Slashdot Mirror
Pope Francis Declares Evolution and Big Bang Theory Are Right
HughPickens.com writes: The Independent reports that Pope Francis, speaking at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, has declared that the theories of evolution and the Big Bang are real. "When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so," said Francis. "He created human beings and let them develop according to the internal laws that he gave to each one so they would reach their fulfillment." Francis explained that both scientific theories were not incompatible with the existence of a creator – arguing instead that they "require it." "Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve." Experts say the Pope's comments put an end to the "pseudo theories" of creationism and intelligent design that some argue were encouraged by his predecessor, Benedict XVI who spoke out against taking Darwin too far.
There's actually a lot of potentional scientific correct stuff in the Bible. Yet, discussing them usually gets frowned upon by either team - it seems (for atheist scientists) a lot easier to discard the bible as 'rubbish' instead of an historical document - where the religious camp tends to take this same history book too literal, despite all translation issues.
Genesis conforming our current Big Bang theory is already a nice start. But, it also hints of more scientific knowledge already known back in the days we call 'stone age'.
A good example of this are Mozes' hygienic laws - about washing hands, seperating raw from cooked food, refraining from eating animals which carry nasty parasites (pigs) etc.
To stretch the imagination more, more stories possibly have some scientific origin. Let me mention a few (without claiming this is correct, but hopefully also without hilarious laugther):
* The arch of Noah - might well have been a spaceship from another planet or solar system, colonializing earth with humans and various animal species.
* Adam and Eve may tell us about genetic engineering - and hence being banned from paradise (animals have no worries apart the current moment) by the knowledge gained (our brains improved by genetic engineering).
* Jesus might have been a space traveller with a good first-aid kit - hence the miracle curings.
* Ascension tells us how he (Jesus) left with his spaceship.
* Even our fossile records supports theories of an alien origin of mankind - there is the famous 'missing link' between apes and humans, especially recent fossiles. Admittingly there are plenty other explanations for that.
* The reasonable recent human races (homo sapiens, neanderthalers, denisovan) might hint to a humanlike race already spreading accross the universe, and colonizing earth with astronauts from various planets.
* The bible distinguishes between 'The Lord' and 'God' - where the Lord is an actual impersonification of a man. Such Lord may well be some space traveller, or otherwise well-educated person, and is mistaken for God only by misinterpretation.
Etc etc. It's easy reply to this with a 'what the f* did you smoke'. However, keeping all options open is what a scientist ought to do. We may have well been interpreting the Bible the wrong way all along. The better reader already noticed that some of the theories mentioned above conflict eachother. However, seeking a scientific explanantion makes more sence than believing in miracles and an almighty God.
There is so much in history that we don't know, and can only guess. Thinking that we are the first intelligent species and culture that lives on this 4-billion year old earth may be very naive.
To put that in perspective: We will probably be able this, or next century latest, to colonize other planets. We will also be able to send robotic vehicles to other star systems. Chances are, that in the next 500-1000 years, we will be able to geo-engineer another planet (Mars). We may be able to send deepfrozen life and DNA in a robotic space ship to another star. We may be able to send bacterial life to other planets. We even may be able to send animal embryo's to other planets. This is all only limited to our imagination, technically this all seems possible in theory.
Now, if you accept this is possible, by us. Then it is reasonable to assume it happened before. It may be reasonable to speculate that earth is actively colonized, possible after being geo-engineered first for millions of years to make it suitable for human life forms.
Surely the Pope won't like this last speculative thoughts. Yet, it's just a scientific-plausible theory. And we may actually have a record of exactly such in our very own Bible.
A glitch a day keeps the bugs away.
Behind the theory of classic evolution lies a metaphysical explanation for the universe: that life "progresses", from simple to complex, from the more fundamental to the more sublime, from problem to solution. The metaphysics of evolution is very much rooted in the philosophy of positivism and progressivism. It is anti-religious not in the sense that it is against the idea of a God, necessarily, but in the sense that the concept of a God is not needed to explain the natural world. God is irrelevant.
One does not hear debate on the metaphysics of evolution very often, and that is a shame. The philosophy of Progressivism, to me, seems more like wishful thinking, than a real explanation of why things are the they way they are. Is progress absolute? Certainly any objective evaluation of history, with its long record of extinctions, would seem to argue otherwise.
Regarding the Bible's metaphysics, however, there is absolutely nothing in common between progressivism and traditional Christian teaching. The very first chapter of the very first book lays it all on the line: God said, "Let there be light. And there was light..." and so on, for 65 more books. The doctrine of the Bible is that "in Him we live and move and have our being." This couldn't be more orthogonal to the doctrine of positivism.
So, while the Pope may rightly observe that a changing creation is still a creation, I'm not sure that really gets to the heart of the matter, which is a metaphysical argument about origins.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Many evangelicals will be willing to grant some kind of natural selection that you'd have to be blind not to accept. They won't insist that the earth was created a couple thousand years ago. But my experience is that you'd better not say that you accept evolution unless you want all the zany people, whether young or old earth, to start trying to talk you out of it every opportunity they get. In the average evangelical church, an outspoken "evolutionist" would be marginalized and de facto excluded from positions of leaderships.
Yes, most churches won't come out and say that you need to be a YEC or a OEC. But they'll still have that double standard that someone who talks about Adam and Eve being directly, physically created by God will never have any problem, while those who point out that it's scientifically inaccurate will be labeled intolerant, divisive, unfit for leadership, etc.
Around 30% of evangelicals accept evolution. And that's with a very generous definition of evolution that allows for God to guide the process. If you ask people whether they think evolution is true and that was due to natural processes, i.e. the scientific consensus, you're down to 8%. I'm wondering if the Pope is not also leaving the door open to that when he says "evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve".
And note that many among the 30% are not the most committed people. If you were to look at the leadership and other influential people in churches, the percentage would be a lot lower.
It is also not abiogeneses theory.
Religious people tend to lump these together because most creation myths cover both Earth-origin (and Universe-origin mind you) as well as life-creation.
All of them assuming that life-creation basically got right to present-day creatures from the start (with a few rare stories where a particular new species is created in a myth in an almost evolution-life story).
In the case of the Christian creation myth in particular - no such exceptions exist, so for Christian creationists big-bang, solary-system formation and evolution are all intruding on something they explain with a single (unscientific) story.
Hence they tend to lump the science together as well.
Of course this is ironic and silly - abiogenesis at this stage has no firm answers or theories, it has a few ideas but none have any significant supporting evidence yet.
Evolution was hailed as a scientific breakthrough since first published and been validated with only minor corrections ever since.
The Big Bang (like black holes) on the other hand was despised by scientists when they first realized that Einstein's theories had it as a possibility, physicists do not like singularities and to them the Big Bang theory was little more than creationism ! The fact that popes had embraced it by the 1960's actually HARMED It's acceptance in science.
It wasn't until decades later as the evidence mounted that the big bang theory became mainstream science - something helped in no small part by the growing evidence for black holes (another hated singularity).
Indeed the hypotheses that black holes in one universe are the big bangs of another universe was first proposed because it would take a universe with two types of known singularities and at least reduce it to ONE singularity, and importantly - one we understand a lot more about !
If that hypotheses is true - then the "other side" of the big bang theory isn't a mystery - it's a black hole in another universe created by a supermassive star collapsing under it's own gravity.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
As a church-goer, I can tell you that, yes, an out-spoken evolutionist will be met with awkward silence. Not because anyone disagrees with him, but because they all are thinking the same thing: "Oh, deal Lord, he's going to get crazy old Mrs. Doddard stated again on fossils again. How can I get out of here politely?" It's the same awkward silence you'd get discussing anything contentious at all. Politics, flu vaccines, or even theology (I'm a Presbyterian, and even still discussing Calvanism is a crap-shoot of accidentally starting an argument). Modern churches, even here in the deep south are pretty diverse places, and the general policy seems to be "if you think this is going to start an argument, and is not vitally important, don't talk about it."
I don't doubt your 30%, though it does not reflect the evangelicals I know (and, like I said, very conservative deep south; perhaps skewed because my acquaintances run in the young adult range).
It was a Catholic priest who first developed the idea that became known as the big bang theory, which Einstein did not accept until he saw Msgr Lemaître present his theory at a conference or something. It is unfortunate that some scientists are so anti religion that they ignore the contributions of the Catholic Church and clergy to many of the ideas that they so rabidly defend as "proof" that there is no God or that religion and science are incompatiable.
Modern churches, even here in the deep south are pretty diverse places, and the general policy seems to be "if you think this is going to start an argument, and is not vitally important, don't talk about it."
I cannot see the point of an organisation that you go to voluntarily (i.e. excluding work) where you aren't allowed to have any meaningful discussions.
Even going out for after work drinks you're likelyto argue about football, politics or something.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Georges Lemaître. Apparently his being a priest led to some accusations that he was using science to promote Christian dogma.
As someone who lives in the U.S. South (Arkansas), this is not the belief of most evangelicals. My wife is a devout Christian and our church is an evangelical church (though not like most that you're probably familiar with. Our church is very into being Christians and not so much talking about how Christian they are. They spend the vast majority of their money helping people in poverty while meeting in a Boys & Girls Club gym instead of building a real church.) But among the religious around here, there's very little belief in evolution or the big bang. That said, the local Christian university (John Brown University) has a pretty good evolutionary biology program. So there's some hope for the future, but not as much as I'd like. Science is definitely taking a back seat with evangelicals in the South. It's a pretty tragic state for the future of science in this country. The South certainly won't be contributing a lot to modern cosmology or evolutionary biology.
Galileo is the victim of politics. It was actually the pope that asked Galileo to complete his studies and publish his works. It may sound odd today, considering how we do science so differently from their times, but back then the pope (and much of the RCC) felt stuck with this "heathen" geocentric world view. After all it went back to Aristotele and he was much but not a good christian child. They found auctors, i.e. authorities (the "ones that had it generally right"), for nearly every other field, but just Astronomy (which was pretty big back then, believe it or not) was left to that heathen guy because nobody came up with something better (and to dethrone such an authority, you had to do something pretty spectacular. Usually, though, it only meant that you summarized various authorities to become the new authority).
So the Pope was originally VERY interested when Galileo started talking about an astronomy model that worked better than the old one AND had no relation to the heathen times. But even the Pope wasn't impossible to fell and political intrigue was pretty big back then. I'd have to look up the details, but iirc the main problem was that some powerful family held various cardinal seats, wanted to overthrow the pope and this could easiest be done by claiming that Galileo (who got a lot of backing from the pope) was in league with the devil for trying to upset the good wholesome Christian doctrine that god created the world as the center of the universe.
The pope generally had two options: Drop Galileo or fall with him. We know how he decided, and who could hold it against him?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.