NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day on August 5th 2014 was a picture titled Hadeon Earth. It is a picture of what the planet Earth allegedly looked like four billion years ago. But how does any one know what it looked like back then? Were they there to take this picture? No of course not. It is based on a just-so story. That story is claimed tobe  backed by scientific evidence but it is more backed by the faith that the scientists have in science–which really is scientism. Scientism is the belief that science alone can eventually answer all questions, reveal all truth even reveal the unobserved history of our planet back 4 billion years.

Figure 1: Hadeon Earth, 4 billion years ago. Illustration Credit: Simone Marchi (SwRI), SSERVI, NASA

The explanation with the picture on the NASA website reads (my emphases added):

Explanation: No place on Earth was safe. Four billion years ago, during the Hadean eon [named because of the high surface temperatures like Hell, a biblical reference], our Solar System was a dangerous shooting gallery of large and dangerous rocks and ice chunks. Recent examination of lunar and Earth bombardment data indicate that the entire surface of the Earth underwent piecemeal upheavals, hiding our globe’s ancient geologic history, and creating a battered world with no remaining familiar land masses. The rain of devastation made it difficult for any life to survive, although bacteria that could endure high temperatures had the best chance. Oceans thought to have formed during this epoch would boil away after particularly heavy impacts, only to reform again. The above artist’s illustration depicts how Earth might have looked during this epoch, with circular impact features dotting the daylight side, and hot lava flows visible in the night. One billion years later, in a calmer Solar System, Earth’s first supercontinent formed.

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