Pope Says Christians Should Accept Big Bang And Evolution

[♦ ficino ♦]

While unveiling a bust of his predecessor in the Holy See, Pope Francis gave a speech supporting the theories of Evolution and the Big Bang. He said God does not act as a magician but through processes, allowing creatures to develop. He also said that humans have the moral duty to preserve nature and the environment.

 

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/10/god-is-not-a-magician-pope-says-christians-should-believe-in-evolution-and-big-bang/

 

This is not new Catholic teaching. The Catholic Church has been OK with the TOE for many decades. It's also been OK for a long time with taking various biblical stories not as literal history but as encoding more sophisticated truths.

 

My understanding is that they hold that God did something special to two primates (or maybe more than two, I'm not sure) to create the first humans, who sinned. From there it's Original Sin, Jesus' redemptive work, all the way through.

 

BAA, I'd appreciate your take on this. Can Catholics get away with allegorizing parts of Genesis and not other parts? They proudly declare that they do this. A lot of Catholics think that you can't have only science or religion but need a synthesis of both.

 

I have issues with this approach, but I can't bring much scientific knowledge to the question. Does the TOE exclude the notion that there was a first man and a first woman?

[Ravenstar]

The beginnings of self-consciousness… abstract thinking, would have been a very gradual process… animals have varying degrees of sentience. Take dolphins - who can recognize themselves in a mirror and use it to check themselves out. A very high degree of consciousness…have a culture. Apes that can learn sign language and express their wants and needs and observations.. again quite high. That there was a deciding moment in our evolution is silly… it doesn't work that way.

 

Have to run.. more later.  

[TheRedneckProfessor]

 Does the TOE exclude the notion that there was a first man and a first woman?

The evidence of the fossil record shows that there were multiple humanoid species, not just neanderthals and modern humans.  Evolution states that gradual changes in DNA lead to speciation.  This would mean that there was no defining moment when humans became "human", which does seem to exclude the notion of a "first" man and woman. 

 

We also need to keep in mind that once moderns began migrating out of Africa and discovering neanderthals across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, there was a fair amount of interbreeding.  This means that even the original modern humans would have been somewhat different from us, as we are now a mixture of modern and neanderthal DNA.

[bornagainathiest]

While unveiling a bust of his predecessor in the Holy See, Pope Francis gave a speech supporting the theories of Evolution and the Big Bang. He said God does not act as a magician but through processes, allowing creatures to develop. He also said that humans have the moral duty to preserve nature and the environment.

 

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/10/god-is-not-a-magician-pope-says-christians-should-believe-in-evolution-and-big-bang/

 

This is not new Catholic teaching. The Catholic Church has been OK with the TOE for many decades. It's also been OK for a long time with taking various biblical stories not as literal history but as encoding more sophisticated truths.

 

My understanding is that they hold that God did something special to two primates (or maybe more than two, I'm not sure) to create the first humans, who sinned. From there it's Original Sin, Jesus' redemptive work, all the way through.

 

BAA, I'd appreciate your take on this. Can Catholics get away with allegorizing parts of Genesis and not other parts? They proudly declare that they do this. A lot of Catholics think that you can't have only science or religion but need a synthesis of both.

 

I have issues with this approach, but I can't bring much scientific knowledge to the question. Does the TOE exclude the notion that there was a first man and a first woman?

 

Thanks for the vote of confidence, F.

 

Please understand that I'm no expert in evolutionary matters.

For an in-depth answer to your question you'd have to throw it open to TheRedNeckProf, who has a far better scientific grounding in these things than I do.  

 

(Ahh... I see the Prof is here. )

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So here's my 50 cents, Ficino.

 

You cannot synthesize a workable mix of science and religion, because science cannot investigate the supernatural and religion cannot function without the supernatural.  Science has nothing to say about the supernatural, because it is purely the study of natural phenomenon.  The only answer it can give about something like water changing into wine is that this happened due to an unknown cause.  

 

But this 'unknown' is not the signal to bring in religion and conclude that this must be due to the power of God.  

If you do that then you aren't synthesizing a workable mixture of science and religion - you're leaving the science out of the mix altogether.   Science has finished it's work and come up blank.  It has drawn a blank.  But if you start drawing religious conclusions from this blank space (         ) , then you are NOT practicing science any more.  You are doing something else.

 

You are building a theological / religious edifice on science's null conclusion, which is no foundation at all - because there is nothing there.  

 

It is a blank space. (        )  

 

Doing that is not science.

Nor is that faithfully and truthfully using science properly.  

As I mentioned above, science is a tool and a discipline for telling us about the natural universe.  It cannot do otherwise and it should not be used as a foundation for anything that requires the supernatural, like religion or theology.

 

So the Catholic way is something I totally and utterly reject, Ficino.

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The only point I can think of making about evolution, is this.

 

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

 

As far as I understand it, there's insufficient diversity in a gene pool of just two people to prevent inbreeding and extinction.  Which is why Christians who take Genesis literally usually call the science of Genetics into question.   Or use special pleading (magic!) to claim that Mud Man and Rib Woman were endowed with SUPERhuman genetic material...!

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Thanks,

 

BAA.

[bornagainathiest]

Oh... but wait!

 

According to the Genesis 9 : 18 & 19 (and 1 Peter 3 : 20)... wasn't the world population reduced to just eight people?

 

So was their DNA just as magical as Adam and Eve's?

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[♦ ficino ♦]

Many thanks, Ravenstar, Prof and BAA. I haven't delved into Church pronouncements on this, and see no reason to devote time doing so, but I get the impression Catholics either just "don't go there" about the details involved in squaring the TOE with their church's doctrine of original sin. There might be sophisticates who try to allegorize Gen. 3 into a message about how we all sin and fall short. That move wouldn't defend the doctrine of Original Sin, though. There might be Catholic conservatives who think God zapped a male and a female higher primate and made two homines sapientes out of them, I don't know.

[bornagainathiest]

Not a problem, F. 

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And there's a 470 year old problem the Pope's going to have to deal with if he really does embrace Big Bang Cosmology.

 

The Copernican Principle.

 

This is a fundamental cornerstone of ALL cosmological science - which includes BBC.

So Papa Frank isn't permitted (by the CP) to claim that our universe was the only one created by God.  Nor is he permitted (by the CP) to claim that our universe was the first one created by God.  If he wants to embrace the science he's got to play by the rules of science.  And that means toeing the Copernican line... all the way down the line.  No exceptions.  No special pleading.  No theological tap-dancing.  No metaphysical mumbo-jumbo.  No philosophical chicanery.  No recourse to Papal infallibility.  Nothing.  Do the science right and do right by the science or don't do it at all!  So, if he's playing this straight, his position has to be as follows.

 

1.  He cannot claim that this universe is any way special, but is simply one of many generated by Inflation.

 

2.  He cannot claim that the Inflationary process of universe-generation required God to initiate it. 

That would mean introducing a supernatural cause into the purely natural scientific paradigm - something that is totally forbidden.

 

3.  He cannot claim that any of the fundamental physical constants of nature in this universe have been fine-tuned by God to allow life to begin and evolve. 

The BBC deals ONLY with the origin of OUR universe and is part of the over-arching theory of Inflation, which describes a potentially eternal process of universe generation. This process has either been proceeding for 13.72 billion years (since it generated our particular universe) or for much, much longer.  Under either scenario, Inflation has generated... GOOGOLPLEXES ...of universes identical to ours in every way.  Every one of these will have exactly the same fundamental physical constants as ours.  Which means that they are just as Fine-Tuned as ours.  Which means that there's nothing FINE about the tuning of our universe at all.  The tuning isn't fine and this universe isn't special and isn't unique.  This so-called fine tuning is common to more universes than there are grains of sand on every beach on this planet.  

 

That's what you get when you use the CP properly to understand the Big Bang and Inflationary theory.

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Thanks,

 

BAA.

[RogueScholar]

It's quite interesting. There are people who can juggle religious dogma and their scientific career. It likely takes a great deal of compartmentalisation or the ability to tolerate a fair amount of cognitive dissonance. Prior to my deconversion I put the cognitive dissonance at bay by believing in concepts such as evolution while also believing that God set the whole thing in motion and things simply evolved according to the laws and principles that God created. Clearly, this was prior to my dive into chemistry where concepts like quantum mechanics and uncertainty eroded such notions. Certainly the notion that an omniscient being could set everything in motion, knowing every outcome in advance. It's quite obvious even to my relatively ignorant mind that uncertainty is a fundamental part of the world.

 

The pope is using a similar thesis. Basically, this is a God of the gaps argument. Unfortunately for the pope we could just as easily replace god with spider pig and the power of the argument would be as robust as using God to fill in the blanks. Either case is supported by exceptionally robust evidence. /sarcasm

 

At the end of the day naturalistic forces are responsible for evolution and this process can be well understood, tested and validated without the need to invoke supernatural hand waving. I think the pope knows this as well and realised it is not possible to argue for a supernatural explanation. Of course, he certainly claims the supernatural when it comes to areas of ignorance but it's probably easier to compete with spider pig anyway.

 

I'm rather pleased with this deistic turn of events. A harbinger of change? Cautiously hopeful at this point.

[♦ ficino ♦]

An old friend of mine is a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering and a committed Catholic. She used to have a poster in her dorm room that ran, "And God said..." and then there was the Schroedinger Equation. Her thesis adviser was an orthodox rabbi AND physicist, who had worked on the Manhattan Project. A former colleague of mine, who taught biology, went to mass every day and was a great fan of Darwin, telling her students about the great man's Thinking Path and old raincoat along with his TOE. Etc.

 

They all had ways of allegorizing stuff in the Bible that worked for them.

[sdelsolray]

...

You cannot synthesize a workable mix of science and religion, because science cannot investigate the supernatural and religion cannot function without the supernatural.  Science has nothing to say about the supernatural, because it is purely the study of natural phenomenon.  The only answer it can give about something like water changing into wine is that this happened due to an unknown cause. 

...

 

 

Good post BAA.  I have a question regarding a portion of it quoted above.  Would it be possible to say that science has (in the past) and does (currently) investigate supernatural claims in the sense that science has provided natural explanations for things that were claimed to be supernatural by certain religious believers?  Some examples:

 

1)  Science has provided a natural explanation for thunder and lightening.  At one time many religious believers claimed thunder and lightening were caused by supernatural entities.

2)  Science has provided a natural explanation for disease.  At one time many religious believers claimed disease caused by supernatural demons based on the conduct of the diseased person.

3)  Science has provided a natural explanation for the origin of species.  In the past and currently many religious believers claim(ed) all species were created by supernatural means.

 

I'm not saying science goes out of its way to investigate supernatural claims, but that through its normal use it has incidentally refuted many supernatural claims.

[sdelsolray]

An old friend of mine is a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering and a committed Catholic. She used to have a poster in her dorm room that ran, "And God said..." and then there was the Schroedinger Equation. Her thesis adviser was an orthodox rabbi AND physicist, who had worked on the Manhattan Project. A former colleague of mine, who taught biology, went to mass every day and was a great fan of Darwin, telling her students about the great man's Thinking Path and old raincoat along with his TOE. Etc.

 

They all had ways of allegorizing stuff in the Bible that worked for them.

There is a trend over recent centuries which demonstrate that supernatural entities are retreating from many things/situations/events/phenomena towards basic and fundamental laws and concepts of physics and chemistry.  As science provides natural explanations, there are less and less items for which a supernatural claim can be made.  For the most part, a creator/god has retreated behind the fundamental laws of physics and chemistry.

[♦ ficino ♦]

^^^^

I think folks like the ones I mentioned might say that the "fundamental laws" to which you refer are indirect evidence that there is a Mind responsible for those laws.

 

I realize that such a position is either question begging or ill defined or both.

 

It's been a while since I've been into such discussions.

[sdelsolray]

^^^^

I think folks like the ones I mentioned might say that the "fundamental laws" to which you refer are indirect evidence that there is a Mind responsible for those laws.

 

I realize that such a position is either question begging or ill defined or both.

 

It's been a while since I've been into such discussions.

I agree and demonstrates that the "Mind" is now hiding behind the Big Bang, Cosmic Inflation and Mathematics because those are the only places left for it to exist in the imagination of its believers.

[bornagainathiest]

 

...

You cannot synthesize a workable mix of science and religion, because science cannot investigate the supernatural and religion cannot function without the supernatural.  Science has nothing to say about the supernatural, because it is purely the study of natural phenomenon.  The only answer it can give about something like water changing into wine is that this happened due to an unknown cause. 

...

 

 

Good post BAA.  I have a question regarding a portion of it quoted above.  Would it be possible to say that science has (in the past) and does (currently) investigate supernatural claims in the sense that science has provided natural explanations for things that were claimed to be supernatural by certain religious believers?  

 

Definitely!

Science is a tool and a discipline for explaining reality.  If in doing this job, it adequately explains something without the need for a supernatural agency, then what's the point of maintaining that this agency exists?    

 

Some examples:

 

1)  Science has provided a natural explanation for thunder and lightening.  At one time many religious believers claimed thunder and lightening were caused by supernatural entities.

 

Because the cause of thunderbolts was unknown to our ancestors - they wrongly concluded them to be the manifestations of an irate sky god.

 

2)  Science has provided a natural explanation for disease.  At one time many religious believers claimed disease caused by supernatural demons based on the conduct of the diseased person.

 

As above.  The causes were unknown, so the only viable explanation had to be a supernatural one.

 

3)  Science has provided a natural explanation for the origin of species.  In the past and currently many religious believers claim(ed) all species were created by supernatural means.

 

As above, again.  

Those that did not and currently cannot bring themselves to accept science's explanation of our origins are forced into a position of rank hypocrisy.  They reap the benefits science gives them and they use it every day, yet they cannot and will not give science the due credit for explaining these things.  

 

Remind you of anyone in this forum, sdelsolray?  

 

I'm not saying science goes out of its way to investigate supernatural claims, but that through its normal use it has incidentally refuted many supernatural claims.

 

Absolutely!

 

[Justus]

Not a problem, F. 

 

And there's a 470 year old problem the Pope's going to have to deal with if he really does embrace Big Bang Cosmology.

 

The Copernican Principle.

 

This is a fundamental cornerstone of ALL cosmological science - which includes BBC.

You do know that it was developed by a Catholic Priest who first published in scientific form the theory during the late 1920's or early 1930's depending on what source you use. This theory in which the primordial atom that contained the matter in the universe evolved from Church theology,  in such any first year theologian could demonstrate the multiple parallels between the big bang an Genesis.

 

 

So Papa Frank isn't permitted (by the CP) to claim that our universe was the only one created by God.

If the CP denies a person the right to freely express their opinion then it contradicts science itself which should hold that this universe is the only one known and observed.  

 

So if that promordial atom existed,  then the nature that it must have existed in would  be nothing according to the Catholic doctrine. Regardless of what model of the Big Bang one subscribes to, what did the primordial atom abode it, nothing?

 

Thus, how did nothing create the external pressure upon the physical matter of the primordial atom in order for it to condense to the sub atomic state necessary to produce the energy to produce the motion for all the matter to be propelled out by the rapid expanse of all the known and observed universe? 

 

[Sexton Blake]

I think we have to take it one step at a time. If we can isolate the creationists so that christians laugh at them, that will be a big benefit.

 

Just the other day I explained evolution to someone I think was a creationist and said that evolution happened AFTER life started so christians can still believe that God created everything and made the first life, and still accept evolution.

[Sexton Blake]

Kicking the Big Bang's ass:

 

It has no credible origin.

 

Suddenly we have this singularity (for want of a better name). How was it made? Where did it come from? Why did it suddenly become unstable and so inflate and expand? There is blatant nonsense about branes and it coming from another Universe but like the idea of a constant Big Bang and Big Collapse idea, this just pushes the mystery back a step and adds nothing to the truth.

 

Inflation is an idea. It requires faster than light movement and we have no evidence such is possible (ignoring the misunderstanding known as quantum entanglement). It is an IDEA made up to explain why the Universe is smooth. I find it apt that the idea was made up by someone called Guth, when his name should obviously be spelt Guff (meaning nonsense or baloney).

 

Then it suddenly switches to sub light expansion.About 42 miles per second per million light years which conventionally would not be much even after 13.8 billion years.

 

But another fudge is used. This is not ordinary expansion as we 3D people think of it but 4D expansion (four physical dimensions) as in dots on a balloon being blown up becoming further apart. Our universe is the 3D skin on a 4D balloon with seemingly nothing inside it and nothing outside it as it expands.

 

Several billion years ago there was another problem. Expansion suddenly increased for some unexplained reason and it was said that Dark Energy had started working. Another fudge, without any evidence. They introduce an idea to support an idea, and though DE makes up 72% of the Universe, with everything we know about being just 4%, we have no actual evidence of DE. Just the supposed effect it was made up to explain.

 

So, nails in the coffin time for expansion. The Universe we are led to believe is expanding and is getting ever bigger, so run time back in your mind and it gets ever smaller. It also gets denser as matter gets close and closer.

 

At some point, while still quite a size (the largest black hole so far found is about 18 billion solar masses and you could fit our solar system to the orbit of Pluto in it, size wise), it reaches black hole density. Parts of it, then larger parts, then all of it are of black hole density. And there is the problem. Black holes do not expand. The Universe can never become bigger than a black hole of similar mass, and everything in a black hole is probably crushed down to fundamental particles (we have no evidence that these can be crushed out of existence).

 

There is also another problem with expansion that no fudge can explain away. The Dark Flow:

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http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2010/12/dark-flow-of-billions-of-stars-dark-flow-racing-away-from-earth-towards-edge-of-observable-universe-.html

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A billion light year wide area of the Universe that is not expanding but contracting. There is no hidden gravitational source pulling it in because it is shrinking at a constant rate throughout.

 

So, the pope's a dope, but so are many astronomers and cosmologists who accept this silly dogma as the truth.

[bornagainathiest]

 

Not a problem, F. 

 

And there's a 470 year old problem the Pope's going to have to deal with if he really does embrace Big Bang Cosmology.

 

The Copernican Principle.

 

This is a fundamental cornerstone of ALL cosmological science - which includes BBC.

You do know that it was developed by a Catholic Priest who first published in scientific form the theory during the late 1920's or early 1930's depending on what source you use. This theory in which the primordial atom that contained the matter in the universe evolved from Church theology,  in such any first year theologian could demonstrate the multiple parallels between the big bang an Genesis.

 

Yes, I did know.

 

Here's the portion of my post you either deliberately snipped out or simply didn't understand, Justus.

 

The BBC deals ONLY with the origin of OUR universe and is part of the over-arching theory of Inflation, which describes a potentially eternal process of universe generation. 

 

The book of Genesis might have parallels with the hot Big Bang at the beginning of our universe, but Inflationary theory tells us that our particular Big Bang isn't unique and is probably one of many.  There are no parallels between Inflationary theory and Genesis.  George Lemaitre's (the priest in question) idea of a primordial atom was good for it's time but new evidence has since consigned it to the dustbin of cosmological history.

 

Do keep up!

 

So Papa Frank isn't permitted (by the CP) to claim that our universe was the only one created by God.

If the CP denies a person the right to freely express their opinion then it contradicts science itself which should hold that this universe is the only one known and observed.

 

You clearly don't understand how the Copernican Principle works, how it's used by cosmologists and why they're glad to use it.

Their freedom of opinion has nothing to do with the CP.   They choose to employ it because the evidence indicates that our universe works this way.  

 

Please read, digest and understand.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_principle

 

So if that promordial atom existed,  then the nature that it must have existed in would  be nothing according to the Catholic doctrine. Regardless of what model of the Big Bang one subscribes to, what did the primordial atom abode it, nothing?

 

Thus, how did nothing create the external pressure upon the physical matter of the primordial atom in order for it to condense to the sub atomic state necessary to produce the energy to produce the motion for all the matter to be propelled out by the rapid expanse of all the known and observed universe? 

 

 

Please bring yourself up to speed on cosmology by visiting this site.

 

http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/relativity-space-astronomy-and-cosmology/big-bang-classic-confusions/

 

It's very good for those who haven't a clue what they're talking about.

 

BAA.