Pope Francis: The Big Bang and Evolution Are Real

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Kittamaru

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Adieu, Sciforums.
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http://sploid.gizmodo.com/pope-fran...source=gizmodo_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

The Head of the Catholic Church has spoken: The Big Bang and evolution are real—God is not "a magician, complete with a magic wand that can do all things," Pope Francis said at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences yesterday. He was surprisingly clear where his immediate predecessors were muddier.

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 love. The Big Bang, that today is considered to be the origin of the world, does not contradict the creative intervention of God; on the contrary, it requires it. Evolution in nature is not in contrast with the notion of [divine] creation because evolution requires the creation of the beings that evolve. [...]

When we read in Genesis the account of creation [we are] in danger of imagining that God was a magician, complete with a magic wand that can do all things. But he is not.

According to this (clever!) Argentinian, God set the Universe in motion, setting the rules that would create us and the Universe. In the past, Pius XII, John Paul II, and Benedict XVII talked about similar topics. Pope John Paul II summarized the previous position in this address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences:

In his encyclical Humani Generis (1950), my predecessor Pius XII has already affirmed that there is no conflict between evolution and the doctrine of the faith regarding man and his vocation, provided that we do not lose sight of certain fixed points.

Taking into account the scientific research of the era, and also the proper requirements of theology, the encyclical Humani Generis treated the doctrine of "evolutionism" as a serious hypothesis, worthy of investigation and serious study, alongside the opposite hypothesis. Pius XII added two methodological conditions for this study: one could not adopt this opinion as if it were a certain and demonstrable doctrine, and one could not totally set aside the teaching Revelation on the relevant questions. He also set out the conditions on which this opinion would be compatible with the Christian faith—a point to which I shall return.

But never a stance was taken so clearly from the Chair of Saint Peter as with Pope Francis.

Still, the Church says in her catechism that it's up to each individual to interpret Genesis literally or not. Most Catholic schools and universities, however, teach biology, evolution and cosmology, just like any other agnostic institution.

But nothing of this matters, folks. I just can't wait to see Fox talking about this.​
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I am... amazed, to be honest! Also... I agree - Faux News is gonna lose their shit over this XD​
 
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?
 
paddoboy said:
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.
 
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!
 
paddoboy said:
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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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'm just surprised to hear him say, pretty much cut and dry, that yeah, it did happen... no real lingual tomfoolery or such :D
 
PhysBang said:
I expect them to be honest, despite centuries of behavior to the contrary.
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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.
 
I think that article is pretty biased there spidergoat XD
 
Kittamaru said:
Pope Francis: The Big Bang and Evolution Are Real.

I am... amazed, to be honest!
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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
 
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GeoffP said:
Yeah, aged news. The Big Bang was accepted as far back as the 50s, as I recall.
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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
 
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Yazata said:
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'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaître
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Doesn't matter.
 
Yazata said:
...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. ...
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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.
 
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