Bible Blunders - The Ignorant Authors Of Genesis

Panels a and b show early images of the visible appearance of Uranus and Neptune reconstructed from Voyager 2 ISS images in 1986 and 1989, respectively, showing Uranus to be pale blue-green, and Neptune dark blue (PIA18182 and PIA01492, credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech). While these early Uranus images were close to ‘true’ colour, the Neptune images were actually stretched and enhanced. Panels c and d show more recent reconstructions of the true colours of these planets, showing them to be more similarly coloured.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Björn Jónsson,

https://www.planetary.org/articles/uranus-neptune-color-difference

Voyager 2/ISS images of Uranus and Neptune released shortly after the Voyager 2 flybys in 1986 and 1989, respectively, compared with a reprocessing of the individual filter images in this study to determine the best estimate of the true colours of these planets.

Credit: Professor Patrick Irwin, University of Oxford.

New images reveal what Neptune and Uranus really look like | University of Oxford

You will search the Bible in vain for any mention of the planets of the solar system, let alone a description of them, and the only description of Earth is so laughably childish it's incredible that anyone could take it seriously.

The reason for that should be obvious to anyone familiar with the scientific ignorance of Bronze Age people, but it's a measure of how far science has taken us since those times, and especially since the European Enlightenment when religion first began to lose its suffocating grip on European culture.

The astounding thing is that there are people alive today, living in technologically advanced countries with modern medicines, skyscrapers, satellite communications and navigation system, the Internet, air transport, nuclear power and space exploration, who still believe those simple people from the fearful infancy of our species had a better understanding of the universe than the scientists on whose discoveries their technological society is based.

For example, astronomers are now in the position of being able to have informed debates about the details of planets such as Neptune and Uranus because we have put instruments into space that can send back accurate data to inform those debates. We can now see that what the simple authors or Genesis thought were little lights stuck on a dome over a flat Earth are in reality large planets orbiting a sun which, unlike the description of it in Genesis, is not hanging from the same dome the planets are stuck to, but is a massive body at the centre of a planetary system in one of hundreds of billions of similar suns and planetary systems in one of maybe a trillion other galaxies, none of which would be affected by earthquakes on Earth, let alone fall down when they could be trampled on by a giant goat! [sic] (Daniel 8:10). (Seriously! There really are grown adults who believe that!)

An example of this informed debate was published open access recently in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The research is described in an Oxford University News release:

Unintelligent Design - How Creationism's Incompetent Designer Tries To Fix It's Bad Design

New Study Reveals Crucial 'Housekeeping' Genetic Elements and Their Potent Role to Fight Cancer｜THE INSTITUTE OF MEDICAL SCIENCE, THE UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO

The thing about Creationism's putative intelligent [sic] designer is that it isn't just your common or garden variety of jobbing designer; it is allegedly omniscient, omnipotent and perfect, so anything it designs should be perfectly designed to do exactly what it does, nothing more and nothing less. Creationists need to ignore that aspect of its designs when it comes to the problem of all the parasites that live on and in the animals and plants it supposedly created or they need to perform some double-think mental gymnastics and blame something else which, even though their putative intelligent designer is the only entity capable of designing anything living, also designs things.

Creationists also need to ignore the fact that good design is minimally complex and pretend it’s a hallmark of good design. But imagine a manufacturing process that is so badly designed that it needs whole layers of sub-processes to correct the mistakes, and then those sub-processes need more sub-processes to correct their mistakes!

Presumably, a creationist would look at that system with its vast array of monitoring and error corrections as evidence of intelligent design, regardless of the waste and inefficiency built into the system. In reality, of course, any competent process designer would get it right first time, or would scrap a bad design and start over, learning the lessons of earlier failures, so designing the perfect system with minimal complexity and minimal waste should not be beyond the wit of a perfect, omnipotent omniscient designer, should it?

Alas, what we see in nature is nothing like perfectly designed processes; instead, we see muddle, waste and inefficiency with layer upon layer of sub-processes simply to cope with the errors in the processes.

An example of just this situation inside the cells of our allegedly intelligently design bodies was discovered recently by a team of researchers from the Laboratory of Functional Analysis in silico (Nakai-lab) at The Institute of Medical Science, The University of Tokyo, Japan, led by Professor Kenta Nakai, head of the laboratory, and Dr. Martin Loza, Assistant Professor, in collaboration with Dr. Alexis Vandenbon, Associate Professor, from the Institute of Life and Medical Sciences, Kyoto University, Japan. Their work was published, open access, in Nucleic Acids Research on December 12, 2023.

The team found as many as 11,000 gene regulators, all needed for basic 'housekeeping' and error corrections within the cell. These are known as housekeeping cis-regulatory elements (HK-CREs). These elements are vital in maintaining cellular stability beyond conventional gene regulation, influencing diverse cellular functions across healthy cell types. Moreover, a subset of these housekeeping elements, particularly those related to zinc finger genes, was found to have reduced activity in diverse cancers, suggesting their role as potential housekeeping tumor suppressors.

These HK-CREs were believed to be simple on/off switches that regulated the activity of housekeeping genes, but that was far too simple for whatever designed this complex process, of course. The Japanese team found that these switches aren't only important for the enhancement of specific genes but are crucial for the basic functions that keep our cells healthy. In other words, they are needed to clean up and correct the mistakes in the basic cell functions.

Given the significant association between cancer and mutations in epigenetic components, every small insight we gain could be key in the ongoing battle against this disease, which has tragically claimed innumerable lives. Through extensive bioinformatics analyses, we aimed to emphasize HK-CREs profound impact on fundamental cellular processes, including their potential as essential housekeeping tumor suppressors.

Assistant professor Dr. Martin Loza, lead author
The Institute of Medical Science
The University of Tokyo, Japan

To summarise at this point then, the housekeeping genes (HKRs) are needed to clean up the errors and mess of a badly designed process, but then they need more genes (HK-CREs) to regulate their activity!

But it gets worse!

Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Home In On Evolution Of Photosynthesis 1.75 Billion Years Ago

Image of Navifusa majensis, a microfossil from the McDermott Formation in Australia. This 1.75 billion-year-old microfossil contains thylakoids, which identify it as a cyanobacterium.

Credit: Emmanuelle Javaux

Images of N. majensis microfossils.

Demoulin, C.F., Lara, Y.J., Lambion, A. et al.(2024)

The evolution of photosynthesis better documented thanks to the discovery of the oldest thylakoids in fossil cyanobacteria

Way back in the dim and distant past in that vast expanse of pre-'Creation Week' history of life on Earth, simple bacteria were evolving a way to use the energy in sunlight to turn the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into the basic building block of carbohydrates, glucose.

The process that was evolving was destined to transform life on Earth when the 'cyanobacteria' took up residence in archaea and turned them into simple algae, the progenitors of all plant-life on earth and responsible for so much greenery away from desert and polar regions.

And now scientists working at the Early Life Traces & Evolution laboratory of the Astrobiology Research Unit at Liège University (ULiège), Belgium have pushed back the earliest date for these pioneer bacteria in the fossil record to 1.75 Billion years by identifying thylakoids membranes, essential for early photosynthesis, in microfossils in rock formations in Australia, Democratic Republic of Congo and Canada.

Their discovery is explained in a ULiège press release:

Cult News - Constantine I - The Not-So-Christian Self-Idolatrous Roman Polytheist

Constantine I, or Constantine the Great.
Roman emperor from 306 to 337 AD.

Cult Mentality: SLU Professor Makes Monumental Discovery in Italy : SLU

Tell me all about Constantine I of Rome. Constantine I, also known as Constantine the Great, was a Roman Emperor who ruled from 306 to 337 AD. He is often credited with being the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity and played a crucial role in the history of the Roman Empire, particularly in the transition from paganism to Christianity. Here are some key points about Constantine I:

1. Early Life: Constantine was born on February 27, around 272 AD, in Naissus (present-day Niš, Serbia). He was the son of Constantius Chlorus, who was a Roman army officer, and Helena, who is believed to be of humble origin.
2. Military Career: Constantine began his military career under the rule of Emperor Diocletian. He rose through the ranks and eventually became a military tribune.
3. Tetrarchy: The Roman Empire was divided into four parts (the Tetrarchy) by Emperor Diocletian to make governance more manageable. Constantine's father, Constantius Chlorus, was one of the Tetrarchs.
4. Rise to Power: After the death of his father in 306 AD, Constantine's troops proclaimed him emperor. This led to a series of civil wars as various claimants vied for power.
5. Battle of Milvian Bridge (312 AD): Constantine's most famous victory was at the Battle of Milvian Bridge against Maxentius. According to tradition, Constantine had a vision of a cross in the sky with the words "In hoc signo vinces" ("In this sign, you will conquer"). Constantine adopted the Christian symbol, the Chi-Rho, and won the battle.
6. Edict of Milan (313 AD): Constantine issued the Edict of Milan along with his co-emperor Licinius, granting religious tolerance to all religions in the Roman Empire, effectively ending the persecution of Christians.
7. Foundation of Constantinople: In 330 AD, Constantine inaugurated a new capital for the Roman Empire, which he called Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul). This city played a significant role in the history of the Byzantine Empire.
8. Council of Nicaea (325 AD): Constantine convened the First Council of Nicaea, which aimed to address theological disputes within Christianity. The council produced the Nicene Creed, a statement of Christian faith.
9. Christian Conversion: While Constantine is often considered the first Christian Roman Emperor, the exact nature and timing of his conversion remain debated among historians. Some suggest that he only converted on his deathbed, while others argue for an earlier and more gradual conversion.
10. Death: Constantine I died on May 22, 337 AD. He was baptized shortly before his death.

Constantine's reign marked a turning point in the history of the Roman Empire. His support for Christianity had a profound impact on the development of the religion and its eventual establishment as the dominant faith within the empire.

If he convened the Council of Nicea in 325 AD doesn't this suggest he had already converted to Christianity? Also, what is the connection with York, England?

The relationship between Constantine's conversion to Christianity and the convening of the Council of Nicaea is a matter of historical debate. While some sources suggest that Constantine may have converted to Christianity before the Council, the exact timing and nature of his conversion remain unclear. Some historians argue that his conversion was a gradual process, and he may have fully embraced Christianity closer to the end of his life.

Regarding the connection with York, England, Constantine the Great is associated with the city in the context of his proclaimed father, Constantius Chlorus. Constantius Chlorus, who was a co-emperor and the father of Constantine, died in York (then known as Eboracum) in 306 AD. After his death, Constantine was proclaimed emperor by his troops in York, marking an important point in the series of events that would eventually lead to his rise to power.

The historical records are not entirely clear about whether Constantine was present in York when he was proclaimed emperor. The primary sources that describe his elevation to emperor, such as the "Origo Constantini Imperatoris" and the "Panegyrici Latini," do not explicitly mention Constantine's physical presence in York at the time of his proclamation.

The general narrative is that Constantine was with his father, Constantius Chlorus, in Eboracum (modern-day York) when Constantius died in 306 AD. Following Constantius's death, the troops in York proclaimed Constantine as emperor. However, it's not explicitly stated whether Constantine was physically present in York during this proclamation or if he was elsewhere.

It's worth noting that Constantine's connection to York is more related to his father's activities and death in the region rather than significant events in Constantine's own life. Nevertheless, York acknowledges this historical connection, and there are some sites and monuments in the city that commemorate Constantine and his father.

The Roman emperor Constantine I, or Constantine the Great, is hailed by Christians as the first Christian emperor and the man who single-handedly converted the Roman Empire to Christianity. But the facts were as usual, different to the narrative promulgated by the Christian Churches.

Certainly, he was instrumental in turning what had been a minority cult into the official religion of the empire but it was Diocletian, some 70 years later who made it official and launched a vicious campaign of repression designed to eradicate all religions and all sects of Christianity which didn't conform to the State Dogma.

Constantine was, however, not so much a devout Christian as a man who liked to hedge his bets. He supported any and all religions of the empire, including the worship of himself as God-Emperor, and only accepted Christian baptism on his death bed. Evidently, he thought he had found favour with all the other gods of the Empire, but just wanted to make sure in case the Christians were right. A form of Pascale's Gambit that includes all the gods, just to be on the safe-side, because, as we all know, gods can easily be fooled by pretending to believe in them, even ones that claim to be the only god.

Now a team of archaeologists led by Professor Douglas Boin, Ph.D, of Saint Louis University, Missouri, USA have unearthed evidence that shows Constantine was as keen to promote non-Christian sects as to promote Christianity. The evidence is in the form of a temple to Constantine and his ancestors, the Flavian family in the hill town of Spello, about 20 miles from Assisi and about two and a half hours from Rome. The inhabitants had applied to be allowed to celebrate a pagan religious fezrival in Spello rather than travel all the way to another festival site. Building the temple was Constantine's condition for granting them their wish.

A St Louis University News release explains the find and its significance:

Creationism in Crisis - How A Marine Snail Transitioned From Egg-Laying To Live Births.

Adult snails adapted to different habitats.
The larger snail is adapted for defense against crab attacks, while the small snail is adapted to live in areas with strong wave exposure.

© Sophie Webster

ISTA | The Snail or the Egg?

Live-bearing has allowed Littorina snails to occupy and adapt to a diverse range of habitats. This has led to the evolution of many ‘ecotypes’ that vary in size, shape, and behavior.

© Fredrik Pleijel

When did eggs evolve? Eggs, in the context of reproduction, have been around for a very long time in the evolutionary history of life. The evolution of eggs is a complex process that occurred over millions of years, and different types of eggs have evolved in different lineages of organisms.

The earliest evidence of eggs comes from fossils of small, shelled eggs that date back to the Early Cambrian period, around 540 million years ago. These eggs are believed to belong to a group of extinct marine animals. However, it's important to note that these early eggs were likely quite different from the eggs we are familiar with today.

The evolution of eggs in the context of vertebrates, such as birds, reptiles, and mammals, is a more recent development. Amniotic eggs, which have a protective shell and membranes that allow them to be laid on land rather than in water, evolved in the lineage leading to reptiles. This adaptation was crucial for the colonization of terrestrial environments.

Birds, a group of reptiles, are known for their hard-shelled eggs, and their evolutionary history is marked by the development of various features related to flight and parental care. Mammals, on the other hand, have live births or lay eggs with soft shells (monotremes like the platypus and echidna).

In summary, the evolution of eggs is a complex process that spans millions of years and involves various lineages of organisms, with different types of eggs evolving at different times in the history of life.

An example of the scientific ignorance that underpins creationism is in the boringly repetitive "Gotcha!" question from creationist fools, "Which came first; the chicken of the egg?", as though they believe chickens had ancestors that never laid eggs and the chicken species started with a single individual, which either hatched from an egg or was given birth to.

Of course, creationists believe chickens were created out of dirt by magic without any ancestors, so in their childlike, magical view of things their question makes some sort of sense.

In reality of course, ancestors of chickens laid eggs and egg-laying originated hundreds of millions of years ago at about the time multicellular organisms evolved.

All placental mammals have had live births ever since this evolved in Mammalia about 140 million years ago, but live birth has evolved independently in other classes multiple times. It is frequently found in the Reptilia, for example, and at least one insect, the tsetse fly.

A marine snail, Littorina saxatilis, is known to have transitioned from egg-laying to live young-bearing in the last 10,000 years - a mere blink in the evolutionary time scale. An international team of researchers, led by Dr. Sean Stankowski of the Austrian Institute of Science & Technology (ISTA) have now worked out the 50 genetic changes involved in this , which probably began about 100,000 years ago. Their research is explained in an ISTA news release:

Why Science Works And Religion Fails - Changing Our Minds When the Facts Change

For decades, paleontologists have debated whether Nanotyrannus is a separate species or simply a juvenile T. rex.

Credit Raul Martin

Nanotyrannus lancensi, believed by some to be a juvenile T. rex

Credit: Conty via Wikipedia (CC BY 3.0 DEED)

New research shows “Juvenile T. rex” fossils are a distinct species of small tyrannosaur

One of the key features of science is the so-called 'controversy', where different opinions are discussed within the scientific specialty. They are invariably resolved with new evidence because, in science, the facts are neutral in any debate and so act as referees. This is why science is convergent onto single answers, in contrast to religions.

Creationists, who generally crave certainty at the expense of truth, find this baffling and cite controversies as examples of scientists not being able to make their minds up, not appreciating that this is the scientific method moving toward the truth, unlike religions which have no such built-in method of resolving disagreements and converging on universal truths. If they did, there would only be one religion; instead we have some 40,000 different Christian sects alone, all claiming, without any supporting evidence, to be the one true religion, and continuing to spawn new sects at an average of 20 new sects per year, or roughly one every three weeks.

In the world of religious opinion, controversies frequently lead to schisms and splits because neither side can provide any evidence for its claims and, more often than not, the ancient documents around which disagreements swirl are so ambiguous or impossible to translate accurately that there is no way to determine the intentions of the author, who was probably only expressing an opinion or reporting on evidence-free beliefs and superstitions anyway.

One such controversy that has now probably been resolved was whether the fossil of a relatively small theropod dinosaur was that of a distinct species, Nanotyrannus lancensis, or that of a juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex.

Two palaeontologists, Dr. Nicholas Longrich of the Department of Life Sciences, University of Bath, Bath, UK and Dr. Evan Thomas Saitta of the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA have now provided evidence that supports the opinion that the fossil is that a full-grown Nanotyrannus lancensis.

A University of Bath news release explains their research:

Creationism in Crisis - Monogamy Predates Christianity By Millions of Years

Ring-tailed lemures. Recent studies show that many lemurs do not live individually, but in pairs of females and males.

Image: istock.com/Goddard_Photography

Early Primates | | UZH

Religious fundamentalists like to assume they have ownership of the institution of marriage because the 'right' form of marriage was dictated by their imaginary god so we should all subscribe to their approved form of it. In many formerly majority Christian countries, the Christian-based marital laws are one of the few remaining vestiges of a time when Christianity imposed itself on everyone, believers, non-believers and non-Christians alike, arrogantly believing it had a divine right to rule.

But recent research has shown that a form of flexible monogamy, or more or less stable social parings of a female and a male is common if not the norm in the primate family. It was most likely incorporated into religions because some human tribes thought of monogamy as the 'right' form of sexual relationship, so any god whom the priesthood wanted to be taken seriously had to hand down 'morals' that the people thought were right and proper. After all, the only way to tell if a god is a good god or an evil god is to compare its morals and behaviour to that of an external standard of 'good', is it not?

If you think not, you have to believe that if your god had told people to hurt babies, rob banks and hit old ladies, those would now be considered moral acts and people who didn't do them would be regarded as immoral and deserving of punishment or other social sanctions. Christian apologist for faith-based genocide, William Lane Craig, has even declared that a seemingly immoral act such as infanticide, is morally right if you believe his (but only his) god commands it, and it would be immoral not to carry out such a divine command.

But William Lane Craig's repugnant idea of what constitutes morality is straying somewhat off the point, which is the 'right' form of marriage in human society, which William Lane Craig presumably believes is divinely commanded by his god and therefore mandatory for the rest of us.

But, absolute monogamy is not the universal norm in modern human sexual relationships, even in societies which only permit monogamous marriage, and probably never has been. Humans can best be described as mostly monogamous, most of the time, with 'infidelity' by both sexes being fairly common to the extent that some estimates put the number of people who have a different father to the one they think is theirs at about 25%. In some cultures, such as Islamic, bigamy is normal and, as evidenced by baptism records, pre-marital sex was commonplace in 19th Century England.

Unintelligent Design News - If Scientists Can Do It, Why Couldn't Creationism's 'Intelligent' Designer?

© Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology/Geisel

First step towards synthetic CO₂ fixation in living cells | Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology

I've written several articles on one of the best arguments against intelligent design - RuBisCo - and include a section on it in The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting The Intelligent Design Hoax. I have also reported on efforts by biomedical scientists to improve on its efficiency and so increase crop yields.

Now we have another research paper which shows how any intelligent designer of photosynthesis could have done a much better job of it but either chose not to or was too incompetent to realise is could have done better, if it really is intelligently [sic] designed and not the result of a mindless, utilitarian process.

First a little refresher on RuBisCo and why it is so inefficient:

Creationism in Crisis - The Evolution of African Primates

Cercopithecus diana

Complex Evolutionary History With Extensive Ancestral Gene Flow in an African Primate Radiation | Molecular Biology and Evolution | Oxford Academic

Cercopithecus diana

Mustached guenon,
Cercopithecus cephus

De Brazza's guenon,
Cercopithecus neglectus

Stuhlmann's Blue monkey,
Cercopithecus mitis stuhlmanni,

Crowned Guenon
Cercopithecus pogonias

12 years ago, I wrote a blog post to explain why, because speciation is a process, not an event, we often don't even know it's happened until well after the event when we can see we have a new population with distinct characteristics. I illustrated this with a hypothetical example of monkeys in a forest being split into isolated populations by climate change.

In it I said:

But, gradually, due to climate change or continental drift, or maybe a change in ocean currents, the forest begins to get drier and turn into grasslands, with trees surviving only close to rivers. In other words, the monkey population is broken up into isolated groups which can no longer interbreed because they simply don't come into contact any more. Each group will be free to evolve according to the local conditions in its woodland. Eventually, maybe after a few hundred thousand years, maybe a million or two, these groups may evolve to the point where they not only look different to each other but may not be able to interbreed even if they do meet up.

So where and what was the 'speciation event'? At what point in the process could an observer say, "Hey! I've just seen speciation occur! It happened when...". In fact, we only know that speciation has occurred retrospectively because, according to our rules of taxonomy, failure to interbreed means they are now different species. Maybe if we had been able to examine them a hundred thousand years ago we might have found that they could still interbreed. Maybe we would have found an incompletely speciated 'ring species'.

There was no sudden emergence of a new species; no sudden branching of the 'tree of life'; no mutation which brought a new species into being and no 'macro-evolution' event. There was no event which creation pseudo-scientists proclaim to be impossible and which they claim has never been seen. All there was was a slow accumulation of difference, directed by natural selection with each group doing nothing but struggling to survive and reproduce with the ones which left the most descendant contributing the most genes to the gene-pool.

Now, take the same scenario, only this time the climate changed again after a few tens of thousands of years and the isolated scattered groups could once again mix freely. But this time maybe they had not diverged sufficiently to prevent interbreeding, or maybe one group now had a significant advantage over the others. In these cases, the group with the genes which gave them greater success would come to dominate and possibly replace the others.

Is this speciation? Is this the point at which we can say a new species arose and the 'archaic' form went extinct? Or is this merely evolution of the entire species? Were those groups isolated for a few thousand years new twigs on the monkey branch of the tree of life, or were they merely groups of individuals with the potential to become new species, but which never quite made it? Certainly, the day they came back into contact, nothing happened to their genes. It was not a change on their part which caused them to re-establish contact. It was the environment which changed.

Rosa Rubicondior: Evolution - Making a Monkey (4 July 2012)

And now, as though to confirm my hypothetical example was close to the real thing, a team of archaeologists and geneticists, led by Axel Jens and Katerina Guschanski of the Department of Ecology and Genetics, Animal Ecology, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden, have carried out a whole genome analysis of 22 species of West African guenons (monkey of the Cercopithecini tribe - one of the world's largest primate radiations) and shown how the different species diverged with frequent gene flow across species boundaries and hybridization events playing a part in the process of radiation and diversification.

The team have published their findings, open access, in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution. In it they say:

Unintelligent Design - Malevolence or Incompetence? - Why Design A Uterus To Grow Fibroids?

Uterine fibroids

Hic et nunc via Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Assistant Professor Stacey Schutte, left, and Research Associate Andreja Moset Zupan study new avenues to treat fibroids in Schutte's biomedical engineering lab in UC's Bioscience Center.

Photo/Andrew Higley/UC Marketing + Brand

Researchers find ways that uterine fibroid cells respond differently from surrounding tissue | University of Cincinnati

Almost 80% of women of child-bearing age will develop uterine fibroids. Although usually not malignant, they can nevertheless be extremely painful, can cause bleeding and can lead to infertility. The economic cost of fibroids has been estimated to be some $9 billion in the USA alone.

Fibroids grow in response to the same hormones, oestragen and progesterone, which cause the endometrium to thicken then breakdown during the menstrual cycle. Now a research team at the University of Cincinnati have shown that cell stretching is also a factor in their growth.

Hormones and uterine stretching as the endometrium thicken and shrinks and during pregnancy and childbirth are, of course part of the normal state of affairs for the uterus that creationists believe must have been designed by their supposedly omniscience, omnipotent designer, so, if we accept that childish notion of magic design by an omniscient supernatural entity, for the sake of argument, we have to assume growing fibroids was all part of the plan, since it is not possible for an omniscient designer to not be aware of the outcome of its design and for it not to design with that outcome in mind.

So, the only alternative, within the creationist paradigm, is that fibroids are the accidental and unforeseen consequences of the design and function of the uterus - which would mean one of three things:

1. The designer was not omniscient.
2. The designer was incompetent.
3. If the designer was both competent and omniscient it must have been malevolent and intended a high percentage of women to suffer the pain and inconvenience of fibroids.

This discovery is the subject of a research paper in the journal F&S Science which, sadly is behind a paywall, but the Abstract in the form of a summary of the paper is available.

Unintelligent Design - Another Ludicrously Complex Arms Race, This Time Between Plants And A Predatory Fungus

Gray Mold, Botrytis cinerea, on green tomatoes

Discovery: plants use “trojan horse” to fight mold invasions | News

Running epigenetics a close second for the most obvious evidence of unintelligent design in nature is the ubiquitous arms race; Arms races are a major component of evolutionary biology, easily understandable in terms of evolution by natural selection. One organism (call it Organism A) predates on, or parasitises another (call it Organism B); this creates an advantage for Organism B in avoiding being eaten of serving as the host of Organism A, so any functional defense mechanism is selected for by natural selection. This in turn creates an advantage for Organism A to evolve a mechanism for overcoming Organism B's defences, and so on until a state of equilibrium is achieved in which either one or the other organism is no longer able to evolve further.

This can lead to some extreme adaptations such as the stupidly long neck and legs of the giraffe which is a response to acacia trees evolving longer trunks to place their leaves, flowers and seeds beyond the reach of giraffes. In the process, acacia trees need to produce masses of cellulose to build the trunk and pump water much higher against gravity than if they were low-growing bushes, and giraffes have to maintain a very high blood pressure to keep their brain supplied with oxygen while drinking water places them at risk of predation by lions because they can't stand up and raise their heads quickly or they will lose consciousness. And they need the additional complexity of special valves in their neck veins to maintain a high blood pressure to their brain.

Now, take away acacia trees (imagine a sudden virus that wipes them out) and the giraffe is no longer superbly adapted for its environment; instead, it is severely handicapped, and might even find feeding from an alternative source difficult.

Another arms race can be seen at the moment is where the SARS-CoV-2 virus is evolving new variants every few months in response to growing herd immunity in its hosts, the human population, due to vaccinations and sub-lethal infections. The virus is getting better at evading our antibodies for long enough for us to pass on the infection to someone else and is tending to be less lethal, so we survive to infect others, even being asymptomatic. Gradually the virus will evolve to become a relatively mild infection that most of us will catch as often as we catch the common cold, and only especially vulnerable people will be made seriously ill by it.

These are just two examples of hundreds of similar arms races in nature; there are even arms races between sexes of the same species as females evolve strategies to retain the ability to only mate with a male of her choice, while males evolve strategies to deprive her of that ability.

But how on Earth can this be explained in terms of design by a single designer, or, including the creationists fallback excuse for parasites, two designers - their supposedly omnipotent, omniscient god and 'Sin'? Would not an omnipotent, omniscient god know in advance what Sin's next response would be and create a design that it couldn't overcome, so an arms race never started in the first place? Or are we to believe that creationism’s god and this 'Sin' thing are equal in all things yet able to conceal their next move from something all-knowing, but powerless to stop its rival? In other words, neither omniscient nor omnipotent.

The notion of intelligent design is quite simply incompatible with the evidence of arms races, for which evolution provides a ready answer.

I have devoted the whole of chapter 3 to arms races in nature in my popular, illustrated book, The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting The Intelligent Design Hoax, but what it doesn't include is this recently discovered arms race between plants and a parasitic fungus, Botrytis cinerea, or gray mold.

Creationism in Crisis - Tears Evolved To Manipulate The Behaviour Of Men, So Where Is The Free Will

Sniffing women’s' tears reduces aggression in men.

Tears without Fears: Sniffing Women’s Tears Reduces Aggression in Men | Weizmann USA

Research by Israeli scientists has shown that sniffing tears can reduce male aggression by almost 44% by lowering the level of testosterone.

The problem for Christianity here is that the entire rationale for the religion is that human free will allowed the mythical founder couple, who were magically created without ancestors, to choose to disobey their magic creator in the so-called 'Fall'.

Because the magic, omnipotent creator has never managed to get over this exercise of the free will it gave them, we need Jesus (the magic creator personified) to help him forgive us, because he had himself sacrificed in a blood sacrifice that everyone knows satiates irascible gods, especially when it's them being sacrificed. (I'm not making this up! Just ask any Christian who Jesus was and what he was born for.)

But, if behaviour is mediated by physiology in the form of hormones and if the levels of those hormones can be mediated by external influences, then external influences can modify behaviour, so where does that leave the notion of free will?

Obviously, the authors of that tale in the Bible knew nothing of hormones and pheromones and how they can modify and influence behaviour.

The research is explained in a press release from the American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science:

Creationism in Crisis - How New Genetic Information Arises Naturally

Top left: Bread Wheat, Triticum aestivum (hexaploid)
Bottom left: Arabica Coffee, Coffea arabica (tetraploid)

Top right: Strawberry, Fragaria x ananassa (Octoploid)
Bottom right: Coxes Orange Pippin, Malus domestica var (tetraploid)

The 'Christmas tree (Norwegian spruce) Picea abies
Seven times more DNA than a human.

It is a basic axiom of creationism that no new genetic information can arise in a species genome without the assistance of a magic designer. This is based on some half-baked interpretation of 'Shannon Information Theory' and misrepresentation of the second law of thermodynamics in which 'information' is confused with energy and a species genome with a closed system.

Try to get a creationist to explain the science behind that claim and you're likely to get nothing but rehearsed parrot squawks made in response to trigger words, if they don't run away hurling abuse and passive aggressive threats over their shoulder, or quickly change the subject. There will be no understanding of either information theory or thermodynamics.

The natural world is full of examples of how gene or even whole genome duplication creates redundant DNA and copies of genes than can mutate and be selected by natural selection to create new meaning in the genetic information. The Christmas tree, or Norwegian spruce, Picea abies, has about 29,000 functional genes (marginally more than a human) yet it has a genome seven times larger than the human genome, all packed into 12 chromosomes. The reason for this, according to a research team from Umeå universitet, Sweden, is because the mechanism for correcting duplication errors broke millions of years ago, so these duplications have been accumulating in the Picea abies genome ever since.

Creationists seem incapable of understanding the difference between information and the meaning in that information or how meaning is given by the environment. For example, a mutation which gave Streptococcus aureus resistance to the antibiotic, methicillin, would have had no meaning before medical science invented methicillin; now the same information makes MRSA an intractable condition and a highly successful pathogen. The point being that new meaning can arise without any change in the genome simply by a change in the environment, so evolution is not always dependent on change in genetic information.

Malevolent Designer - How Creationism's Intelligent [Sic] Designer' Denied Us The Ability To Regenerate Limbs But Gave It To A Jellyfish

The jellyfish Cladonema pacificum exhibits branched tentacles that can robustly regenerate after amputation.

© 2023 Sosuke Fujita, The University of Tokyo

Cladonema pacificum

How jellyfish regenerate functional tentacles in days | The University of Tokyo.

Imagine for a moment that you're creationism's putative intelligent [sic] designer (the one on whom they've bestowed all the 'omnis' like omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence) and you've created lots of creatures with the ability to regenerate body parts like limbs, tails and tentacles when they lose them, but you haven't given this ability to all of your creation, especially the one you supposedly love above all the others because its designed to be in your own image and you created all the other species to be at the disposal of your favourite.

What are some of the reasons you might have created them without the ability to regenerate missing body parts?

• Incompetence? It can't be that because you're omnipotent, so nothing is impossible for you.
• Amnesia? You just forgot to! It can't be that because you're omniscient, so know all things, past present and future so must remember creating the ability to regenerate limbs in salamanders, for example.
• If it wasn't incompetence and it wasn't amnesia, it must have been deliberate. You chose not to because you didn't want your special creation to have this ability - even though you're allegedly omnibenevolent.

So creationists must be mistaken in at least one and possibly all of the qualities they've bestowed on you.

Or you've chosen to create humans and other animals, especially mammals, birds and most reptiles, less perfectly than you could have created them because you prefer to see them suffer when they have accidents.

And yet, according to recently published research by a Japanese research team, you gave that ability to a small jellyfish so it can regenerate its tentacles. Unless you prefer to see a human amputee struggle but not a jellyfish, why would you do that?

I'll leave that question for creationists to perform their usual intellectual gymnastic over, so they can continue to feel like the special creation of an omnipotent creator of the universe who loves them above the rest of its creation that it created just for them, like a narcissistic toddler, who thinks the world is just for him/her and someone must be making sure it stays that way.

Malevolent Design - How A Cat Poo Parasite Can Change Your Personality

Toxoplasma gondii is an obligate intracellular, parasitic protozoan that causes the disease toxoplasmosis. Diagram of Toxoplasma structure.

Image Credit: Designua / Shutterstock

Toxoplasma 'cat poo' parasite infects billions – so why is it so hard to study?

In my last blogpost, I described how the parasitic organism, cryptosporidium, is one of those 'irreducibly complex' organisms that creationists have been fooled by Michael J Behe into believing are proof of their putative creator god, because, so their ignorant intuition tells them, there can only be one intelligent designer capable of designing an irreducibly complex structure such as the bacterial flagellum or the apical complex structure that all members of the Apicomplex phylum characteristically possess.

Sadly for them, though, their reliance on this 'proof' of their god precludes them from arguing that these nasty little pathogens that appear to be designed to make us and other animals sick is the work of another intelligent creator, 'Sin', so the inescapable conclusion must be that their beloved creator god is designing these pathogens to make us sick and to increase the suffering in the world.

As though that wasn't bad enough, we now have another related parasite, also a member of the Apicomplex phylum, that on the face of it, seems to be an even more determined attempt to make us sick. It's a parasite that once you have it, you have it for life, and the evidence is that it manipulates your behaviour and changes your personality too. This then raises doubts about the idea of free will that is a central part of creationist superstition, and notions of 'Original Sin' (that thing that can supposedly create parasites too).

This organism is Toxoplasma gondii which is carried by about 25% of the world's people, so the chance of you or me or any of your friends and family having it is quite high.

Malevolent Design - More Nastiness From The Pestilential Designer, Or God, As Creationists Call It

Infections from a diarrhoea-causing parasite are on the rise in the UK – but experts aren't quite sure why

Cryptosporidium is a eukaryote protozoan parasite which creationists dogma says must have been designed by their favourite designer because that is the only entity capable of designing complex organisms, including 'irreducibly complex' structures.

Embarrassingly for creationists who are hoping to be able to blame 'Sin' for them, they are hung out to dry on the same hook that Michael J. Behe hung them on with the flagellum of the pathological E. coli bacterium, which they now happily wave as 'proof' of their designer good. Protozoans of the Apicomplexa phylum, of which the cryptosporidia are species, all have the apical complex organelle which is essential for them to break into a cell in order to infect it.

The characteristic apical complex organelle of the Apicomplexa phylum

Cryptosporidia appear to have two functions: to increase the suffering in the world by causing gastrointestinal disorders, usually resulting in severe diarrhoea; and to make more copies of themselves to infect more people and animals and spread the suffering more widely. They have no known beneficial functions in respect of humans or their other host species.

The species Cryptosporidium hominis is an obligate parasite on humans, so, according to creationists superstition, must have infected one or two of the Ark survivors, assuming there were no more than two individuals of the species present. Either that, or, according to creationist mythology, it has been created in the last four thousand years, which rules out being created by 'Sin' as a result of 'The Fall', which would mean it predates creationism's genocidal flood.

First, some AI background by way of introduction to the subject:

60 Years Ago Today - Remembering the Big Freeze - From My Book, 'In The Blink Of An Eye: Growing Up In Rural Oxfordshire'

The winter of 1962–63 was something else. It deserves a special mention. It came almost as a punctuation mark for me as my life was about to change when I left school and entered the working class in Oxford.

I was the village’s provider of Sunday newspapers! I felt I had an important job to do because without me, no–one would have anything to read on Sunday mornings! It was my sacred duty to get the Sunday newspapers delivered!

So, on Sunday, 30th December 1962 I got up as usual to go to Charlbury to buy my 60 newspapers for which I charged a penny each for delivery. I noticed there had been some snow and, unusually, the snow on the lower window frame on the back door seemed to be three or four inches up the glass.

The winter had actually started a few days earlier with snow on Boxing Day, the next best thing to a white Christmas, but it was nothing more than the usual few inches which everyone assumed would be gone in a few days. How wrong we were, as I was about to find out!

I opened the door to go to the outside toilet. A pile of snow fell into the kitchen. The back yard was full of snow, literally. It wasn't just piled up on the edges of the windowpanes, but against the door itself.

I went out of the front door to find the world had changed beyond recognition! The Lane was full of snow! A snowdrift came straight off our garage roof, across the front garden, over the garden wall and up to the wall of the house opposite. It was deeper by far than my, by now, 5 feet 10 inches.

And the snow was still falling thick and fast, driven by a gale-force wind! Southern England was in the grip of a major blizzard not seen since 1947 and probably much earlier. Bitterly cold Arctic winds drove the dry, powdery snow into every hollow and piled it up until the hollow was full, then moved on to fill the next, deeper hollow, until the countryside was a smooth as plastered wall.

But the newspapers had to get through!

So, donning wellies with two pairs of thick socks, jumpers, overcoat, scarves – one over my head and over my mouth, another round my neck twice – a balaclava helmet and two pairs of gloves, I slung my paper bag, made out of an old hessian corn sack, over my shoulder and set out. It was a strange landscape, but Main Road wasn’t too deeply covered. There were no car tracks!

I trudged up through the village to just beyond the Finstock turn, marveling at the deepening drifts, and even stopping to help a man trying to get his car out of his drive. He wasn't going to get very far. It was there I met our neighbour’s son-in-law walking over from Charlbury to check on her.

“You goin’ to get yer papers?” he asked incredulously.

“Well, Dad can’t drive me so I’m walkin’!” I explained.

“Well, turn round and go ‘ome” he said. “No–one’s goin’ to get their papers today!”

“Is it that bad?”

“Corse it is! Even the trains ent runnin! Nothin’s movin’ anywhere.”

So, I turned round and walked ‘ome with him, and had a cup of hot soup made out of the remains of the Christmas goose. The village was totally shut off! For the first time on my watch, the Sunday newspapers had not been delivered.

We dug out the lane down to The Green so people could get to Wally Scarrot's shop, but the shop couldn’t get supplies in and was beginning to run down as a village shop anyway, as people got cars and could shop at the new supermarkets in Witney and Chipping Norton. The bakery had ceased to operate several years earlier. It was a time for community action!

Malevolent Design - Parasitic Mistletoe - Unintelligent Design, Malevolent Creation Or Evolution?

European mistletoe, Viscum album

Mistletoe haustorium on a birth branch.

At a time of giving and receiving, our many Australian mistletoes do it too

Mistletoe is a hemiparasitic plant and obligate parasite on many different species of tree. It can kill a heavily infested tree. Although mistletoe is photosynthetic, so produces its own sugars, it is dependent on its host for water and the nutrients such as nitrates and other minerals that the host plant obtains from soil. There is no evidence that mistletoe gives anything back to the host in the form of sugars.

Mistletoes and similar parasitic plants obtain the nutrients from their host via a structure called a haustorium which infiltrates the host tissues and forms a close association with the vascular bundles.

But why would an intelligent designer create all the complexity needed for a parasitic lifestyle when it had supposedly designed other plants to obtain nutrients from the soil, and simply added another layer of complexity between the host's roots and the parasitic plant's tissues to achieve the same result? In fact, this is just another example of the needless complexity that characterises evolved systems and distinguishes them from intelligently designed systems, which are characteristically minimally complex.
And it hasn't just done it once! There are over 100 parasitic species of similar plants in Australia alone, which I'll come to next, but first, a little AI background on mistletoe:

Creationism in Crisis - Insects Had Already Evolved An Array Of Defence Strategies 100 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'.

Larva of a scorpionfly in 100-million-year-old amber with hairs on its back for attaching camouflage material.

© Carolin Haug

Figure 7. Flat wasps (Bethylidae) trapped in Kachin amber while stinging into host larvae for oviposition
(A) Snakefly larva as host, PED 2351.
(B) Beetle larva as host.⁸¹
(C) Lepidopteran caterpillar as host, PED 2575.

Insects already had a variety of defense strategies in the Cretaceous - LMU Munich

On top of the evidence of people practicing animal husbandry in the Pyrenees Mountains before, during and after the legendary genocidal flood inflicted on Earth by creationism's 'omni-benevolent' god according to their superstition, and the fact that the predictable layer of silt from such a flood failed to materialise or was away the evidence of this occupation, we have more bad news for creationists.

A paper which describes how insects had evolved a whole array of defensive strategies, 100 million years before the legendary 'creation Week', when the universe was allegedly magicked up out of nothing by a magic man made of nothing, has just been published in the journal iScience.

The significance of this is that it shows an already mature and established ecosystem with predators against which insects needed protection. Defence is one aspect of an evolutionary arms race, of course, and arms races are entirely inconsistent with any notion of intelligent [sic] design because it is not intelligent to create predators to eat your designs, then created mechanisms and structure for the victims of predation to prevent your designs doing what they were designed to do. Arms races are examples of the needless complexity and prolific waste that can result from a mindless, undirected natural process. Needless complexity and prolific waste are the antithesis of intelligent design which should be minimally complex and minimally wasteful.

And of course, the existence of these fossil insects set in amber from 100 million years ago, alone falsifies the childish notion that Earth has only existed for 10,000 years.

The paper is the work of a team of palaeoarchaeologists from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich), Germany and University of Greifswald, Greifswald, Germany, led by Professor Carolin Haug of MMU. It is explained in a brief news release from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität:

Creationism in Crisis - Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Were Practiced Uninterupted In The Pyrenees Through The Biblical Genocidal Flood

The Pic de Posets, in Huesca Province
Second highest peak in the Pyrenees.

First high mountain settlers at the start of the Neolithic already engaged in other livestock activities apart from transhumance - Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona - UAB Barcelona

Figure 1. Location of Coro Trasito cave (Huesca, Spain).

There is no let up for Creationists this week as science continues to reveal facts about the world that casually refute creationism, utterly and irredeemably. Their only hope is for a couple of day's respite over the holiday period when there will be few new science papers published, but we can be sure the onslaught will continue in the New Year.

One of today's clutch shows that there were people living in a cave in the Pyrenees who were practicing animal husbandry before, during and after the mythical genocidal flood. Perhaps someone forgot to tell them that they should all be drowing as the flood waters covered their mountain homes and killed all their livestock.

Curiously, the predicted layer of silt containing a jumble of fossils from disconnected landmasses, which would inevitably result from such a flood, failed to materialise and miraculously, the flood waters failed to wash away the evidence of these farmers' existence. Nor is there any evidence of an abrupt change of culture as the exterminated inhabitants of this cave were replaced by later immigrants from the Middle East.

The Pyrenees is a mountain barrier between the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of Europe. It's not particularly high as mountain ranges go, the highest peak being Pic Aneto, at 3404 metres (a little under 11,200 feet). According to the genocidal flood account in the Bible, however, this peak was under water to a depth sufficient to cover Mount Everest under 15 cubits of water (about 30 feet), so the flood would have been about 29,030 feet deep, covering the tallest peak in the Pyrenees by about 27,000 feet.

Sadly for the Bible narrative, however, archaeologists from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) Archaeozoology Laboratory and the High Mountain Archaeology Group, have shown that from the Early Neolithic (about 7,000 years ago) humans had moved into the Huescan Pyrenees and had taken a number of domesticated animals with them, including cows, goats, sheep and pigs (Bos taurus, Capra hircus, Ovis aries and Sus domesticus). The archaeologists have published their findings, open-access, in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology. Their research and its significance are explained in a UAB news release:

Small Gods - More Magnificance Of The Real Universe Revealed,

The 'Running Chicken Nebula
("No, No! Ours Is A Small God And We Insist It Stays That Way!)

VLT Survey Telescope (VST),
hosted at ESO’s Paranal site in Chile

The Running Chicken Nebula comprises several clouds, the most prominent of which are labelled in this vast image from the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), hosted at ESO’s Paranal site. The bright star labelled Lambda Centauri is actually much closer to us than the nebula itself, and can be seen with the naked eye. The clouds shown in wispy pink plumes are full of gas and dust, illuminated by the young and hot stars within them. Overall, this image spans an area in the sky of about 25 full Moons, one of which is shown to scale for reference.

Credit: ESO/VPHAS+ team. Acknowledgement: CASU

New 1.5-billion-pixel ESO image shows Running Chicken Nebula in unprecedented detail | ESO

Astronomers using the European Southern Observatory in Chile have revealed in unprecedented detail, the so-called, 'Running Chicken' nebula, named not after creationists when asked a direct question, but because some people think it resembles a running chicken. The photographs were taken using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) as a series of images capturing different wavelengths of light, then carefully stitched together to form this detailed composite image.

The Running Chicken Nebula actually comprises several regions, all of which we can see in this vast image that spans an area in the sky of about 25 full Moons [1]. The brightest region within the nebula is called IC 2948, where some people see the chicken’s head and others its rear end. The wispy pastel contours are ethereal plumes of gas and dust. Towards the centre of the image, marked by the bright, vertical, almost pillar-like, structure, is IC 2944. The brightest twinkle in this particular region is Lambda Centauri, a star visible to the naked eye that is much closer to us than the nebula itself.

There are, however, many young stars within IC 2948 and IC 2944 themselves — and while they might be bright, they’re most certainly not merry. As they spit out vast amounts of radiation, they carve up their environment much like, well, a chicken. Some regions of the nebula, known as Bok globules, can withstand the fierce bombardment from the ultraviolet radiation pervading this region. If you zoom in to the image, you might see them: small, dark, and dense pockets of dust and gas dotted across the nebula.

Other regions pictured here include, to the upper right, Gum 39 and 40, and to the lower right, Gum 41. Aside from nebulae, there are countless orange, white and blue stars, like fireworks in the sky. Overall in this image, there are more wonders than can be described — zoom in and pan across, and you’ll have a feast for the eyes.

This image is a large mosaic comprising hundreds of separate frames carefully stitched together. The individual images were taken through filters that let through light of different colours, which were then combined into the final result presented here. The observations were conducted with the wide-field camera OmegaCAM on the VST, a telescope owned by the National Institute for Astrophysics in Italy (INAF) and hosted by ESO at its Paranal site in Chile’s Atacama Desert that is ideally suited for mapping the southern sky in visible light. The data that went into making this mosaic were taken as part of the VST Photometric Hα Survey of the Southern Galactic Plane and Bulge (VPHAS+), a project aimed at better understanding the life cycle of stars.

Contrast this small fraction of the visible universe (it occupies an area of the night sky about the size of 25 full moons) with the laughably naïve description of the Universe in Genesis 1: 6-18:

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. And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the third day.

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. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

The Universe as described in Genesis 1: 6-19

And, just to reinforce the ignorance of the authors of Genesis who guessed what they didn't know and got it so spectacularly wrong, here is a selection of deep-space images from the ESO: