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.
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).
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.
The main problem with using the bible here is that it has no predictive power at all. It's all the classical case of "hindsight is 20-20". We can't read into the bible as to what to look for in future scientific endeavors. All we can do is do science the right way, and then try to use it and claim "hurr durr see bible was right - here here and there". The revisionist approach many religious people seem so fond of can be reduced to: the religious text X must be right, let's see if we can fit it to our current understanding of reality. I shouldn't need to state the obvious problem here: any time spent on such revisionism is a big waste and has nothing but faint entertainment value. If you're easily amused, that is.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
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.