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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 "Young Earth" theory of 6,000 years old planet is a relatively recent development, when people impressed by the advances in science and particularly physics and with too much time on their hands started looking for "clues" in the Bible for the Earth's age.
Reality is that Bible is completely unconcerned with "how old the Earth is" because at the time it was written the Earth's age was completely irrelevant to the lives of most people. (That's true today too.) The Bible and the sacred texts in other religions are only concerned with the psychological -- the idea being to guide you through making everyday decisions in your life. (Of course a lot of people pervert this principle -- the Young Earthers being one example -- but that's a different story.) The Bible is a catalog of archetypes and has no interest in knowledge of the objective universe for its own sake.
The originator of the Big Bang theory was in fact a Catholic priest, a Belgian I think, except he gave it a boring name, the British physicist who mocked him called his theory Big Bang, and the name stayed. It's nicely documented in the movie Hawking with Benedict Cumberbatch.
I wouldn't quite put it that way. I'd say rather that the Church's official doctrine doesn't explicitly bind itself to any particular scientific theory, viewing science as simply another kind of revelation, another kind of truth, apart from Scripture, and that both cannot be wrong. Therefore, if there is an apparent conflict between science and scriptural interpretation, the fault is with the interpreter.
That being said, one can still be a Catholic in good standing and reject evolution, the Big Bang and other scientific theories that are viewed by the scientific community as being confirmed and as true as anything can be in science (keeping in mind science's fundamentally provisional nature). I do believe that Sola Scriptura is considered, if not heretical, then at least theologically unsound. You aren't going to get excommunicated for being a Creationist
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
So long as you don't use a condom. But touching little boys is ok.
The main reason that there is so much pedophilia in Catholicism is because the Catholic church has created its own traditions which go against the teachings of the Bible. They do not allow priests or the pope to get married, yet Peter, the guy they claim to be the first pope was married. An example of one such passage that is ignored by the church is 1 Corinthians 7:
"Now concerning the things about which you wrote, it is good for a man not to touch a woman. But because of immoralities, each man is to have his own wife, and each woman is to have her own husband."
and
"But I say to the unmarried and to widows that it is good for them if they remain even as I. But if they do not have self-control, let them marry; for it is better to marry than to burn with passion."
If the Catholic church allowed its priests to follow the teachings of these scriptures there would be far less sexual immorality and abuse in the church.
Simple. Genesis is a creation myth invented few thousands years ago around a camp fire. The idea was not to answer the question "what's truth", but to convey the meaning of "how we're all in this together and why should look after one another."
The myth, BTW, was likely put together from several (at least 3) stories that circulated orally between nomad tribes in the middle east. At that time, each tribe was having its own "one true God" - a contrast to the polytheistic ideologies of the time, formed simply from the necessity of not being able to carry around many artefacts for several gods around when you're nomad. Eventually the families (of Israel) evolved into all worshipping the *same* "one true God" - Jahwe, the god of the old testament.
God image and perception changes from the forefather tribes of Israel, to BC-Israel people (old testament), to Jesus / AD humanity (new testament).
That's essentially the official teaching stance of the Catholic church. (Source: 8 years of highschool religion lessons in Bavaria, under several catholic priests.)
Why on earth anyone would try to interpret the bible lierally, in 2017, is beyond me - let alone mistake it for a physics book. But then again, stranger things do happen in the US education system...
I heard a quantum astro physicist speak on this recently. It was interesting that what he said the requirements for the big bang would be just happened to match up to some things outside of physics.
You mentioned:
> It all comes down to relativity: If the universe started as a single dimensionless point, then the gravity would have been so strong that time didn't exist. If time didn't exist
If time didn't exist within that point, if the gravity was so strong nothing could escape, then *nothing* could happen, within a basic understanding of relatively. For anything to happen, for the big bang to happen, you need either something outside pf physics (something meta-physical) or certain laws of quantum physics must be present in a very particular way.
Biblically, when God is asked who he is, the answer is basically "I am what it timeless" or "I am what has always been and always will be" (English doesn't have exactly the right words because we give several meanings to the word "is/am" Spanish comes closer with es vs esta). Also "I am the truth". So God states he is, essentially, timeless truth. Whatever has always been true, that's God.
And the physicists say that *before* the big bang can happen, quantum physics must *already* be true. Quantum physics must be timeless truth in order to get the big bang, or else the big bang has to be caused by something beyond physics, something meta-physical.
Therefore reading the plain words, the laws pf physics are timeless truth that must have existed before the big bang, and that's what God is - timeless truth that existed before the big bang. The founders of the US would then have been correct to call the laws of nature the laws of God, acts of nature are called acts of God. They are one and the same. They are timeless truth.