Refution 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.

Refuting Creationism - Eating Carrion Made Us Human

Factors influencing scavenging behavior in humans.

Carmen Cañizares (@canitanatura).

Eating carrion made us human | CENIEH

One of the most telling weaknesses of creationism is how heavily it depends on piling assumption upon assumption to sustain its narrative. As Stephen Hawking observed in The Grand Design, the more assumptions a theory requires, the less likely it is to be true. This is simply the reverse of Occam's razor, the principle that the simplest explanation consistent with the evidence is usually the most plausible.

Creationists take the simplistic story of human origins from the Bible and build layers of speculation upon it — not derived from scripture or evidence, but from the circular reasoning of “this must have been true, or my beliefs are wrong.”

A classic example is their claim that there could have been no death before Eve’s supposed sin, because death is ‘evil’ and evil only entered the world after the Fall. From this, they conclude that Adam and Eve — and indeed all animals — must have been vegetarian. To prop up this contrivance, they add yet another assumption: that plants aren’t really ‘alive’ in the same way as animals, so eating them doesn’t count as causing death.

This is a textbook case of a weak theory being shored up by multiplying entities and assumptions — the very opposite of sound scientific reasoning. It also collapses under biological scrutiny. There is no evidence in the Bible to support it, and human anatomy and physiology clearly reveal that we are omnivores with a long evolutionary history of meat consumption.

And now, a team of evolutionary anthropologists led by Ana Mateos of Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH) has published a research paper in the Journal of Human Evolution, in which they argue that before early hominins developed the technology to hunt large game for themselves, they were probably dependent on scavenging carrion—often from the kills of apex predators.

An important advantage of scavenging is that it provides a reliable source of high-protein food with relatively low energy expenditure. Carcasses can also sustain a population through periods of drought, when prey is scarce and some animals die from natural causes. Early hominins could have used sticks and stones to drive off predators, while their highly acidic stomachs minimised the risk of disease from decaying meat. Later, cooking provided additional protection against pathogens.

After what was likely a brief evolutionary phase as scavengers, humans developed the tools and cooperative strategies to become apex predators themselves. This reliance on carrion may even have been one of the critical factors that set our lineage on a different path from the other African apes, driving both physical and physiological changes.

Refuting Evolution - Allopatric Evolution, Just as The Theory of Evolution Predicts

(a) Chamaecyparis obtusa in Japan

(b) C. obtusa var. formosana in Taiwan

Map of the South China Sea showing the Ryuku Arc between Taiwan and Kyushu

Google Maps

Natural Japanese and Taiwanese Hinoki Cypresses Genetically Differentiated 1 Million Years Ago | Research News - University of Tsukuba

Japanese plant geneticists, led by scientists from University of Tsukuba, have shown that the Japanese and Taiwanese Hinoki cypresses began to diverge around one million years ago, following the destruction of a land bridge that once connected Taiwan to the Japanese archipelago.

This is a textbook example of allopatric speciation, in which an isolated population diverges from its parent population through a combination of founder effects, genetic drift, and natural selection in response to different environmental pressures.

The now-vanished land bridge once linked Taiwan to the southern Japanese island of Kyushu. Its remnants form the Ryukyu Arc — a chain of small islands marking the south-eastern boundary of the South China Sea.

Faced with such clear evidence of speciation, creationists typically resort to a familiar tactic: redefining evolution into a straw man. They insist that “evolution” means one species turning in a single event into something utterly unrelated — for instance, that these cypresses should transform into daisies, cabbages, mammals, or birds. If such an absurd event ever occurred, it would in fact falsify evolutionary theory and throw the entire fields of biology and taxonomy into chaos. This is the standard creationist tactic on social media: misrepresent science, then demand that science defend the misrepresentation, and claim victory when it doesn’t.

The reality remains, however, that the divergence of these related species of cypress — and the fact that this divergence can be correlated precisely with geological change — stands as powerful evidence for Darwinian evolution. Charles Darwin knew nothing of genes, alleles, or genetic drift, yet his description of descent with modification through inherited traits is elegantly confirmed here by modern genetics and biogeography. The genus Chamaecyparis — commonly known as the false cypresses — is an evolutionarily interesting group of conifers in the cypress family Cupressaceae. Their distribution and divergence provide a good illustration of how geological change, climate oscillations, and geographic isolation have shaped the evolution of temperate conifers.

Unintelligent Design - How Wheat Could Have Been Designed To Give Tripple The Yield

A spike of wheat showing three grains clustered within each spikelet, where there is ordinarily just one.

Credit: Vijay Tiwary,
University of Maryland

Wheat monoculture - but it could have been better designed!

Scientists Discover a Gene that Could Triple Wheat Production | College of Agriculture & Natural Resources at UMD

News that a single mutant gene could triple wheat yields raises some uncomfortable questions for Bible-literalist creationists, and indeed for anyone who believes their god created the Earth and all life on it exclusively for humans — its supposed favoured species, for whom “all of creation” was made.

This belief has profoundly shaped Western attitudes towards the planet and its resources. One consequence of this selfish worldview has been the destruction of vast areas of the Earth, its ecosystems, and the countless species that depend on them. In the relentless search for mineral wealth, cropland, and grazing land, humans have transformed immense regions into effective monocultures which, to anything not adapted to those particular crops, might as well be deserts. Moreover, the same belief — coupled with the idea that brown and black people were inferior to whites and therefore “created” to serve Europeans — helped justify imperialism and the transatlantic slave trade.

One question that creationists, in my experience, consistently shy away from is this: if an omniscient god truly created our domestic animals for our use, why have we almost always had to modify them through selective breeding to make them more useful? It’s as though this god didn’t actually know what we would need or how we would use these animals. Which leads to the obvious follow-up question: why didn’t this supposedly omniscient being create ideal domestic plants and crops in the first place?

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.

How Science Works - Revising Our Knowledge Of Plant Dispersal

Plants colonising volcanic tepha on Surtsey

Credit: Pawel Wasowicz (CC BY)

Plants colonising lava field on Surtsey island.

Credit: Pawel Wasowicz (CC BY)

New study overturns long-held assumptions about how plants spread to islands | EurekAlert!

Plants that successfully leave more offspring are those with traits that allow their seeds to spread widely. That usually involves two key factors: tolerance or adaptability to new environments, and an effective way of reaching them. Over time, evolution has produced a variety of dispersal strategies—seeds can float on the wind, stick to animals, or pass through birds and end up deposited somewhere new.

Crossing the sea, though, adds another layer of difficulty. Seeds must survive what amounts to a small ocean voyage. For a long time, scientists assumed birds were the main way plants made these crossings. The idea was straightforward: birds eat fruit, fly to new islands, and excrete the seeds.

But new evidence has challenged that view. A recent open-access paper in Ecology Letters examines how plants have colonised Surtsey, the volcanic island that emerged off Iceland in 1963. This unique setting has allowed researchers to watch ecological colonisation unfold in real time.

Their findings were unexpected: most of the 78 vascular plant species that established themselves on the island weren’t fruit-bearing plants spread by birds, but grasses. While birds like geese and gulls did contribute to dispersal, most of the colonising species lacked the traits typically linked with long-distance dispersal.

Bible Refuted - A Possible Explanation for the Origin of the Implausible Exodus Myth

A view across the Amarna excavations at the South Tombs Cemetery in 2010, facing southeast.

Gwil Owen and the Amarna Project

This article is best read on a laptop, desktop, or tablet

Fig. 1. Map of the Late Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean (modified from Cohen and Westbrook 2000, xii).

Gretchen R. Dabbs & Anna Stevens (2025)

Mortality Crisis at Akhetaten? Amarna and the Bioarchaeology of the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean Epidemic | American Journal of Archaeology: Vol 129, No 4

This paper in American Journal of Archaeology is tentative support for a theory that I find fascinating because it offers an explanation for the implausible Exodus myth in the Bible. The theory is that the myth is an exaggerated retelling of the expulsion or voluntary exile, of the Ahtenist sect from Egypt, complete with a 'royal' leader in the form of 'Moses' (an Egyptian name) - a retelling that grew over time and incorporated multiple miracles and the origins of the 'Law', with each telling until a small band became a mass exodus from which an entire new nation was built.

The exodus of Hebrew slaves from Egypt has too many inconsistencies for it to be real history - for example, the claim is that "600,000 men on foot" (Exodus 12:37), complete with their women, children and livestock, fled from Egypt into Sinai. That would mean some 2-3 million people - more than the then entire population of Egypt, plus livestock - far more than could be supplied with food and water in Sinai. There is also no archaeological evidence of such a large population ever living in Sinai for 40 years. It is inconceivable that they would leave no trace, not even the graves of those who died.

Then there is the story of 600, (horsedrawn) chariots (Exodus 14:7) pursuing them into the Red Sea, right after all the livestock, including, explicitly, all the horses, were killed in one of the plagues (Exodus 9:3-6).

Then there is the small geo-political problem that the story of crossing the Red Sea into Sinai 'from Egypt; ignores the fact that at that time Egypt not only controlled Sinai but its political and military control extended into Canaan, so the Israelites were leaving Egypt into... Egypt.

It is probably significant that during the entire telling of the tale of the Israelite's supposed captivity in Egypt, the pharaoh is invariably named 'Pharoh' (A Hebrew word), but never by his real name - Imhotep II, Rameses, Akhenaten, etc. It's as though the story-teller didn't know their names. This would be the equivalent of telling the Medieval history of England and only ever referring to 'King', never John, Henry IV, Edward II, etc.

Creationism Refuted - How Science Works - A Fossil Fly That Challenged Evolution.

A 150-million-year-old fossil with a singular adaptation may unlock the origin of quironomids | Estación Biológica de Doñana - CSIC

In a striking example of how science, in contrast to creationism, starts from the evidence and builds understanding accordingly, a newly discovered fossil fly has led scientists to revise their view on a seemingly minor detail of insect evolution.

Creationism, by contrast, starts with the conclusion and either distorts the evidence or ignores it altogether when, as is usually the case, it contradicts what they believe. To a creationist, the belief is sacred, so facts must comply—or be disregarded.

In my last blog post, I explained how psychologists view this behaviour as a perceived test of strength: creationists see challenges to their beliefs as threats that would make them appear weak if they accepted and adapted to the evidence. They respond by setting their faces like flint against any contradiction.

Science, by contrast, sees a refusal to change one’s mind when the evidence demands it as a mark of intellectual dishonesty. A willingness to revise one’s views shows a desirable strength of character — the hallmark of a good scientist. To a scientist, facts are sacred; opinions must flow from them. In any scientific debate, facts are neutral.

The discovery in question involves a Jurassic fossil midge from Australia — Telmatomyia talbragarica, the oldest known member of the Chironomidae (non-biting midge) family in the Southern Hemisphere. The fossil shows a mechanism for attaching to rocks using suction pads on its feet. This trait was previously thought to have evolved in marine species, but this insect lived in freshwater. That detail suggests the family did not originate in Siberia, as once believed, but in Gondwana before it broke apart.

Not the most dramatic scientific breakthrough, perhaps, but this is precisely how science advances — especially evolutionary biology: one careful step at a time, with constant re-examination and revision as new evidence emerges. It’s like working on a million-piece jigsaw puzzle without a picture on the box.

Creationism Refuted - Why Creationists Cling To Easily Disproven Claims - It's All About Weak People Needing To Appear Strong

Winning with misinformation: New research identifies link between endorsing easily disproven claims and prioritizing symbolic strength

Anyone who values facts as the foundation of rational opinion will quickly grow frustrated trying to reason creationists out of their infantile beliefs with information. The problem, according to a paper recently published in the Journal of Social Psychology, is that creationists—like antivaxxers, conspiracy theorists, climate change deniers, flat-earthers, and those who believe Donald Trump will “make America great again”—see it as a weakness to ‘give in’ to reason. For them, it is a sign of strength to resist facts and cling defiantly to beliefs that can be easily disproven.

This reflex stems from an underlying sense of vulnerability in the face of complex information and a perception that science is attempting to manipulate them into conforming to mainstream knowledge. For such individuals, the priority is not to hold factually correct, verifiable beliefs—anyone can do that—but to assert symbolic strength by being contrary.

And what better evidence of that superior strength is there than persuading someone else to agree with you - by any means available?

Unfortunately, the full journal article is behind a paywall. However, two of the four authors have also written an accessible article in The Conversation, which is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Refuting Creationism - Tracking Dinosaurs In Oxfordshire - 166 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Aerial view of the trackway at Dewars Farm Quarry, Oxfordshire

Credit: Richard Butler,
University of Birmingham.

Oxford researchers return to the Jurassic Highway | University of Oxford

Members of the 2025 excavation team

One of the sauropod trackways.

Photos: Emma Nicholls.

Oxfordshire, where I was born and spent the first twenty-odd years of my life, is steeped in fossil history. Notably, the lower jaw of the very first named dinosaur — Megalosaurus bucklandii — was discovered in Stonesfield, in the quaintly named valley, Bag's Bottom, the centre of the former Stonesfield slate industry, just about a mile and a half from my childhood home in the hamlet of Fawler.

About 166 million years ago, in the Middle Jurassic, much of the region now known as Oxfordshire lay under a warm, shallow sea. A sandbar separated it from the open ocean, forming a tranquil lagoon. Sediment slowly accumulated, forming limestone that preserved innumerable small molluscs. Even today, you can spot their fossilised shells in the drystone walls built from that same limestone — a subtle but constant reminder of deep time.

When I was a teenager, I would take the grandsons of the renowned palaeoanthropologist and former President of the Royal Society, Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark, on fossil-hunting excursions. One disused quarry, rich in fossil mussels, coiled snails and bivalves, became a familiar haunt. But nothing we ever uncovered then compares to what has just been unearthed at Dewars Farm Quarry, between Middleton Stoney and Ardley. Dubbed the “Oxfordshire Dinosaur Highway,” this newly announced discovery appears to be the longest dinosaur trackway known in Europe, at 220 metres.

The work was conducted by a team of palaeontologists co-led by Oxford University Museum of Natural History (OUMNH) and The University of Birmingham. Unsurprisingly, this find challenges certain creationist narratives and casually refuted the Bible creation myth. The announcement was recently made in an Oxford University news release.

Creationism Refuted - Hippos Lived In The Rhine - More Than 21,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Left mandible fragment of a female hippopotamus from Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen Mannheim.
Between 46,000 and 48,300 years old.

Photo: Rebecca Kind

Hippos lived at the Upper Rhine in the same time frame as mammoths. In the Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen a hippo reconstruction meets a mammoth skeleton.

Photo: Rebecca Kind

Hippos lived in Europe during the last ice age | University of Potsdam!

News that an international research team led by University of Potsdam and Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen Mannheim, working with Curt-Engelhorn-Zentrum Archäometrie, has produced evidence that hippos lived along the Rhine in what is now Germany some 21,000 years before creationists believe Earth was created out of nothing, will probably come as no surprise to creationists.

They are well-practised at living in a world where verifiable evidence repeatedly refutes their beliefs. Over time, they have developed all manner of convoluted mental gymnastics to cope with the resultant cognitive dissonance—secure in the arrogant conviction that their beliefs trump evidence simply because they label them “faith”.

Normal people, of course, tend to have the humility to accept that evidence is the only valid basis for an informed opinion, and that it must therefore take precedence over myths and fairy tales told to them by parents and authority figures with vested cultural interests. The real test of whether a belief is right or wrong is how well it is supported by evidence—not how cleverly the evidence can be ignored.

This discovery extends our knowledge of the extinction timeline of European hippos, previously believed to have disappeared around 115,000 years ago. The new evidence pushes that date forward dramatically, showing that they survived until about 31,000 years ago, at least in that part of Europe. It also clarifies how these European populations were related to the African hippos.

That timeline is not only inconvenient for creationists; it also highlights the parochial nature of the Bible’s authors, who clearly had no knowledge of flora and fauna beyond their narrow Middle Eastern world. Notably, the Bible makes no mention of the African megafauna—hippos, elephants, giraffes, or ostriches, for example. In fact, the latter would have posed a serious problem for their primitive taxonomy, which classified bats as “birds” simply because they could fly. One can only wonder where they might have placed the flightless ostrich.

Creationism Refuted - Time For A Bible Re-Write

A Palaeolithic handaxe with a broken distal end, discovered during the Ayvalık survey

Early humans may have walked from Türkiye to mainland Europe, new groundbreaking research suggests - Taylor & Francis Newsroom

A phrase much loved by journalists (and creationists) is “the history/science books will need to be re-written”. It’s a convenient bit of lazy journalistic rhetoric — but in this case, the book that actually needs to be re-written is the Bible.

The discovery in question concerns the migration of early Homo sapiens, who may have spread from the Levant across Asia Minor (modern-day Türkiye) and then into Greece via a northern Aegean land bridge, exposed when sea levels were much lower during the last Ice Age — between 115,000 and 11,700 years ago.

This new evidence challenges some existing models of early human migration routes. However, it represents only a refinement of the broader, well-established story of humanity’s dispersal out of Africa, not a challenge to it. What it does completely undermine, however, is the Biblical narrative claiming that all humans descended from a single, ahistorical couple created without ancestors some 6,000 to 10,000 years ago — followed by a supposed global “reset” just 4,000 years ago when a genocidal flood left only eight related survivors.

The evidence for this Ice Age land bridge comes from the recovery of 138 stone tools at ten sites within a 200 km² area around Ayvalık in north-west Türkiye, opposite the Greek island of Lesbos.

Malevolent Design - How Creationism's 'Designer' Favoured The Naked Mole Rat

DNA repair mechanisms help explain why naked mole-rats live a long life

News that scientists have discovered what enables the naked mole-rat to live for up to 37 years — around ten times longer than relatives of a similar size — raises a troublesome question for creationists. The findings were reported recently in Science by a team of researchers from the Shanghai Key Laboratory of Maternal Fetal Medicine.

Creationists like to flatter themselves with the notion that they are the favoured creation of their putative designer god and the ultimate expression of design perfection. So, when evidence emerges of other species surpassing humans in some way — bats with more robust immune systems, elephants and sharks being almost completely immune to cancers, peregrine falcons with far superior vision — it is typically ignored, met with incredulity, or dismissed as an ineffable mystery and part of some divine plan which in no way diminished the unique position of humans in the grand scheme.

Now, to add to their woes, comes the discovery that the secret of the naked mole-rat’s extraordinary longevity may be traced to changes in just four amino acids. This alone undermines creationist claims that mutations are always harmful and incapable of generating new genetic information.

Creationism Refuted - Inclusions In 112 Million-Year-Old Amber Show A Diverse Ancient Ecosystem

Diptera: Chironomidae

Scientists unearth a 112-million-year-old time capsule filled with ancient insects | ScienceDaily

A rich source of amber from the Genoveva quarry in the Napo Province of Ecuador is revealing information about life in a dense, tropical rainforest 112 million years ago, requiring the most convoluted of mental gymnastics for creationists to ignore or deny. This newly described deposit, part of the Hollín Formation in the Oriente Basin, represents the first Mesozoic amber deposit with preserved insects ever discovered in South America — and one of the largest known anywhere on the former Gondwanan supercontinent.

Unlike rock fossils, where finer detail is often lost through mineralisation and geological processes, amber frequently preserves plant and animal life with exquisite microscopic precision. This makes the Ecuadorian deposit, produced at a time when Gondwana was on the verge of splitting into Africa and South America, a rare and invaluable window into the humid, densely vegetated ecosystem of an equatorial rainforest during the Cretaceous Period.

Amber is the solidified resinous sap of trees — often conifers such as araucariaceans — and can originate from branches, trunks or even roots, preserving both aerial and subterranean organisms. Almost all known amber deposits come from the northern hemisphere, particularly from Eurasia and North America, so this southern hemisphere deposit provides an unprecedented opportunity to study an ancient Gondwanan ecosystem at a crucial time in Earth’s evolutionary history.

The contrast between this rich, 112-million-year-old ecosystem and the simplistic biblical creation myth is as stark as it could be. Even if we had no other fossils, the life forms trapped in this amber — representing at least five insect orders, spider silk, and an abundance of pollen and spores from ferns, cycads, conifers and early angiosperms — would comprehensively refute the notion of a young Earth created in its present form.

Another strength of amber as a fossil medium is that it is always contemporaneous with the bioinclusions it preserves — organisms became trapped while the resin was still liquid — removing the additional uncertainties sometimes introduced when dating fossils embedded in sedimentary matrices.

Refuting Creationism - Rock Art From Arabia - 2,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

[left caption]

[right caption]

12,000-year-old monumental camel rock art acted as ancient 'road signs' to water sources - Griffith News

Thousands of years before creationism’s god supposedly decided to create a small, flat planet with a dome over it, centred on a tiny patch of the Middle East, humans were already leaving road signs and directions to water sources carved into rocks in what is now the Arabian desert. These carvings offer a fascinating insight into the region’s prehistoric megafauna—and, of course, all such evidence of early human activity would have been completely obliterated by the biblical genocidal flood, had such an event really occurred as described.

The rock carvings were discovered by an international team of archaeologists, led by the Heritage Commission of the Saudi Ministry of Culture, and including scholars from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), University College London, Griffith University’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution (ARCHE), and others. Their findings were published open access in Nature Communications a few days ago.

At the time, the region that is now arid desert was made habitable by a humid period following the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), when surface water was abundant. Stone tool manufacture from the site shows clear cultural links with Neolithic societies in the Levant—ironically, the very region where the authors of Genesis set most of their imaginative origin myths, apparently oblivious to the deeper history of the area or the existence of earlier human populations beyond their narrow horizons.

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).

Unintelligent Design - The Needless Complexity That Produces Orchids

Cremastra variabilis

Cremastra variabilis

Deadwood brings wild orchids to life | Kobe University News site

An interesting open-access paper, recently published in the journal, Functional Ecology, by two researchers from Kobe University, Japan, explains the complex, symbiotic relationship between an orchid and a wood-decomposing fungus, not only between the fungi and the adult plants that depend on the fungi to provide the orchid with nutrients, but also for the orchid seed to germinate.

This complex relationship appears to benefit the orchid because it can live in otherwise nutrient-poor conditions. However, from an intelligent design perspective, it makes no sense at all because an omnipotent, omniscient designer could have endowed the orchid with the genetic machinery to do what the fungus does.

The relationship between the seeds and the fungus is even more bizarre. The seeds, unlike those of other plants, are devoid of nutrients and therefore need the fungus to supply some. Orchid seeds are notoriously small, being almost invisible to the naked eye. Contrary to Jesus’s bizarre reputed claim in the Bible that the mustard seed is the smallest seed, orchid seeds are orders of magnitude smaller.

Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field: Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof.

Matthew 13: 31–32

The mustard seed is not only not the smallest of seeds but also doesn’t grow into a tree!

Contrary to what creationists have been conditioned to believe, one of the hallmarks of good, intelligent design is minimal complexity because the simpler a process is, the fewer opportunities there are for it to go wrong.

The converse is true for evolved organisms and processes because there is no plan or foresight in evolution, which can only build on what is already present, and natural selection prioritises utility, based solely on what is better than what preceded it. Consequently, evolved organisms are a collection of suboptimal compromises, and there is selection pressure to minimise failures with another layer of complexity.

This has led to confusion in creationist thinking, which associates complexity with intelligent design as they try to force-fit what can be observed with their need to have a role for their particular deity — especially in their own ‘design’ — giving them a sense of importance that being ‘merely’ the product of evolution doesn’t give them.

Refuting Creationism - Hominins Hunted Elephants in Italy - 400,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Hunting straight-tusked mammoths, Palaeoloxodon antiquus

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5)

Butchering the carcass with small flint blades

AI-generated (ChatGPT 5)

Early humans butchered elephants using small tools and made big tools from their bones | EurekAlert!

A recent archaeological finding, by Beniamino Mecozzi of Sapienza University of Rome, Italy and colleagues, at the site of Casal Lumbroso in northwest Rome, has once again refuted the Bible narrative by extending the known depth of human prehistory far beyond the limits imposed by biblical literalism.

In sediments dated to some 400,000 years before creationism’s mythical 'Creation Week', the research team has uncovered evidence that early humans were butchering elephants with small stone tools and then fashioning large implements from the animals’ bones. These traces of planning, adaptation, and technological innovation demonstrate that human ingenuity was already well advanced hundreds of millennia before the supposed creation of Adam.

More interestingly from a scientific perspective is not the incidental refutation of ancient creation myths, which happens with almost every archaeological and palaeontological discovery, but the fact that these hominins predate the successful Homo sapiens migration out of African and into Eurasia by tens of thousands of years and pre-date even the earliest evidence of Neanderthals in western Eurasia. Such discoveries highlight the sheer scale of time over which our lineage evolved—an evolutionary saga measured not in millennia but in hundreds of thousands of years. The people who left these marks were not modern humans, but archaic members of the genus Homo, close relatives or ancestors of the Neanderthals. Their world was already ancient when the earliest chapters of Genesis were imagined.

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.

Creationism Refuted - Evolution of 'Language' in Birds.

Male superb fairy wren, Malurus cyaneus
A frequent brood parasite host

By JJ Harrison (https://www.jjharrison.com.au/) - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Tawny-flanked prinia, Prinia subflava

By Bernard DUPONT, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link

Birds all over the world use the same sound to warn of threats - The Conversation

A recent paper published in Nature Ecology & Evolution lends support to Darwin’s theory that language evolved from learned responses to innate sounds conveying specific information — such as a scream in response to pain — behaviours shared across many species.

The paper, by a team of researchers led by William E. Feeney of the Doñana Biological Station, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Seville, Spain, and the School of Environment and Science, Griffith University, Nathan, Queensland, Australia, together with James A. Kennerley of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York, USA, suggests that different bird species—separated by thousands of miles geographically and tens of millions of years evolutionarily—may illustrate Darwin’s theory in practice.

This study not only strengthens Darwin’s insight into the evolutionary roots of human language but also highlights how universal biological processes—rather than supernatural design—can account for the complexity of communication across species.

Feeney and Kennerley, with co-author Niki Teunissen of Monash University, have explained their discovery and its significance in an article in The Conversation, reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence and reformatted for stylistic consistency.