Pope Francis: The Big Bang and Evolution Are Real

http://sploid.gizmodo.com/pope-fran...source=gizmodo_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

I am... amazed, to be honest! Also... I agree - Faux News is gonna lose their shit over this XD​

 

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The Catholic church gave its OK for acceptance of the BB and evolution more then a decade ago as far as I know.
I have actually used that fact in arguments with creationists in the past.
Maybe this was just reconfirming it?

 

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Quite. In the case of evolution I think it goes back to 1950 or so.

None of this is news or in the least remarkable. Same will go for the Archbishop of Canterbury , the Moderator of the Church of Scotland and practically all the head of major western Christian denominations.

Only extreme evangelical Protestants, plus Jehovah's Witnesses and the like, have a problem with either.

 

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Sorry, if this is a bit off topic. No one need respond. Once on an Easter Sunday I wished a Witness a 'Happy Easter' and he coldly told me Jehovah's Witnesses don't celebrate Easter. What...!?

The very next day, a young man shook my hand and wished me a 'Happy Easter' as I am nominally christian of some sort, at least he thought so, and after I thanked him, I said, "You're a Muslim and you can wish me a 'Happy Easter', but just yesterday..." Well, you know the rest. Do you know that if you're a Jehovah's Witness you can't even root for a football team? How ridiculous is that? I don't hold with those who pray for their team to win, for several reasons, but my gawd! What harm is there in following interested a sports team. Stupid Witnesses. Also they can't vote. Gawd almighty!

 

Yeah, aged news. The Big Bang was accepted as far back as the 50s, as I recall.

 

Yes, the Catholic Church has been subtlety deceiving people on this issue for decades. They do not accept evolution, they accept something that looks superficially like evolution, but with divine intervention all along the way.

 

Well, that's their mandate. What the hell did you expect, a sudden deference to complete naturalism?

 

I expect them to be honest, despite centuries of behavior to the contrary.

 

I'm just surprised to hear him say, pretty much cut and dry, that yeah, it did happen... no real lingual tomfoolery or such

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They are honest. They're also honest to their philosophy. And they're free to believe as they like; science has nothing to say about God and the reverse.

 

No, every couple of years they make a fuss about how they believe in evolution, everybody forgets the last time they did it, and nobody pays attention to the details. It is dishonest PR.

 

I would rephrase thusly:
The beginning of the world is not the work of chaos that owes its origin to something else, but it derives directly from a supreme principle that creates out of symbiosis.

 

Correct.

No, the Pope doesn’t support evolution

 

I think that article is pretty biased there spidergoat XD

 

Of course it's biased. It's biased towards the truth.

 

I'm not sure why.

The Catholics have been saying that for many years. Catholic scientists have been major contributors to the growth of evolutionary theory and there are currently evolutionary biology research programs at many Catholic universities. Biological evolution, the age of the Earth and the importance of the fossil record are all taught in Catholic school science classes.

The Catholics do officially hold to the view that biological evolution has unfolded according to God's larger plan. That's clearly an expression of their faith, but in my view it isn't all that different than the causal determinism that we see many atheists arguing in the free-will/determinism threads here on Sciforums. In both cases there's the idea that the direction of all subsequent events was determined somehow at the very beginning. Actually the determinists seem to be much more adamant about that than the Catholics.

Where the Catholics seem to me to draw their line and mount their defense isn't in evolutionary biology, but rather in the philosophy of mind. Officially at least, the church still seems to want to hold on to the idea of spirit, to the idea of the human soul. And once again, we sometimes see ostensible atheists making similar arguments against physicalism in the philosophy of mind and/or for more radical forms of metaphysical idealism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_evolution

 

2012
Vatican astronomer says Big Bang theory in tune with creation history

2005
Catholic schools steer clear of anti-evolution bias
"The heated evolution versus creationism controversy is one battle in the culture wars that U.S. Catholics can watch from the sidelines. As church officials recently put it: “The church does not need to fear the teaching of evolution.” "

The Vatican took a "neutral" stance towards evolution around 1950.

 

It's arguable that Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian Catholic priest and professor at the Catholic University of Louvain, was the originator of the Big Bang theory. He may very well have been the first astronomer to publish the proposal that cosmological redshifts were evidence that the universe was expanding. He speculated that if we follow that expansion back in time, we end up at what he termed a 'primaeval atom' or a 'cosmic egg'. (The term 'big bang' seems to have been coined by steady-state advocate Fred Hoyle, who intended it sarcastically.)

Interestingly, Pope Pius XII referred approvingly to Lemaitre's theory in 1951 as evidence of creation. That didn't please Lemaitre, who thought that science and theology should be kept separate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaître

 

Doesn't matter.

 

That's fine, they can express their faith, but it's not the scientific theory we are talking about. They have created their own version of the theory and are pretending it's the same. Evolution is inherently adaptive and doesn't follow a plan.