Why I Am No Longer Christian

#2: The Creation Myth is False

The very first biblical error shows up within the first two chapters: the Creation myth.

I was going to quote Genesis 1-2, but it is unnecessarily long for a chapter of this length. So, if you need a refresher or haven't read the Old Testament (OT) before, you can find it easily at biblegateway.com. You can even pick your favorite edition there, and what language(s) you want to read it in.

The big takeaway is that the Creation myth is not factual or scientifically accurate. And how do we know what really happened? We can piece together the history of the Universe from hundreds of years of discoveries in physics, cosmology, biology, geology, archaeology, and the other sciences to paint a picture of what went on.

In the beginning, the Universe was a hot, dense point source — everything that ever was, is, and will be was packed into that space. Then, in a tiny fraction of a second, the point source expanded rapidly, creating both space and time. This is known as the Big Bang. (Scientists can actually extrapolate back to about 10^(-43) seconds after the Universe was created, meaning that we have detailed models of the Universe almost up to its conception!)

This rapidly expanding Universe was a very hot soup of subatomic particles, so hot that the four fundamental forces of the Universe were a unified force. As the Universe cooled and expanded, the forces separated, and subatomic particles formed into protons and neutrons. This happened within the first second. After three minutes, the lightest elements, hydrogen (H) and helium (He), began to form. After twenty minutes, the first microstructures formed. These are what we see today as galaxies.

Now fast forward to 380,000 years after the Big Bang. The Universe finally cooled off enough for the electrons to bond with hydrogen and helium to create stable, neutral atoms. (The Big Bang also made trace amounts of other elements, but I study space in my spare time, so I'm trying to keep my explanations as basic and simple as possible!) This important event is called recombination. Once this happened, photons (i.e. particles of light) were able to escape from the opaque soup of particles, leaving a lasting glow. This glow is measurable and called the cosmic microwave background radiation, or CMB for short. Mapping the CMB is like developing the Universe's baby picture.

^ the Universe's baby picture c. 380,000 years after the Big Bang, featuring temperature fluctuations across the entire sky

The first stars formed around 400,000 million years after the Big Bang. About a billion years after the Big Bang, the first galaxies formed. Around the stars, planets and other compact objects were created. The Universe continued to churn out new stars and galaxies, as well as to expand; in fact, it is still expanding today. From different complicated techniques, including comparing our current rate of expansion to the past rates, astronomers can calculate the precise age of the Universe. It is about 13.8 billion years old!

^ a helpful visual of the galactic timeline and the Universe's life so far

Focusing closer to home, the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. (The Solar System is slightly older.) When the Sun formed, it had a hot disk of material spinning around it that would become planets, moons, and asteroids, called a protoplanetary disk. The material gradually accreted into larger and larger objects until they reached asteroid, moon, and then planet size. This was a time of many impacts from objects as big as the Moon or even Mars, so Earth's surface was covered in lava, active volcanoes, and craters. The volcanoes spewed gas, which became an atmosphere, and water covered the surface of Earth. The atmosphere didn't have oxygen until the first photosynthesizing life forms took carbon dioxide and released oxygen as a byproduct into the air.

The rest of Earth's history is a long one. Ice ages came and went, the waters rose and fell, and continents drifted around. As for life, it has had an equally winding path. The first lifeforms were prokaryotes (cells without nuclei), eukaryotes (cells with nuclei), bacteria, sponges, fungi, algae, simple underwater plants, and corals. Next came the rapid development of whole new lifeforms, including crustaceans (e.g. lobsters, crabs, shrimp, barnacles) and arachnids (e.g. spiders, scorpions, ticks, mites), which fall under arthropods. Jellyfish, worms, mollusks (e.g. snails, slugs, octopi, squids, clams), and echinoderms (e.g. starfish, sea urchins) also appeared around this time. This development of new life is called the Cambrian Explosion.

Next came fish, ferns, insects, and amphibians, which eventually developed into reptiles and dinosaurs. Then came birds, a living relative of the extinct dinosaurs, and mammals. Later came flowering plants, large mammals (e.g. whales, horses, monkeys), grasses, mammoths and Neanderthals, and finally modern humans in the last 10,000 years (although ancestors to humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years).

^ a basic example of evolutionary timelines with a few important developments labeled

Needless to say, this narrative doesn't fit within the Creation story. In Genesis 1, "the heavens and the earth" were created from "the waters," and on the first day, God created light. On the second day, God separated "water from water" with a "vault" (the sky). On the third day, he separated water from land and formed plants. On the fourth day, he created the Sun, the Moon, and stars "to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness." The fifth day saw the creation of sea creatures and birds, the sixth day saw the creation of land animals and humans, and the seventh day was a day of rest. (In contrast, it can be argued that in Genesis 2, Earth's dry land was created first, followed by waters, man, vegetation, animals, and finally, woman. I will discuss this possible contradiction in greater length in Chapter 25.)

Regardless, Genesis does not follow the observed patterns for the evolution of life or the Universe. In the Creation myth, the order is Earth; light; the atmosphere; dry land and plants; the Sun, the Moon, and the stars; sea creatures and birds; and land animals and humans. But what the evidence shows us is that the order was actually light, the stars, the Sun, the Earth, the Moon, the atmosphere and water, sea creatures, dry land and plants, amphibians and reptiles, birds, and then humans. Even the biological timeline isn't a clear-cut distinction, since simple underwater plants formed far earlier than land plants, and biologists think that underwater mammals like whales and dolphins developed after land mammals did.

For young-earth creationists (evangelical Christians who believe in biblical inerrancy and literalism), there are two majorly perplexing parts of the scientific explanation for the Cosmos. One is the idea that the Universe could be so old. According to young-earth creationists, the Universe is between 6,000 and 10,000 years old — a far cry from what the evidence tells us. Of course, it is up to them to explain how this can be true in the face of decades of cosmological evidence, Earth's fossil record, and even human history (for example, prehistoric paintings have been found in caves from around 32,000 years ago).

The other perplexing part for young-earth creationists is twofold: how evolution could create such diversity of seemingly "designed" species and lifeforms, and how life could form out of "nothing," both of which are endlessly fascinating topics to study. For a simple explanation of evolution, I recommend reading Jerry A. Coyne's Why Evolution is True or checking out PBS's Nova series on evolution. For more on abiogenesis (the development of life from non-living matter) and the studies of the beginning of life on Earth, you can check out the articles in my sources chapter. Either way, science has given us a much more satisfactory and detailed answer than a religious Creation story ever could.

So, if the Creation story is inaccurate, what about Adam and Eve? That is the question I will dive into next.