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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.
If you're going to be Christian and don't want to be a retard, Catholicism is where it's at.
Because young earthers are generally not Catholic.
. .
Now that the Pope has lured them in, he should put them all on trial for heresy.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
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.
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.
They've been doing astronomy for over a century. They're hardly trying to look "hip" or "cool".
Biblical numerology was never intended to be taken literally. You're supposed read the number of years and think, "oh, right. That doesn't really mean X years. That means Y alternate meaning."
e.g. The number 7 means completeness and perfection, and the number 40 means a period of testing.
When numbers are added or multiplied in the bible, you're not supposed to try to use algebra.
X plus Y means "both the meaning of X and the meaning of Y",
X times Y means something similar to addition, but it adds extra emphasis.
Anyone who believes in a literal 6000 year old earth because of the Bible needs to go take a required freshman Bible Studies class at a religious university ASAP. It doesn't matter which one you pick. They'll all tell you you're wrong if you think the Bible says the earth is 6000 years old, and then they'll teach you the context/meaning of all of those numbers.
The problem with defending the Church's treatment of Galileo as being based on their view of science "at the time" is that science barely existed at the time, and Galileo is seen as one of the founders of modern science. The Ptolemaic model was not science, it was a complex mathematical model built to shoehorn in a whole pack of observations into a much older geocentric view of the universe. It sure the heck wasn't science, which is fine, because science as we know it didn't exist in the 2nd century AD, but by the 17th century and Copernicus's theory and Galileo's observations, there was no excuse at all, other than just an unfortunate episode of the Church not listening to the words of one of its greatest Doctors, Augustine of Hippo, who cautioned against exactly what the Church did.
And the Church has acknowledged its error and unjust way it treated Galileo, so I don't see any need to whitewash the Church's treatment of him.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The best part is that God only created the universe so that He could fake the moon landing.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
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.
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.
Does a God need it?
You (and the creationist idiots for different reasons) are looking at things the wrong way IMHO. As I see it science and religion are orthogonal unless it's dumbed down Christianity-Lite that sees science as a direct threat to it's very financial business model.
Mendel was quite happy working out a few things about genetics as well as being a monk, they didn't conflict. In geology four out of the five that disproved the "Noah's flood" theory of fossils were ordained. They didn't have so narrow an idea of religion that reality could get in the way.
Giordano Bruno was also a Catholic monk, who advanced the "infinite universe" theory, and got burned at the stake by the Vatican for his trouble.
Correlation is not causation. He was heretical on quite a few issues and if his only heresy would have been his scientific work, my guess would be that he would have lived a lot longer. Case in point — how many did the Church burn because of scientific work? I am not aware of any such definite case.
I take your point, however. The Catholic Church has been pretty good on most science - up and down- but you've got to be careful, because if Science starts to suggest something that makes the Vatican too uncomfortable, they might get slapped down pretty hard. Though Benedict seems a decent sort in that regard.
Well, right now Catholic Church is very uncomfortable with embryonic research. I don't see the hammer falling.
The pope before him would have gladly started burning witches and homosexuals again if he could.
This is a good reason not to ever trust any group of people. If you think well of scientists, look up Tuskegee syphilis experiment. For a wide scale corruption of science, look up Nazi Germany.
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.
The Ptolemaic model was not science, it was a complex mathematical model built to shoehorn in a whole pack of observations into a much older geocentric view of the universe. It sure the heck wasn't science
Well, the history of science has been filled with shoehorning.
The "science" that preceded relativity started as a complex mathematical model built to shoehorn in a whole pack of observations into a much older non-relativistic (aether) view of the universe.
The "science" that preceded quantum mechanics started as a complex mathematical model built to shoehorn in a whole pack of observation into a much older non-quantum (deterministic) view of the universe.
It often takes quite a while for views of our universe to change and not everyone goes along quietly. Simply dismissing the stuff that came before as "sure the heck wasn't science" doesn't really honor the scientific method at all. We'd be pretty arrogant to think that 100 years from now, all the "science" we have come up with today won't be looked at with derision and dismissiveness.
Even Einstein (who came up with relativity and won a Nobel prize for the quantum mechanical photo-electric effect) spent years trying to dismiss the currently accepted quantum view of the universe (the probabilistic view, aka god does not play dice) and many think never fully accepted it. I don't think he's the only one either...
As I wrote elsewhere it really came down to politics and calling the Pope an idiot in print. Others had been discussing the Copernican model before Galileo (and Galileo for two decades before his trial), but they did not depict a character that was obviously the Pope and obviously an idiot in their discussions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair
The Vatican has maintained an astronomy office since 1774: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... .
In 1993 the Vatican Observatory saw first light on one of the world's premier large telescopes on Mt. Graham in Arizona (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican_Advanced_Technology_Telescope), a project which was almost killed off by the same Greens who are trying to prevent the Thirty Meter Telescope in Hawaii from being built, on the same excuse of "sacred to my people" that is being used now in Hawaii.
I am not a Catholic and do disagree with some of their beliefs. I do not take the Bible literally or any other religious document, and I concentrate more on the moral and ethical teachings of religions instead of the god concepts. And there is no doubt that the Catholic Church can be criticized for how they spend some of their money. On the other hand, in many communities Catholic Charities provide much needed help to the poor. Often a sizable majority of the people needing help in the U.S. are not Catholic. So please, before you blindly criticize the Catholic Church, check out the good charity work that the Church does.
As for the science bit, I welcome any effort that helps people realize that science and faith do not have to be in conflict. Science and technology has done much to improve the lives of people, and hopefully, that is what religion should be about. Unfortunately, both science and religion often get corrupted.