binary choice between something so simplistic or absurd that no serious scientist would argue for it—and "God did it!" In doing so, they ignore the actual scientific explanations and exclude all other plausible natural mechanisms.

A classic example of this is the argument that abiogenesis—often deliberately misrepresented as the spontaneous assembly of a complex, living cell from inorganic materials—is far too improbable to have occurred by chance alone, and therefore must have required a supernatural intelligence. In their minds, the very existence of complex life is "proof" of their particular deity.

This line of reasoning overlooks the crucial role played by natural processes, such as chemistry and physics, and what amounts to an evolutionary process at the molecular level. In such a process, chemical pathways that are more efficient at producing copies of themselves are naturally favoured, leading over time to increased refinement and complexity. For instance, why was the five-carbon sugar ribose selected as the backbone sugar in RNA?

This is the question that two researchers at the Scripps Research Institute have tackled. They demonstrated that ribose is far more efficiently phosphorylated than its alternatives, forming the chemical basis of nucleotides—the building blocks of RNA (and later DNA). This efficiency gave ribose a natural advantage, allowing it to "win" the competition against other sugars.

Their findings show that the emergence of ribose was not the result of random chance, but the predictable outcome of the underlying chemistry and physics. The study has been published in the international edition of the journal of the German Chemical Society, Angewandte Chemie.

The work is also summarised in accessible terms in a Scripps Research press release.

Creationism Refuted - Astonomers Witness The Birth Of An Earth-Like Planet

HOPS-315, a baby star where astronomers have observed evidence for the earliest stages of planet formation.

This image shows jets of silicon monoxide (SiO) blowing away from the baby star HOPS-315. The image was obtained with the with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which ESO is a partner.

For the first time, astronomers witness the dawn of a new solar system | ESO

One of the more dishonest tactics employed by creationist grifter Ken Ham is his infamous question: "Were you there?" As though the only valid form of evidence is eye-witness testimony. The implication is clear—if you didn’t personally observe a species evolving, then you have no grounds to claim that evolution occurred. And by extension, Ham suggests that his own creationist claims are equally valid and deserve the same consideration as scientific explanations, despite the fact that he wasn't there either.

Of course, this deliberately ignores the many well-documented instances of observed evolution and the overwhelming fossil evidence showing gradual transitions over time.

He applies the same fallacious reasoning to cosmology, dismissing scientific accounts of Earth’s and the solar system’s origins on the grounds that no one was there to witness them. As though this somehow makes the biblical Bronze Age myth—a magical spontaneous assembly in response to divine incantation—equally plausible.

In a typically cynical move, Ham teaches children to parrot this question as a way to shut down scientific discussion. Rather than encouraging curiosity with the far more constructive question, "How do you know that?" — a gateway to learning about observation, extrapolation, and logical reasoning — he arms them with a slogan designed to obstruct inquiry and preserve ignorance, while making them feel smugly superior to the scientists having exposed the 'flaw' in their reasoning.

But now, thanks to cutting-edge astronomical research, science has delivered something akin to “being there” at the birth of a planet.

An international team of researchers, using the ALMA telescope (operated in part by the European Southern Observatory) and the James Webb Space Telescope, have observed what appears to be the formation of an Earth-like planet in the accretion disk of a young star. This is direct evidence supporting the scientific model of planetary formation — the very process that explains the origins of Earth and the solar system.

Predictably, this discovery will require some creative misrepresentation from creationists to dismiss it. No doubt we’ll hear claims that it’s not really the same process that formed Earth, or that it doesn’t disprove Genesis — because defending ancient mythology apparently requires ignoring any modern evidence that makes it look absurdly naive.

Refuting Creationism - The 'Abiogenesis Gap' Just Got a Little Bit Smaller

Image generated with Adobe Stock by Josef Kuster / ETH Zürich)

How urea forms spontaneously | ETH Zürich

Graphical representation of urea formation in a droplet.

Figure: Luis Quintero / ETH Zürich.

Creationism's ever-shrinking, gap-shaped creator god has just lost a little more ground. New research suggests that the formation of basic organic molecules may have been far easier under early Earth conditions than previously thought. Remarkably, scientists have found that urea—a key organic compound—can form spontaneously from ammonia and carbon dioxide on the surface of water droplets. This process requires no catalysts, no high pressure or heat, and consumes minimal energy.

Although vitalism was refuted as early as 1828 — decades before Darwin — creationists still claim that life cannot arise from non-living matter. Yet they quickly retreat when asked how dead food becomes living tissue, or what exactly they mean by ‘life’: a substance, a process, or some kind of magical force. In reality, life is a set of chemical processes, and at its core, it’s about managing entropy—using energy to maintain order against the natural drift toward disorder.

The discovery was made by researchers at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich in collaboration with colleagues from Auburn University in Alabama, USA. Their findings have just been published in Science.

Refuting Creationism - How We Know The Bible Was Made Up By Scientifically-Illiterate People

A new study broadens the horizon of knowledge about how matter behaves under extreme conditions and helps to solve some great unknowns about the origin of the universe.

Deciphering the behaviour of heavy particles in the hottest matter in the universe - Current events - University of Barcelona

The Bible contains no scientific insights or understanding beyond what would have been known to Bronze Age pastoralists—what Christopher Hitchens aptly described as the "fearful infancy of our species." Their knowledge was naturally constrained by the absence of scientific instruments, a lack of understanding of the planet's history, and a worldview shaped by tribal dogma and magical thinking.

Had the Bible truly been written or inspired by the deity it describes — as a vital message to humanity from the creator of the universe — one might reasonably expect it to contain some revelations unknown to its time. Yet it offers nothing by way of evidence to support such a claim. There is no mention of germ theory, no understanding of cells or cellular life, no grasp of atoms, electricity, or metabolic processes like photosynthesis and respiration. All living things are described as strictly male or female, with no recognition of genetics, hermaphroditism or parthenogenesis — except for a single, supposedly miraculous human birth of a genetically impossible male child. In short, the text contains nothing that was not already known or assumed until the development of tools like the microscope and telescope, and much of it was clearly and demonstrably wrong.

The Bible’s authors were storytellers, not scientists. Their goal was not to challenge the cultural assumptions of their time but to frame them within a compelling narrative.

Because religions are not founded on tested hypotheses or objective facts but rather on the best guesses of uninformed people, any alignment with modern scientific understanding is coincidental, not predictive. For example, the biblical phrase *"Let there be light"* is sometimes interpreted as metaphorically reflecting the early high-energy state of the universe following the Big Bang. But there is no indication that the authors understood photons, particle physics, or the quantum nature of space-time. Nor did they suggest that the universe originated nearly 14 billion years ago in a quantum fluctuation of a non-zero energy field.

Recent discoveries illustrate just how far modern science has advanced beyond anything conceivable to ancient authors. For instance, an international team of scientists has recently found evidence suggesting the existence of heavy particles during the universe's first microseconds—particles that influenced the behaviour of other matter. This discovery, utterly incomprehensible to a Bronze Age worldview, is detailed in a peer-reviewed article published in Physics Reports.

Refuting Creationism - That Ever-Shrinking Little Creationist God Just Got Even Smaller

Liquid brine veins, where RNA molecules can replicate, surround solid ice crystals in water ice, as seen with an electron microscope.

Credit: Philipp Holliger, MRC LMB

Chemists recreate how RNA might have reproduced for first time | UCL News - UCL – University College London

The problem with having a god who exists merely to fill gaps in human knowledge and understanding — as the god of creationism does — is that science has been steadily shrinking those gaps ever since the scientific method emerged and the Church lost its power to persecute scientists for discovering inconvenient truths. Today, only a few small gaps remain, scattered throughout the body of scientific knowledge —particularly in biology, which holds special interest for creationists.

Creationism persists because there are still people with such a poor understanding of science that they believe the authors of ancient religious texts — written during the Bronze Age, when humanity's knowledge gaps encompassed nearly everything in their small world — had access to some deeper, divine insight. Although what they wrote is often naively simplistic and demonstrably wrong in almost every respect, creationists insist that it somehow surpasses anything modern science has produced in terms of accuracy and reliability.

One of the few remaining gaps where creationists attempt to place their god — the abiogenesis gap — has just shrunk further. Predictably, this will be ignored, dismissed, or misrepresented by creationist frauds who exploit carefully maintained ignorance to preserve their cult followings and income streams.

This discovery by chemists at University College London and the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology reveals how a simple RNA molecule can self-replicate under conditions thought to have existed on prebiotic Earth. Many scientists believe this marks the origin of RNA-based life, which eventually gave rise to the more complex protein- and DNA-based life we see today. A self-replicating RNA molecule, competing for limited resources, will naturally evolve to become more efficient — leaving more copies of itself than rival variants. This is classic Darwinian evolution, operating in a context Darwin himself could scarcely have imagined, knowing nothing of RNA or DNA.

The new research is published open access in Nature Chemistry.

Abiogenesis News - Closing Creationism's Favourite God-Shaped Gap - Still No God(s) Found

Diagram of an early cell membrane.

AI Generated image (ChatGPT4o)

How membranes may have brought about the chemistry of life on Earth | Department of Biology

Another hefty spadeful of science has just been shovelled into one of creationism’s favourite god-shaped gaps: the ever-shrinking mystery of abiogenesis. This is the gap that, through the intellectually dishonest tactic of the false dichotomy, creationists claim as evidence for their chosen deity.

Not only is this approach scientifically bankrupt, it also conveniently spares them the bother of providing any evidence or a testable mechanism of their own. For a target audience conditioned to see science as an attempt to disprove their god, the logic goes: if science is wrong—or even just incomplete—then “God did it!” wins by default.

But that dreaded moment for creationists, when science finally closes the gap and, like every other gap in history, finds no need for gods or magic in the explanation, draws ever nearer. The latest discovery bringing us closer comes in the form of new research into the origin and function of membranes—an essential step on the path from chemistry to life.

This particular piece of gap-filling comes from a paper published in PLOS Biology, authored by a team led by Professor Thomas Richards, Professor of Evolutionary Genomics in the Department of Biology at the University of Oxford. The researchers demonstrate that early cell membranes could not only have formed through natural processes, but also had the crucial ability to control what passed through them.

In doing so, they explain what had been something of a mystery and a favourite claim of ID creationists - the chirality of 'living' molecules where all amino acids have the same chirality. Creationists claim this shows the hand of an intelligent designer. This work shows it has a natural explanation.

How Can We Tell The Bible Was Written By Ignorant People? - Compare It To Reality!

A Brightest Group Galaxy (BGG) seen as it was 3 billion years ago, located about 2.7 billion light-years away

How the Bible's authors saw the Universe.

Astronomers observe largest ever sample of galaxies up to over 12 billion light years away | Aalto University

More stunning images of deep space have been released, once again highlighting the vast and awe-inspiring reality of the universe—one that stands in stark contrast to the ancient cosmology described in the Book of Genesis.

According to that account, the universe was a small, flat Earth covered by a solid dome, fixed and immobile at the centre of creation. The sun, moon, and stars were imagined as small lights affixed to the underside of this dome. Surrounding it all, above and below, were the primordial waters—and somewhere within or beyond this structure lay a magical, supernatural realm inhabited by divine beings bearing a striking resemblance to capricious, tribal warlords, and winged men (Genesis 1:1–18).

And, according to the Bible narrative, it has only existed for 6-10,000 years!

Since the invention of the telescope, and as our instruments have grown ever more sophisticated, our understanding of the universe has revealed a reality far removed from the one imagined by the authors of Genesis. The cosmos is not only vastly older than they could have conceived, but also incomprehensibly immense. Earth itself is far larger and older than they believed, a spherical planet orbiting the Sun—which is just one of perhaps half a trillion stars in our own galaxy. And that galaxy is, in turn, just one among perhaps a trillion others. Altogether, this vast universe is nearly 14 billion years old.

The most recent images are from the James Webb Space Telescope, of a region of deep space, between twelve billion and one billion lightyears away, so showing how the universe has evolved since it was about one billion years old - younger than Earth is now.

Refuting Creationism - Scientists Confirm A Simple Model Of The Universe's First 380,000 Years

Credit: ACT Collaboration; ESA/Planck Collaboration.

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Analysing the cosmic microwave background in high definition has enabled researchers to confirm a simple model of the universe, ruling out many competing alternatives.

Credit: ACT Collaboration; ESA/Planck Collaboration.

Telescope observations reveal universe’s hours-old baby pictures, scientists say - News - Cardiff University

Creationists today face a distinct challenge compared to their predecessors from one or two centuries ago. They must continually devise ways to ignore or dismiss the relentless flow of scientific evidence disproving their beliefs, while simultaneously rationalizing the complete lack of evidence supporting claims of a young Earth, special creation through supernatural means, or the existence of a creator capable of producing a universe from nothing.

Individuals with a normal degree of intellectual honesty, when confronted with overwhelming evidence against their beliefs and a lack of supportive evidence, would naturally see this as grounds for doubt and reassessment. Creationists, however, appear undeterred, convinced that their personal beliefs override scientific evidence without the necessity for evidential justification.

Compounding their difficulties, scientists recently announced a significant advancement: they have mapped the cosmic microwave background radiation—the residual echo of the Big Bang—in unprecedented detail. Utilizing data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) collaboration, this new research reveals conditions in the universe as they existed only 380,000 years after the Big Bang, roughly 13.8 billion years ago.

On the scale of a human lifetime, this is the equivalent of a photograph of a now middle-aged person, taken one hour after they were born, and, in a confirmation of the principle of Occam's Razor, the simplest model is conformed as the correct model.

Refuting Creationism - Looking Into The Past - To 14 Billion Years Before 'Creation Week'

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F770W–F277W–F115W shown as an RGB false-colour mosaic
at redshift \(z=14.3{2}_{-0.20}^{+0.08}\)¹¹

Helton, J.M., Rieke, G.H., Alberts, S. et al. (2025)

James Webb Space Telescope reveals unexpected complex chemistry in primordial galaxy | University of Arizona News

It's one thing for creationists to dismiss evidence of life on Earth hundreds of millions, or even a billion or two years before the so-called 'Creation Week' by misrepresenting dating methods and making the absurd claim that the Universe is so finely tuned for life that altering just one parameter slightly would render life impossible, while also claiming that radioactive decay rates were much higher during 'Creation Week', making radiometric dating inaccurate by orders of magnitude.

However, it's quite another to argue that the speed of light was much slower in the past, which would mean that objects appearing to be billions of light-years away are actually much younger than we observe them today.

But a ludicrous and false argument which is not easy to spot by the scientifically illiterate fools that creationists target, was seen by creationists as any reason not to try to get away with it on a different audience.

So, if they don't simply ignore this discovery, it will be interesting to see which lies the creation cult uses to dismiss it. It is the discovery of a galaxy, designated JADES-GS-z14-0) from just 300 million years post Big Bang, discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

This discovery, along with the fact that it is chemically complex, challenges the standard model for galaxy formation as well as the synthesis of 'heavy' elements (i.e., heavier that hydrogen, helium and lithium) because JADES-GS-z14-0 shows evidence of substantial quantities of oxygen. The standard model explains that heavier elements are formed in the end-stages of the life of a sun when its hydrogen supply has all been used up and it collapses under its own gravity. This high gravity forces helium nuclei together to form the heavier elements. When the sun finally explodes in a supernova these elements are thrown into space supplying the next generation os stars with these higher elements.

Creationism Refuted - The Real Universe Shows Us The Bible's Authors Just Make Stuff Up -

Euclid image of a bright Einstein ring around galaxy NGC 6505

Close-up of the Einstein ring around galaxy NGC 6505

ESA - Euclid discovers a stunning Einstein ring

No matter how much you insist that words meant something different in those days, or the description is a poetic allegory or a metaphor the meaning of which is beyond us, the early verses of the Bible clearly and unambiguously describe a universe consisting of a small flat planet with a dome over it with the sun, moon and stars stuck to the underside of the dome.

This, of course, is a childlike description of what the authors saw as they looked up into the sky and saw what looked like a dome, and Earth was more or less flat, give or take a few low hills, so that is what, in their child-like naivety, they described:

How the Bible's authors saw the Universe.

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

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And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. 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 1.14-18

Now, as we learn more about the Universe as we develop increasingly sophisticated scientific instruments for examining it, we discover just how childishly naïve the Bible's authors were and so show to anyone interested in truth that the Bible could not possibly have been written or inspired by the creator god described in it, unless that god wanted to mislead us so that it would take humanity another three thousand years or more to discover its lies - and what would have been the point of that?

Mind you, the same creator god could have told us about germs, atoms or electricity or how to make a steam engine or a motor car, but either chose not to or didn't know about those things, because the people who invented it didn't know about those things either. What 'science' there is in the Bible is no better than the primitive understanding of Bronze Age pastoralists.

Abiogenesis News - Closing Another of Creationism's God-Shaped Gaps - Still No God Found

Formation of polyester protocells under early Earth-like conditions Polyester microdroplets, possible precursors to life, were formed from alpha-hydroxy acids (αHAs) in early Earth-like conditions even at low reaction volume, low reactant concentrations, and/or high NaCl or KCl concentrations.

Credit: Associate Professor Tony Z. Jia

How life’s building blocks took shape on early Earth: the limits of membraneless polyester protocell formation – ELSI｜EARTH-LIFE SCIENCE INSTITUTE

Creationism’ ever-shrinking little god that sits in the abiogenesis gap, just got smaller with the news that researchers led by PhD student Mahendran Sithamparam of the Space Science Center (ANGKASA), Institute of Climate Change, National University of Malaysia, working at the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) in the Institute of Science, Tokyo, Japan, have shown how primitive protocells could have formed under a wide range of realistic probiotic Earth conditions. The research team included scientists from Taiwan and China.

The research showed that membraneless protocells could have formed by polymerization of alpha-hydroxy acids (αHAs) to form polyester microdroplets, not to be confused with the modern plastic polyester. These polymers were polymers of esters - simple organic compounds which are chemically similar to the monomers that make modern polyester fibres.

Refuting Creationism - First Steps to Abiogenesis

Diagram of the atmospheric evolution of Earth's ancient atmosphere estimated by this study

© Yoshida et al.

Research News - How Life Began on Earth: Modeling Earth's Ancient Atmosphere | Tohoku University Global Site

The fact that living organisms arose on Earth from inorganic sources rather than being made of nothing by magic, is an indisputable fact because there are living organisms on Earth and the chemicals they are composed of all exist on the planet in inorganic minerals and gases. 'Life' contains nothing that 'non-life' doesn't contain.

This much we know, but what we don't yet know and can probably never know with certainty, is precisely how and where that happen. In fact, we don't even know whether it did all start in the same place at the same time because the reason there are two different prokaryote cells - bacteria and archaea - could be because life arose on Earth not once but twice, by two different processes in two different places at two different times.

What we have though is lots of working hypotheses in the process of being validated.

What role would Earth's atmosphere have played in abiogenesis? Earth's early atmosphere was crucial in creating the right conditions for abiogenesis—the process by which life originated from non-living matter. While the exact composition of Earth’s primordial atmosphere is still debated, its unique conditions likely contributed in several essential ways:

1. Provision of Basic Building Blocks
   
   • Earth’s early atmosphere likely contained simple molecules like methane (CH₄), ammonia (NH₃), hydrogen (H₂), carbon dioxide (CO₂), nitrogen (N₂), and water vapor (H₂O). These molecules are rich in carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen—elements that are vital for organic compounds and, ultimately, for life.
   • When exposed to energy sources like ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the Sun or electrical discharges from lightning, these molecules could recombine into more complex organic molecules, such as amino acids and nucleotides, which are the building blocks of proteins and nucleic acids, respectively.
   
   
2. Facilitation of Prebiotic Chemistry
   
   • Experiments like the famous Miller-Urey experiment in 1953 showed that simple gases (methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water vapor) in an atmosphere subjected to electrical sparks could produce amino acids. This suggests that Earth’s early atmosphere could have been instrumental in initiating chemical reactions that synthesized complex organic molecules.
   • Without a protective ozone layer, the early atmosphere allowed substantial UV radiation to penetrate the Earth’s surface, providing the energy necessary to drive these prebiotic reactions.
   
   
3. Supporting a Reducing Environment
   
   • The presence of reducing gases (such as methane and ammonia) would favor the formation of organic molecules because such conditions prevent the oxidation (and hence destruction) of organic compounds. Oxygen is highly reactive and can break down organic molecules, so the absence of free oxygen in the early atmosphere was likely a key factor that allowed these molecules to accumulate and react.
   • This reducing environment might have helped organic compounds to survive long enough to form stable, self-replicating systems.
   
   
4. Encouraging Geochemical Interactions
   
   • The interaction between the early atmosphere and the oceans, along with geothermal activity like volcanic eruptions and hydrothermal vents, provided a diverse range of chemical environments. In particular, hydrothermal vents may have supplied essential minerals and additional energy sources, further driving complex chemical reactions that are believed to be important in the formation of life.
   • The cycling of materials between the atmosphere and oceans would have contributed to creating localized "hotspots" for prebiotic reactions.
   
   
5. Protection and Concentration Mechanisms
   
   • The atmosphere also played a protective role by preventing the immediate dissipation of important compounds into space. It allowed the concentration of molecules and gases at Earth’s surface, increasing the chances of interactions among the essential precursors to life.
   • Early atmospheres may have helped regulate surface temperatures, preventing extreme fluctuations that would have been hostile to complex chemistry.
   
   
6. Encouraging Self-Organization and Membrane Formation
   
   • Interactions in the early atmosphere could have contributed to the formation of lipid molecules that could aggregate to form primitive cell-like structures or vesicles. These structures would eventually help in containing and protecting reactions necessary for early metabolic pathways.
   • These early "proto-cells" or vesicles would have been necessary to create a boundary for molecular interactions, which is a critical step toward the organization needed for cellular life.

In summary, Earth’s early atmosphere provided a chemically conducive, energetically rich environment that fostered the synthesis and concentration of organic molecules necessary for abiogenesis. This atmosphere also shielded these nascent molecules, allowing them to organize and evolve toward increasingly complex systems, eventually leading to the first living organisms.

One of which is the precise details of the atmosphere on the Early Earth, which is important because it would have had a major impact on the rest of the environment in which life arose. To gain a better understanding of that, a team from Tohoku University, Tokyo University and Hokkaido University, Japan, led by Tatsuya Yoshida have succeeded in modelling that atmosphere, as explained in a Tohoku University press release and published in the journal Astrobiology:

How Life Began on Earth: Modeling Earth's Ancient Atmosphere

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The key to unlocking the secrets of distant planets starts right here on Earth. Researchers at Tohoku University, the University of Tokyo, and Hokkaido University have developed a model considering various atmospheric chemical reactions to estimate how the atmosphere - and the first signs of life - evolved on Earth.

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Ancient Earth was nothing like our current home. It was a much more hostile place; rich in metallic iron with an atmosphere containing hydrogen and methane.

Shungo Koyama, co-author
Graduate School of Science
Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan.

These molecules contain an important clue to how life was initially formed. When exposed to solar ultraviolet (UV) radiation, they undergo a chemical reaction that produces organics (also known as the "building blocks of life"). Part of these organics were precursors to essential biomolecules, such as amino acids and nucleic acids. However, understanding the role of UV radiation is difficult. Firstly, this type of atmosphere is unstable and likely underwent rapid changes due to atmospheric chemical reactions. Secondly, when UV radiation efficiently breaks down water vapour in the atmosphere and forms oxidative molecules, the precise branching ratio and timescale has not been determined. In order to address these issues, a 1D photochemical model was created to make accurate predictions about what the atmosphere was like on Earth long ago.

The calculation reveals that most hydrogen was lost to space and that hydrocarbons like acetylene (produced from methane) shielded UV radiation. This inhibition of UV radiation significantly reduced the breakdown of water vapour and subsequent oxidation of methane, thus enhancing the production of organics. If the initial amount of methane was equivalent to that of the amount of carbon found on the present-day Earth's surface, organic layers several hundred metres thick could have formed.

There may have been an accumulation of organics that created what was like an enriched soup of important building blocks. That could have been the source from which living things first emerged on Earth.

Tatsuya Yoshida, lead author
Graduate School of Science
Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan.

The model suggests that the atmosphere on ancient Earth was strikingly similar to what we see on current day neighbouring planets: Venus and Mars. However, despite their proximity, Earth evolved into a completely different environment. Researchers are trying to understand what makes Earth so special. As such, this model allows us to deepen our understanding of whether atmospheric evolution and the origin of life on Earth are unique or share common patterns with other planetary systems.

These findings were published in the journal Astrobiology on October 22, 2024.

Publication Details:

Tatsuya Yoshida, Shungo Koyama, Yuki Nakamura, Naoki Terada and Kiyoshi Kuramoto
Self-Shielding Enhanced Organics Synthesis in an Early Reduced Earth's Atmosphere Astrobiology DOI: 10.1089/ast.2024.0048

Abstract
Earth is expected to have acquired a reduced proto-atmosphere enriched in H₂ and CH₄ through the accretion of building blocks that contain metallic Fe and/or the gravitational trapping of surrounding nebula gas. Such an early, wet, reduced atmosphere that covers a proto-ocean would then ultimately evolve toward oxidized chemical compositions through photochemical processes that involve reactions with H₂O-derived oxidant radicals and the selective escape of hydrogen to space. During this time, atmospheric CH₄ could be photochemically reprocessed to generate not only C-bearing oxides but also organics. However, the branching ratio between organic matter formation and oxidation remains unknown despite its significance on the abiotic chemical evolution of early Earth. Here, we show via numerical analyses that UV absorptions by gaseous hydrocarbons such as C₂H₂ and C₃H₄ significantly suppress H₂O photolysis and subsequent CH₄ oxidation during the photochemical evolution of a wet proto-atmosphere enriched in H₂ and CH₄. As a result, nearly half of the initial CH₄ converted to heavier organics along with the deposition of prebiotically essential molecules such as HCN and H₂CO on the surface of a primordial ocean for a geological timescale order of 10–100 Myr. Our results suggest that the accumulation of organics and prebiotically important molecules in the proto-ocean could produce a soup enriched in various organics, which might have eventually led to the emergence of living organisms.

Yoshida, Tatsuya; Koyama, Shungo; Nakamura, Yuki; Terada, Naoki; Kuramoto, Kiyoshi
Self-Shielding Enhanced Organics Synthesis in an Early Reduced Earth’s Atmosphere Journal of Astrobiology (2024) DOI: 10.1089/ast.2024.0048

© 2024 Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.
Reprinted under the terms of s60 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

So, by the action if UV radiation from the sun on the inorganic molecules in Earth's early atmosphere for a period of some 10-100 million years, the oceans could have accumulated the basic building blocks for organic organisms to get started, and all th result of chemistry and physics with no magic gods involved at any point.

And, as usual with scientific discoveries, the truth is shown to have little resemblance to the origin myths the parochial Bronze Age pastoralists made up to fill the yawning chasm in their knowledge and understanding of the world around them, with their belief that Earth had only existed for a few thousand years, so were blissfully ignorant of the 99.9975% of its history that occurred before then.

Refuting Creationism - Producing 'Life' in The Laboratory

Biological systems serve as examples for the simplified artificial systems used to create synthetic cells.

Beeld Willy Arisky via Pexels

Creating a simplified form of life | News articles | University of Groningen

One of the more amusing questions creationists keep asking is how did 'life' come from non-life? Or more dogmatically, they claim 'life' from 'non-life' is impossible.

They then scuttle off to hide when asked to define, 'life' and state how it can be measured to assess whether something like a rock, a bacterium or a bowl of chicken soup has any life in it. It causes the same tactic of avoidance when asked to explain how dead food becomes living tissues during the process of digestion and metabolism, if that's impossible?

The problem is creationists have been brainwashed into thinking that 'life' is something magical; some special force that turns inorganic chemicals into 'living' structures. In fact, 'life' is a process involving atoms and molecules doing their chemistry according to the fundamental laws of chemistry and physics. And the function of the process is to manage entropy - the tendency of a system to become disordered - using the energy in nutrients.

And rather than 'life' being something magical which is magically inserted into a developing embryo at some unspecified day of its development from a zygote to a free-living organism, it's actually a continuation of the life processes of the egg and sperm that united to form the zygote. There never is a 'new life', just a continuation of the parent's entropy management process.

Silly Bible - More Evidence Of The Laughable Naivety Of The Bible's Primitive Authors

This image of the galaxy REBELS-25 was taken by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international facility co-owned by ESO. It shows how cold gas is distributed in the galaxy, and exhibits hints of an elongated bar structure at its centre.

Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/
L. Rowland et al.

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This image shows the motion of cold gas in the REBELS-25 galaxy as seen with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). Blue colouring indicates movement towards Earth and red indicates movement away from Earth, with a darker shade representing faster movement. In this case, the red-blue divide of the image shows clearly that the object is rotating, making REBELS-25 the most distant rotating disc galaxy ever discovered.

Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/L. Rowland et al.

Space oddity: Most distant rotating disc galaxy found | ESO

It looks like it's the turn of cosmologists to casually refute creationism by revealing the facts - normally the privilege of biologists and archaeologists who do so with almost every science paper they publish. But of course it would also be difficult for cosmologists to reveal anything about the cosmos that doesn't make those who described it as consisting of a small flat planet with a dome over it, look like anything other than ignorant simpletons who can't be taken seriously.

But of course, they were probably expert at being cattle-herding pastoralists, quite familiar with their few square miles of the Bronze Age Middle East; they just didn't know anything about science or history, so made up tales to fill the gap in their understanding.

Here for example is another cosmology paper showing just how old, immense and awe-inspiring the real Universe is, by reporting the discovery of a stable, rotating disc galaxy, rather like our own Milky Way galaxy, but from just 700 million years after the Big Bang. As such, REBEL-25 is the most distant rotating disc galaxy yet discovered. The discovery was made by an international team of astronomers led by cosmologists from Leiden University, The Netherlands, using data from the European Southern Observatory, Chile.

They have just published their findings in Monthly Notices of the Astronomical Society and announced it in a press release from the European Southern Observatory:

Silly Bible - How The Description of the Universe in Genesis was Laugably Naïve

This artist’s impression of a planet-forming disk surrounding a young star shows a swirling "pancake" of hot gas and dust from which planets form. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, researchers obtained detailed images showing the layered, conical structure of disk winds – streams of gas blowing out into space.

National Astronomical Observatory of Japan

Winds of change: James Webb Space Telescope reveals elusive details in young star systems | University of Arizona News

Source

I keep returning to the contrast between how the universe is described in Genesis and how it really is as described by science because it illustrates better than almost anything else in the Bible, the naivety and sheer ignorance of the authors. A creator god who wanted us to understand the magnificence of its creation would surely have done a better job of explaining it than to have described it as a small flat planet with a dome over it to keep the water above the sky out, with the sun, moon and stars as lights stuck to the dome.

This description is so far removed from reality that none of it can plausibly be described as allegorical or metaphorical, or even a simplistic description intended to inform simple, uneducated people incapable of understanding anything more complicated. It is simply and laughably wrong; but exactly what parochial pastoralists might think from their limited perspective.

And these same parochial, naïve people came up with the notion of gods to explain the world around them whose working were so mysterious as to look like magic - and magic requires a magician. Where better to locate that magician? Above the dome over the Earth, obviously.

And so religions were built on the best guesses of people who knew no better; people whose best guess was that the Universe consisted of a small flat planet with a dome over it to keep the water above the sky out; people who saw no contradiction in describing the creation of light before the creation of the source of light, or the creation of green plants before the sun!

But how could they, with no technology more complicated than a potter's wheel and the visual acuity of the human eye, possibly know what was really going on as they looked up at the 'little lights stuck to the dome'? How could they possibly have been aware that this Earth is in orbit round the sun, that the sun is but one of half a trillion suns in one of half a trillion galaxies, all existing in a vast, expanding universe in which more than 3000 new stars are being born every second, most of them with an accretion disc from which planets will eventually coalesce?

Had they done so, and had they told us about it, then, and only then, would the notion that a creator god was inspiring them to explain the magnificence of its creation be even a plausible explanation for how they knew that stuff. As it is, all we are left to explain is why they were so ignorant of reality that they needed to invent stories to fill the gaps in their understanding, and of course, the gods they created exactly fitted those gaps, just as todays gods are precisely tailored to fill the gaps in the understanding of ignorant people.

So, how do we know they got things so badly wrong?

Refuting Creationism - If We Discovered The Bible Today We Could Date It's Authorship By The Scientific Illiteracy In It

An artist’s rendering of what’s called an active galactic nucleus at the center of NGC 4151. The galaxy’s black hole sits at the center, immediately surrounded by an accretion disk shown in blue.

Image credit: JAXA

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XRISM has shown that the accretion disk surrounding a black hole in an active galactic nucleus is warped, confirming earlier hypotheses reflected in this artist’s conception from 2015.

Image credit: International Center for Radio Astronomy Research

First data from XRISM space mission provides new perspective on supermassive black holes | University of Michigan News

I've often remarked on how the stark difference between their laughably childish description of the Universe in the Bible and the reality science is revealing, illustrates the scientific illiteracy of its parochial authors, and so gives the lie to claims that it was written or inspired by a creator god.

They were writing with the knowledge and understanding of Bronze Age pastoralists - which is hardly surprising, since that's exactly what they were. They only knew of the small area around the Canaanite Hills, so nothing that was more than a day or two's walk for them was included, which is why it seemed to them like a small flat planet with a dome over it, and fixed to the dome were the sun, moon and stars; stars being mere small points of light and only those that were visible to the naked eye.

So, just imagine what they would have made of the information if some time traveler from today went back and told them about black holes and the centre of a galaxy 120,000 light years across and containing a billion suns with planets orbiting them! How could they have comprehended the idea of mass bending space-time or something smaller than a grain of sand weighing the same as a million suns?

What would they have made of distances so great that it takes light 120,000 years to travel its length? To them, light was instantaneous; it mattered not whether it came from the sun or the campfire, and the sun was merely a lamp hanging from the dome over the earth. What on Earth was this nonsense about the sun being really big and Earth going round it, things weighing millions of times more than the sun or light taking more time than they thought there had been to travel from one place to another?

They knew nothing of laws of motion and how forces make things move, so they had no concept of gravity. They walked on Earth because they didn't float above it, and they couldn't fly. Only gods and supernatural beings could travel up and down at will. So, what on Earth would mass causing gravity and gravity being an attractive force mean?

Black holes would have been simply beyond their comprehension and outside their experience of the world.

So, of course, they could have included nothing of any of this stuff in the stories they invented to explain things they didn't understand. Had they done so, we might have had some cause to think something must have told them. As it was, they wrote tales that illustrated their scientific illiteracy because they had no option but to do so. They were scientifically illiterate by today's standards.

Refuting Creationism - The Fossil Record Shows Climate Change - 59-51 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Microscopic fossil foraminifera shells

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What microscopic fossilized shells tell us about ancient climate change – @theU

The bad news for creationists continues unabated as science discovers more facts, as we would expect of a counter-factual superstition.

This time it's news that new research led by University of Utah geoscientists has shown how there is a record of climate change in the fossil record in the form of traces of boron isotopes in the fossilised shells of microscopic foraminifera.

The record, 59-51 million years before creationists think Earth was created, is just another record of events in that 99.9975% of Earth's history that creationists try to shoe-horn into 10,000 to make it seem like their childish creation myth has some merit.

The record of change itself depends not on radioactive decay rates but on the ratios of stable isotopes of boron that get incorporated in the shells of microscopic foraminifera during their growth and then remain locked up as their bodies fossilise in marine sediment.

Dating of this marine sediment is done using several strands of evidence, one of which is U-Pb dating of zircon crystals, and all of which converge on the same dates (see the AI panel on the right).
What changes is the ratio of ¹¹B (δ¹¹B) incorporated in the shells of foraminifera during their lifetime, and this is related to the pH of the seawater. pH of sea water is in turn determined by the level of atmospheric CO₂ - the higher the level of CO₂, the lower the pH due to dissolved carbonic acid H₃CO₄.

Creationism Refuted - The 'Fine-Tuned Universe' Fallacy - Or How Creationists Have Been Fooled

Horsehead nebula

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The 'Pillars of Creation'.

The 'fine-tuned Universe' argument appeals particularly to those who understand neither physics nor probability and for whom the argument from ignorant incredulity and the false dichotomy fallacies are compelling, partly due to parochial ignorance in assuming that the locally popular god is the only entity capable of creating a universe, and that nothing else, supernatural or otherwise is capable of it.

The most compelling argument against it is the anthropic principle. This means the fact that we are discussing it means we must exist in a universe in which intelligent life is certain.

There is also the subtle blasphemy that most creationists seem not to have thought of in that the argument assumes their putative creator god could only create life within fine-tuned' parameters, so is itself constrained by the same parameters. This denies it's omnipotence and implies the existence of a higher power which set these constraints.

Incidentally, although it's not strictly speaking an argument against the 'fine-tuned' fallacy, note that one of the fundamental forces is the weak nuclear force which governs the rate of radioactive decay. Creationists try to dismiss geochronology based on radiometric dating, claiming, with no evidence whatsoever, that the decay rates used to be much faster, so millions of years can look like 10,000 years or less. This would mean the weak nuclear force was even weaker, by several orders of magnitude.

Probability of dealing a specific bridge hand from a 52-card pack:
\[ P = \frac{1}{\binom{52}{13} \times \binom{39}{13} \times \binom{26}{13} \times \binom{13}{13}} \]
Which can be simplified to:

\( P = \frac{1}{\frac{52!}{(13!)^4}} \) or \( P \approx 1.86 \times 10^{-29} \)

Creationists will look at a tiny probability like this and conclude that dealing four bridge hands from a 52-card pack is so improbable as to be impossible, therefore a god must have dealt the cards, and then wave that 'fact' as 'proof' of the locally popular god.

If that were true, as the following dialogue shows, the formation of anything other than hydrogen would not be possible, so stars (which depend on the nuclear fusion of hydrogen to form helium to prevent them collapsing under their own gravity) could not exist, nor could the heavier elements of which living organisms are composed.

Creationists are, probably because they lack the understanding to realise it, and their 'scientists' aren't going to tell them, arguing two mutually contradictory claims simultaneously. They can't both be right, but they can both be wrong.

Of course, given their willingness to try to mislead gullible people into joining their cult, we can never be sure that creationists who try to get away with this fallacy aren't aware they are using a false argument in order to deceive.

The following is a dialogue with ChatGPT4.0, which not only debunks the argument, but shows how it's actually a blasphemy because it argues more strongly against a supreme, omnipotent creator god than for one: