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The Vatican Invites World's Leading Scientists To Discuss Cosmology (independent.co.uk)
In 2014, Pope Francis declared that God is not "a magician with a magic wand" and that evolution and the Big Bang theory are real. Now, the Vatican has sent an invitation to the world's leading scientists and cosmologists to try and understand the Big Bang. The Independent reports: Astrophysicists and other experts will attend the Vatican Observatory to discuss black holes, gravitational waves and space-time singularities as it honors the late Jesuit cosmologist considered one of the fathers of the idea that the universe began with a gigantic explosion. The conference honoring Monsignor George Lemaitre is being held at the Vatican Observatory, founded by Pope Leo XIII in 1891 to help correct the notion that the Roman Catholic Church was hostile to science. In 1927, Lemaitre was the first to explain that the receding of distant galaxies was the result of the expansion of the universe, a result he obtained by solving equations of Einstein's theory of general relativity. Lemaitre's theory was known as the "primeval atom," but it is more commonly known today as the big-bang theory. The head of the Vatican Observatory, Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno, says Lemaitre's research proves that you can believe in God and the big-bang theory.
The Catholics accept that nearly every falsifiable statement in the Bible is wrong, but still demand that you accept the other stuff on faith. How is that not retarded?
How is that not retarded?
Take a look at their bank accounts and other holdings.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Ask Galileo how that worked out. Sounds like desperate actions of cult who's way past expiration date.
Not this again. I'm not Catholic, I disagree with a lot of the politics of the Catholic Church, and obviously most of its religious doctrine is hooey.
But anti-science? Nope. And the "Galileo affair" is a red herring, one of the very few episodes in the Catholic Church's long history where it comes across as anti-science -- although actually, it wasn't so much. Galileo himself was spouting off about stuff that didn't actually make sense according to the science of the time. That doesn't justify shutting him down or placing him under house arrest of course, but that's a free speech issue, not a suppression of SCIENCE issue.
Anyhow, I'm not going to bother describing the Catholic Church's long history of support of science, how a few 19th-century anti-Catholic revisionist historians basically trumped up the idea that the Church was anti-science, and how Galileo's case was a LOT more complicated than some stupid inaccurate portrayal you've heard from Neil deGrasse Tyson or whatever. You want to know more? I've explained it before here. You want to know more about the details of Galileo's theories and the problems? I've explained that here. I could go on, but hopefully that's at least enough to prove Pope Francis's point here: the Catholic Church throughout its history has rarely been hostile to science and in fact for most of the past thousand years has probably been the biggest and most consistent institution to support it over the longest period.
- Saint Augustine of Hippo
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Similarly, on the Protestant side, Sola Fide and, particularly, John 3:16 within Sola Scriptura makes one's stance on creationism versus evolution not a criterion for salvation.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Penrose's Cycles of Time puts forward a really straightforward mechanism for the big bang. When the last massive particle pops and all the energy in the universe is massless photons, you have no mass, so no gravity and no time. Everything is simple, low entropy, dominated by photons and bingo you have something that looks (and is) identical to the state at start of the big bang.
It hard to see why it isn't true.
He's a smart fellow that Penrose.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Highly interesting (I'm a physicist myself, versed in quantum mechanics, but I don't know jack about cosmology and big bang besides from what I've heard on discovery channel...).
But you shouldn't start looking for God where the physics fails -- that's a recipe for misunderstanding. Essentially, that's what everyone before already did: ancient times looked for god in nature catastrophes and anomalies, middle ages looked for him in the stars and (by today's standards) simple chemistry, and now we're looking for him at the inception of big bang or in "quantum physics" -- in other words, always at the boundary of our scientific understanding. The concept failed before, and it will fail us, as our understanding of the world inevitably advances. (I'm shamelessly assuming that one day we'll understand how the universe holds together, physically... ;-) ).
Don't mix god and science. God is not there to fill the gaps in physics books. It's the humanistic side of things rather than the scientific, he's there to help us understand the "why" rather than the "how." Every time God or religion appears to meddling with scientific education, it's because somebody's not asking the right question.
Religion and science go together wonderfully as long as the other doesn't try to diletantly invade the domain of the other. (BTW, this view is not new in the Catholic church, I've learned this in religion classes since the 6th grade. It's just that the current pope is now being explicitly clear about it. And judging by the number of misunderstandings that bubble to the surface I'd say it was about f#@%$ing time, too.)
Take a look at their bank accounts and other holdings.
That just means they are talented at scamming the credulous and are huge hypocrites. Take one look at Vatican City if you need proof that of their hypocrisy about "helping the poor". They are only interested in finding new angles to take advantage of people.
The church wanting to "talk" about cosmology is a waste of everyone's time because they have nothing useful to add to the discussion. Their idea of cosmology ends with the writings of primitive men who died thousands of years ago. The only interest the church has here is in hoodwinking idiots into thinking they are interested in something more than growing their flock and keeping their gravy train going. An organization which has based their interpretation of the world around a ridiculous fictional book isn't likely to be interested in a rational and evidence based discussion. They are just trying to figure out where the gaps are to continue their god of the gaps argument.