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Pope Advised Hawking Not to Study Origin of Universe
BlueCup submits a link to an Associated Press article running in the Northwest Florida Daily News which begins "Famous astrophysicist Stephen Hawking said Thursday that the late Pope John Paul II once told scientists they should not study the beginning of the universe because it was the work of God. The British author, who wrote the best-seller 'A Brief History of Time,' said that the pope made the comments at a cosmology conference at the Vatican."
According to the article, "The scientist then joked during a lecture in Hong Kong, 'I was glad he didn't realize I had presented a paper at the conference suggesting how the universe began. I didn't fancy the thought of being handed over to the Inquisition like Galileo.'"
He wrote that anecdote himself in "A Brief History of Time". So, this *really* is old news.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
If you love God, why not read up on his work?
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Pope Palpatine will advocate not studying conception...since it is an act of God. Great. Guess my girlfriend won't be putting out.
The Inquisition can't come for Hawking now: he's expecting it!
[FROM TFA]...he had one more great ambition: "I would also like to understand women."
The Vatican was unavailable for comment.
Church versus Science. Not exactly a new story.
But, I'm surprised to hear the Pope said this. I'd thought the Catholic church was relatively progressive in terms of creationism. A few hundred years ago, it might have made a difference what they thought.
These days, this kind of comment makes the church look archaic rather than actually discouraging scientists. At least in Europe.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
...then shouldn't the Pope be against all science? Funny how they only do this with the sciences that threaten their beliefs. I find this interesting since this same Pope embraced evolution.
Pope, speaking in bad Italian accent: Yeah, you see, it's like this Mr. Hawking... the beginning of everything... that's God's work... he wouldn't be too pleased if you found out too much about what he did... he's very private that way... he tends to get upset easily... and we wouldn't want anything to say, happen to you... you wouldn't want to end up in a wheelchair or nothin'... oh wait...
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
It's turtles all the way down.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
The Pope doesn't represent all of Chistianity or religion for that matter. Hawkings should study and theorize the origin of the universe as much as he wants. He probably will never determine if a higher being actually flipped the switch that made it happen, though. Science explains how, what, where, and when. Religion explains who and why.
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
That's my thought. Why shouldn't we study everything so we can bask in the full glory of God's work?
of course with knowledge comes the fact that most religions are just social engineering scams designed to control the population and make people feel better about themselves at the expense of others^H^H non-believers.
Oh well I have my beliefs and I don't care if no one else believes what I do. A good life involves giving to others, for in the end only kindness matters.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
in the end only kindness matters.
Thanks Jewel.
If you look at all of the other statements that JPII made regarding science and faith, this would immediately strike you as out of character. Add that to the fact that I've never seen someone actually produce proof that he ever said it, like a transcription or something. So, I think Hawking either misquoted, misunderstood(given JPII's accent, understandable) or made up the quote. After all, it makes a good joke, right?
All that is necessary for the triumph of good is that evil men do nothing.
Science is to religion as truth is to politics. Incompatible and irrelevant. Honestly, when you consider the history of the Catholic Church, or most other religions and religious institutions, how can you believe anything they say? Of course they oppose science as science keeps exposing them for the phonies that they are. As more and more of their "truth" is exposed as fraud they lose power and influence. Take anything that anyone ever asks or demands that you accept "on faith" without ever backing it up with evidence with one giant fucking grain of salt. One a side note wouldn't John Paul II's time have been better spent trying to weed out and punish the child molesters in his own church? That, ladies and gentleman, tells you all you need to know about the church and its priorities. What a sick joke.
There are priests who have done science too (maybe even scientists who became priests :)
:)
Take for example, Lemaitre who is credited with proposing the none too unsignificant Big Bang theory. He was a Belgian Roman Catholic priest. He convinced Hubble and Einstein of the expanding universe model using Hubble's experimental work and Einstein's theories.
Jokingly, I would say the Pope advised Hawking not to study the origin of the universe because the Vatican wanted to beat him to publishing the first paper
Just think about what a pathetic concept of divinity that is: a supposedly almighty God who dislikes it when his creation looks at his works. That's in addition to all the smighting, shame, pain, and torture that Catholicism says God inflicts on the world.
I'm agnostic about whether there is some higher power. But a world created and ruled by the kind of schizophrenic and conflicted being that the Catholic church postulates makes no sense to me, and my faith tells me that they are wrong; no omnipotent being could sensibly be as petty and hateful towards mankind as the Catholic church claims God is.
While I don't have a reference for this, I seem to recall reading that Hawking misquoted John Paul. The Pope didn't say that scientists *shouldn't* study the beginning of the Universe, but that the scientists *wouldn't* be able to explain the instant of Creation, because that came from God; it was an expression of faith, rather than an admonition.
And as far as I know, the Pope so far is right; cosmologists will talk about t=1e-12 seconds after the Big Bang, and so forth, but few talk about t=0 (or t0) in anything but completely speculative ways. The Big Bang and "Let there be light!" are perfectly compatible if you're not a literalist.
What are you talking about? Sir Isaac Newton didn't discover gravity. Al Gore did.
"You will pay for your lack of vision..." - Emperor Palpatine to Ray Charles
I was raised Baptist but am not religious these days. Many many scientists have a deep spirituality or faith and feel that science just gets you closer to the creation. I've never had a problem with science versus faith: to put it into religious terms, I presume that science is our attempt at explaining "how," and spirituality is our attempt at explaining "why." There's no disconnect here.
The bible doesn't explain how the universe was created, and explicitly says that God's timeline is nothing like man's timeline, so there's no point in parsing "six days" as meaning anything in particular to us. If I feel like parsing it at all, I'd say the seventh day of rest aligns quite nicely with the future era of calmness mentioned in Revelations, so maybe we're still in the sixth day as far as God is concerned. I've subsequently heard some Israeli theologians have put forth the same conjecture. But I don't parse the bible that much, as I already figured out what I want to figure out with regards to my own spirituality: do less harm than good, and the world will be alright.
Major organized religions (aka, Church Inc.) just don't want any explaining of either, as it impacts the bottom line. Come in, drop off your tithe, pat a homeless man on the head, and go watch your kids' soccer game. Questions come pretty close to questioning authority, and they like being the unquestioned authority. I mean, really, condoms in Africa...
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what is the pope afraid of?
Why does it matter that someone like Hawkings studies it? If god is real, then he will discover that.. If god is not real, then that will be discovered. In the end only the truth matters, regardless of which answer is 'found'. ( not that i ever expect that question to really ever be answered, there will ALWAYS be doubt.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
So, if I read a ten, fifteen, maybe thirty-year-old book, can I submit quotes from it as news, too?
Well, maybe Hawking himself submitted this, and it just took him this long to... type... it... with... his... little... clicker... thing...
I for one, wholeheartedly embrace the concept of design...
Years ago I had a Religious Education teacher who talked about the "God Bin" which was a place to stick all the stuff we didn't understand by simply saying "God did it". Science has the job of emptying the God Bin and now all the easy stuff, night and day, why bees can fly etc are done there are only a few things rattling around in the bottom of the bin so it isn't any wonder that the Pope would grasp onto one of the last things and say science shouldn't touch. The only other stuff in the God Bin now is stuff that people just make up and is impossible to prove one way or another such as the existence of a 'soul'.
And yes, I read 'A Brief History of Time' several times and always enjoyed the bit about the Pope telling him to stay away from the beginning of the universe.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
"Galileo got in trouble for saying that the earth moves... in a book that irreverently satirized the current pope."
/. So Galileo proceeds to publish a book in which he thoroughly flames the Pope, and puts the Pope's words, in some cases distorted or taken out of context, in the mouth of a character whose name is just one letter away from "Stupid"... and is pronounced almost the same as "Stupid." In effect it's the kinda flamebait post that goes on and on about how the opponent is just too stupid to understand, only in print.
Read again the part after the "..." and there you have the real problem.
AFAIK, Galileo had had a pretty civilized talk with the Pope, and while the Pope wasn't convinced by Galileo's argumentation, he let Galileo go.
Before you blame the Pope of being too fanatical to accept science, remember that it wasn't just faith, but they did have their own explanations (derived from Aristotles) about how the world works. It may have been wrong in retrospect, but as far as any wise man at the time was concerned, they already had a science of sorts. Something that comes and turns the whole cosmic model on its head, damn better be convincing, and at any rate the Pope wasn't convinced. And remember that the Pope had been willing to hear Galileo's arguments, which doesn't strike me as too closed-minded.
Unfortunately, Galileo seems to have had the same kind of personality one can see often on
Now also bear in mind that the Pope at the time was debatably the biggest political figure. A king above kings, if you will. They weren't big on democracy and freedom of speech back then...
And Galileo goes and flames him in public and calls him stupid...
I don't know, seems to me like science-vs-religion had _nothing_ to do with what happened from there. You get in a public pissing contest with the dictator of the realm, you get roughed up in return. It's that simple.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This once again shows the stifling effect that religion can have on science.
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I kept reading through the posts until I found it, and I knew I would -- the god-hater's words on the matter.
Religion isn't perfect and neither is science. If, indeed, a religious figure told a great scientist to not study something then that's unfortunate. It doesn't make religion useless, no more than detonating an scientifically discovered atom bomb over a city makes science useless, but pound-for-pound, one could argue that science has been far more effective in providing the means by which humanity can annihilate itself than religion ever has.
Here's one for ya: science & religion are both imperfect. Indeed, science is no slouch itself when it comes to being misused by humanity. Religion can stifle science? True. I concur, and scientifically-based governments have stifled religion. The soviets and Nazi governments both were quite efficient at imprisoning, killing priests & destroying churches. It was unfortunate that governments came to be that both laid foundational claims to science and then also persecuted the religious.
We cannot get rid of either really, nor should we. Science we need and it has vastly benefited the human race, but religion will not go away nor should it. It really cannot you see.
I'll digress here and point to my blog post on the subject: http://fatkiddown.blogspot.com/2005/08/death-of-t
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
...the pope was being silly.
The Catholic church does not object to evolutionary theory, on the premise that "life evolved" and "God created life" are compatible--by way of "God used evolution to create life". (In much the same way, no Christian I've heard of objects to the study of embryology, even though Psalm 139 talks about God "knitting together" the psalmist in his mother's womb.) The reason people like me remain creationists isn't because God couldn't create with evolution, but because common descent isn't compatible with the Genesis account.
So why should the pope object to the idea of God creating using a Big Bang? Theologically speaking, that would be no different from God creating life using evolution.
"It's OK to study the universe and where it began. But we should not enquire into the beginning itelf because that was the moment of creation and the work of God."
You sir, or madame, are full of shit. I know two people who insist on a literal and flawless interpretation of the bible. If it is in their KJV bible it is true with the translation to english fixing several lies in the vulgate because God inspired the translators. A very nice couple to be around as long as you don't bring up religion.
Kind of like "Moose", which stems from Canadian Latin ... ;-)
The Catholic church has learned its lesson after Galileo. See for example Evolution and the Roman Catholic Church. The main place it continues to fly in the face of scientific opinion is when science affects what it considers to be its own sacred turf of the traditional family, but outside that you can expect the Vatican to be pretty pro-science. (In fact, this is not wholly new. Many outstanding scientists around the time of Galileo were priests at the Jesuit university in Rome). Indeed the Natural Law tradition, which is traditionally strong in Catholic theology, is a motivation to study nature.
The big danger to science as I see it comes from fundamentalists, Christian and otherwise. When scripture is granted authority over actual observations, then science is in trouble.
Isn't the Bible the work of God?
Isn't everything the work of God in some manner or another? Doesn't that make all quests for knowledge suspect?
!gnineppah si ti ,on hO
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
.); enilemit eht nwod kcab yaw eht no swen neeb evah dluow siht os ,hcnurc gib eht sdrawot gnitcartnoc detrats esrevinu eht nehw esrever dluow emit taht deveileb ecno gnikwaH ,lleW .em erofeb ereht tog uoY
With the first link, the chain is forged.
I heard this same anecdote from Hawking himself when he visited Chile a few years ago.
I'm reminded of a story Carl Sagan used to tell. He once asked the pope (John Paul II, of course) what he would do if some scientific discovery proved once and for all and irrefutably that the precepts of Christianity were false. The pope lectured him for a few minutes about how this wasn't possible.
Sagan once asked the Dalai Lama the exact same thing. The Lama's answer?
"I would tell the world, of course! There are millions of buddhists in the world and if I find out their all wrong, I should tell them as soon as possible, and we should look for a better way to live then.
Very different mindset.
Slashdot: news from nerds.
- Genesis 15:5
He took him outside and said, "Look up at the heavens and count the stars..."
- Psalm 143:5
I remember the days of long ago; I meditate on all your works and consider what your hands have done.*
- Psalm 92:4
For you make me glad by your deeds, O LORD; I sing for joy at the works of your hands*
- Proverbs 6:6
Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise!
- Luke 12:24
Consider the ravens: They do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them. And how much more valuable you are than birds!
*Hebrews 13:7 Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith.When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
First you crawl back up into your mother then are sucked out of there by your dad. Wonderfull. I hope they have shrinks in the pre-life.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
In the end, every fact you haven't personally experienced is based on faith.
Perhaps, but religious "facts", unlike scientific facts, require a large degree of doublethink to accept.
For example, you have never been into space. You may have never looked out the window of an aircraft, yet you are told that the earth is round. You can accept this fact, in contridiction to your own expieriences of a flat earth, as locally the round earth looks like a flat one. What you have accepted as fact, and what you expierience, are indeed compatable. There were no mental gymnastics required to accept the idea of a spherical earth, once given gravity.
However, for religious facts, virtually every one contridicts our expieriences and knowladge. We require doublethink to accept them. The definition of doublethink is one accepts a fact that one knows to be untrue or impossible, and simultaniously forgets that one ever thought or could ever have thought otherwise. The best example of this is clearly a physisist or indeed, any scientist believing in the miracle of loaves and fishes from the new testament. It's clear that numerous physical laws are grossly violated in the parable, yet there are learned, educated people who hold the story to be absolute fact, despite the reality that they would consider you mad if you recounted witnessing a similar event. Doublethink at its purest.
So scientific facts such as the conservation of mass, the theory of gravity, the theory of evolution, the average height of a population, the theory of flight, etc; are all acceptable facts which can be shown to agree, eventually, with our own expierience and common sense. Religious facts such as Noah's Ark, the miracle of the loaves and fishes, the ressurection of Jesus, meeting Gabriel on Hira, the incarnations of Vishnu, the visions of Joseph Smith, etc; are all facts which can never been shown to agree with either our own expierience or common sense. They are also, unlike scientific, completely unverifiable, uncheckable, unreproducable, and in general, poorly or ambiguously stated.
Doublethink is essential if one is to accept religious facts, especially if one also accepts reason and the scientific method. Only in this way is it possible to completely accept two totally contridictory facts. Humans are quite capable of believing that both A and not A will hold simultaniously, though this can hardly be described as a healthy state of mind. In the words of Mark Twain: "Faith is believing what you know ain't so". Science on the other hand is believing what you know, or what you can deduce, to be true.
May the Maths Be with you!
That's because the Big Bang theory WAS developed by a religious person, namely Georges Lemaître.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtr
A Roman Catholic priest!
From that link
I do agree though, that this is the best explanation of God. Something we can never possibly understand.
God is timeless. ~ The Universe had NO time before the Bang.
Where is God? God is everywhere. ~ The Universe is everywhere.
etc...
= The Universe IS God
Mind you, the theory DOES threaten the beliefs of the Fundamentalists. Of course, suggesting that the world has a history beyond 6500 years ago does as well.
I would be surprised, if it were true, but it doesn't seem to be. First of all, it defies logic -- that the Church would a conference on cosmology at which the Pope would simply tell people not to study cosmology -- and second, as far as I can tell from a search of several archives of Papal speeches, the only Vatican conference on cosmology that John Paul II addressed was on July 6, 1985, and his remarks to that conference do not include even the remotest suggestion that the beginnings of the universe, or any other matter within the scope of scientific investigation, should not be investigated.
He does suggest that science alone is inadequate to completely understand the mysteries of creation, and that human understanding of our role in the universe must be informed by more than science, but that's not even remotely like discouraging investigation by science of, well, anything.
In a sense, JPII is actually right there: it's impossible for science to prove anything about an entity outside the observable universe.
Let me use WoW as an example. Let's say the observable universe is WoW. Even the wisest scholar living _in_ the WoW universe, even with the best gnomish instruments, can only observe and measure things that are _inside_ this universe.
What it _can't_ observe is the universe's creator: Blizzard.
Can such a scholar prove, with only the data in his universe, that Blizzard doesn't exist? No. He just doesn't have the data on which to base such a proof. The best his science can do is state that the universe can be explained well enough without this mystical "Blizzard" entity at the helm.
Same is it with RL science and God. Science _can't_ prove that God doesn't exist. All science can do is explain the universe well enough without needing some "God" entity. But that's all.
No, seriously, I know that we all love to troll and bait the christians. But put your thinking cap for a second and you'll realize the same: if a "creator" exists _outside_ the universe he created (just like Blizzard exists outside the WoW universe), science can't prove or disprove this creator in any form or shape. It just can't get any data from there. At all. Ever.
Not to mention that it's not even possible to prove a negative like that. As long as science can't know every single atom in the universe, _and_ go back in time and observe what happened at every single moment since Big Bang, you simply can't have enough proof that something _doesn't_ exist even _inside_ your universe. It's like proposing to prove that a green three-legged rabbit doesn't exist and never existed. You only need one specimen to prove that it does exist, but it's simply unfeasible to prove that nowhere in the universe such a creature ever existed.
The best science can do is apply Occam's Razor. Basically to say "well, we can explain the universe perfectly well even without some 'God' hypothesis, so we don't need such a hypothesis." But that's all.
Plus, some of the precepts of Christianity are pretty much notions, ideals or moral judgments. How do you scientifically disprove "love thy neighbour"? How would you scientifically disprove "thou shalt not kill"? No, seriously. They're moral precepts that reflect a certain set of values, not something you can run through a spectrograph or whatever other instrument.
So basically, yes, JPII was right: it's not even possible. So while it makes for some good christian-bashing material to compare the answers there, in practice it's about as relevant as asking "what would you do if gravity just suddenly disappeared?" It seems to me like "it's not even possible" is a perfectly valid answer there. Sure, it's not the most interesting or imaginative kind of an answer, but nevertheless it is a valid one.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
And then read The Jury Is In, which carefully analyzes the infamous Evidence That Demands a Verdict.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
This is a very important question for someone using that line of reaoning.
To expand on this:
The Universe exists, so something must have created it.
Thus, the universe exists, and something that created it exists.
You have just created the exact same problem again. You've just transfered the problem.
And don't say, "but maybe God's eternal and didn't need to be created!" because you could just say that about the Universe if you wanted to. As long as you're assigning unverifi(ed|able) attributes to something that may or may not exist to explain the existance of some other, known-to-exist thing, you might as well just assign those same unverifi(ed|able) attributes to the thing itself (the universe, in this case) instead. It's adding complexity for NO REASON if one throws God into the mix.