[StarSlayer]

So sayeth his eminence Pope Francis, Bishop of Rome and absolute Sovereign of the Vatican City State.  He certainly seems a pretty progressive and vigorous pontiff.

[Luis Dias]

I'm still scratching my head around the notion that this is newsworthy. John Paul the second already acknowledged evolution and so did Ratzinger, and the "big bang" has been accepted by the church from the get go, so what the hell?

[SypheDMar]

I just want to emphasize that this is my favorite pope serving in my lifetime. I feel that the only reason he is ignoring the issues of homosexuality is the same reason Obama did his first term: to avoid the contentious issues that will divide the Church.

Luis isn't wrong. As traditional and backwards as the Catholic Church may seem, they are very pro-science in the early days.

[Flipside]

There wasn't really all the furor over Evolution until later when the Church went through a more fundamentalist phase. The Catholic Church is weird like that, took them till 1984 to remove Galileo's excommunication for saying the Earth went round the Sun.

Oddly enough, a large number of Scientific foundations around that period were discovered by people with, or training for, positions in the Church, though this was also largely to do with the fact that younger sons of nobles tended to get pushed into the Church to stop them lounging around at home doing nothing, and strangely enough, that's precisely how Darwin ended up where he did.

It's a funny old world...

That said, I will agree that this new Pope has been a breath of fresh air, who actually seems to have a grasp on the fact that an inclusive Church grows.

[Phantom Hoover]

Oddly enough, a large number of Scientific foundations around that period were discovered by people with, or training for, positions in the Church

This isn't 'odd' at all, despite what the reddit strain of atheist would have you believe. The Church was the main venue for scholarship in Europe for a very long time.

I'm looking forward to see how the fundamentalist Catholic creationists try to weasel their way out of this one, though. Not much scope for arguing about translation errors this time.

[Luis Dias]

Well I think that Francis means well, but I also happen to think that Ratzinger's more dubious position is somewhat more intellectual honest with the christian tradition. Catholic creationists will merely think that Francis is just being Francis again, and will probably be more aligned with Ratzinger's position anyway.

[Flipside]

Oddly enough, a large number of Scientific foundations around that period were discovered by people with, or training for, positions in the Church

This isn't 'odd' at all, despite what the reddit strain of atheist would have you believe. The Church was the main venue for scholarship in Europe for a very long time.

I'm looking forward to see how the fundamentalist Catholic creationists try to weasel their way out of this one, though. Not much scope for arguing about translation errors this time.

Well, by odd, I mean from a modern-day perspective, if you consider, at the very least, the amount of publicity that these confrontations between Science and Faith create.

The strange part is that a lot of the foundations of large established theories were created, encouraged and promoted by the Churches of most major religions at the time.

[deathfun]

He added: “He created human beings and let them develop according to the internal laws that he gave to each one so they would reach their fulfilment. “The Big Bang, which today we hold to be the origin of the world, does not contradict the intervention of the divine creator but, rather, requires it.

“Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve.”

Essentially he's just saying Evolution came from Creation
Clever Pope is clever

[Dragon]

Yes, Pope Francis really is a great man. Ratzinger just didn't cut it, he was a theologian more than anything else, and soon acknowledged that. Francis is truly the right Pope for our time. A true successor of John Paul II in every sense of this word, he will likely end up just as (likely even more) revered as him. He clearly knows what he's talking about here - his point about Big Bang can well be indisputable by physics alone, and the origin of the first self-replicating organisms is still shrouded in mystery, and will likely remain so for long, though can make some educated guesses about that (amusingly, one theory states lightning was involved... go figure ).

I like how he incorporated the two stances into a single entity. He placed creation in it's "original" place - at the limit of human knowledge. This is where mythology belongs, and he returned it there. While his proposition isn't exactly new, it's good to see it become an official stance.

[MP-Ryan]

He added: “He created human beings and let them develop according to the internal laws that he gave to each one so they would reach their fulfilment. “The Big Bang, which today we hold to be the origin of the world, does not contradict the intervention of the divine creator but, rather, requires it.

“Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve.”

Essentially he's just saying Evolution came from Creation
Clever Pope is clever

Well, to be fair, the Big Bang Theory, Abiogenesis, and Evolution are all distinct scientific theories and concepts, though related.  He embraced two while leaving the third (abiogenesis) out.  That said, if you look at the Bible and Christian teachings as metaphorical and not literal, there isn't anything about our modern understanding of the creation of the universe, life, and its evolution that outright contradicts a place for a deity.  Science can never disprove the concept of a religious God... and that isn't necessarily a bad thing.

As to the Pope's announcement.... as I said on twitter, does it strike anyone else as highly amusing that the Catholic Pope just demonstrated a better grasp of science than a hell of a lot of people who were educated and reside in North America, one of the most affluent and well-educated parts of the planet?

[An4ximandros]

Not really. When you are free to do, learn, love and live as you wish, you take everything for granted; this includes demeaning and mocking those who do not have these things.

[Herra Tohtori]

It's a cop-out, but better than the alternative.

He's still essentially saying that:

-universe couldn't have started without a creator - big bang being the means of creation, rather than the original cause itself. It's much better than literal interpretation of Genesis, but still fundamentally unscientific (understandably).

-life couldn't have started without a creator - a statement strictly relating to abiogenesis, which has nothing to do with biological evolution, but spits in the face of chemical evolution and chemistry in general. As far as I'm concerned, abiogenesis is a simple statistical result of the fact that it's possible for a self-replicating molecule to exist - when that happened in suitable conditions, life occurs.

-evolution is real but can only happen after life has been created - again much better than "intelligent design" or any variant of creationism, but unclear in its meaning.


To what extent his statements have to do with evolution is difficult to decipher. Does he mean that in his view God created the first micro-organism that was qualifiable as "life" and all other species evolved from that point on, sharing common ancestry?

Or does he say that God supposedly created several species of organisms (if so, how many and at what point of the phylogenetic tree of life did this occur) but the theory of evolution is still valid because that's how things work post-creation?


Basically, it sounds to me like a very, very carefully formulated statement engineered to annoy as little people as possible. He doesn't want to alienate the conservative members of the church, but he wants to make his church less backward for the more progressive religious people.


Obviously, it's sort of understandable that the leader of Roman Catholic Church doesn't want to completely remove God as the original cause for as many things as possible, but to me it's rather annoying how much influence the position of a religious leader still has - progressive as he may be by comparison to his predecessors.

[MP-Ryan]

Not really. When you are free to do, learn, love and live as you wish, you take everything for granted; this includes demeaning and mocking those who do not have these things.

I'm pretty sure I'm demeaning and mocking those who DO have these things and yet still choose to be ignorant buffoons.  US Congress/Senate, I'm looking at you.

[Luis Dias]

I agree with Herra that his statements are 100% designed (ah) for social purposes, not theological clarity purposes.

Regarding how science cannot disprove "god", well that is superficially somewhat true, but not completely. Our current understanding on the big bang, abiogenesis processes, evolution and the overal materialistic underpinnings of our beings all but rule out almost everything said about these theistic gods. They don't "disprove" them, but merely state how these gods are absolutely unnecessary to explain everything around us, which is a kind of a slow death to these gods. All that might remain is some kind of a deistic demiurge god, something that sparked the big bang. But even Hawking believes that we now know sufficient stuff to even disregard that necessity altogether.

[Turambar]

I love when people go for 'god of the gaps' reasoning.  It means that we can kill God one day.

[InsaneBaron]

I'm not exactly sure why this is new (I never really understood the claim that Christianity and the Big Bang/Evolution were incompatible), but I'm grateful to Francis for the reminder.

@Dragon: Christianity =/= Mythology, but I agree with your assessment of Francis. He's exactly the kind of Pope the world needs right now.

@ Herra Tohtori: I disagree. The argument that the Universe, or Life, needed some intelligent being to start and design it is a philosophical question that, far from being unscientific, is (I hold) both reasonable and defensible. Science is useful- in fact, necessary- for determining how this was done (The Big Bang, for instance, or the Theory of Evolution). But stating that something as complex, powerful, and downright Transcendant (if you'll excuse the pun )as the human mind implies an intelligent creator is neither unscientific nor "God of the Gaps" reasoning.

If you're annoyed that a religious leader still has some influence- well, all I can say is I'm sorry about that. But religion isn't going to just disappear as long as there are humans seeking something deeper than mere mortal existence.

I'm pretty sure I'm demeaning and mocking those who DO have these things and yet still choose to be ignorant buffoons.  US Congress/Senate, I'm looking at you.

I'm an American... and I couldn't agree more.

[Luis Dias]

But stating that something as complex, powerful, and downright Transcendant (if you'll excuse the pun )as the human mind implies an intelligent creator is neither unscientific nor "God of the Gaps" reasoning.

Double negatives are always tricky. It might well be "not unscientific", but it's also not scientific. More to the point, is it reasonable? Well, if it makes you feel better, if it informs your aesthetic or poetic mind, why not? I am definitely not going to censor or police these kinds of excentricities, they are part of being human after all! However, I'll add to this a simple point, namely, that it will be the more rational and "untranscendently-like" reasoning, the more down to earth, materialistic investigations that will unearth the mysteries of the brain and the mind in the next decades, not these poetic lines that are undistinguishable from handwaving banal deepities.

[InsaneBaron]

But stating that something as complex, powerful, and downright Transcendant (if you'll excuse the pun )as the human mind implies an intelligent creator is neither unscientific nor "God of the Gaps" reasoning.

Double negatives are always tricky. It might well be "not unscientific", but it's also not scientific. More to the point, is it reasonable? Well, if it makes you feel better, if it informs your aesthetic or poetic mind, why not? I am definitely not going to censor or police these kinds of excentricities, they are part of being human after all! However, I'll add to this a simple point, namely, that it will be the more rational and "untranscendently-like" reasoning, the more down to earth, materialistic investigations that will unearth the mysteries of the brain and the mind in the next decades, not these poetic lines that are undistinguishable from handwaving banal deepities.

Well, it's not scientific in the sense that it's a philosophical question, certainly. But That doesn't mean it's invalid unless you dismiss Philosophy. And Philosophy (the use of reason to discover truths about ourselves, morality, and truth itself) is something I definitely don't dismiss.

I'm not being poetic or handwaving; by Trascendant I'm referring to the fact that the mind can "Transcend" physical reality in its understanding. The ability to grasp non-material concepts like justice or courage. The ability to separate the concept of a table from any one table. But It's hard to condense everything I've ever read on philosophy into a post. Arg!

Try reading Aristotle if you have time (and I know a lot of us don't ). He explains this stuff far, far better than I could.

EDIT: And for the record, I agree we should study the brain scientifically.

[Luis Dias]

It's handwaving in the sense that you use words like "Transcendence" liberally and without any rigorous restraint - what proof is there that the human mind really transcends "physical reality"? None, just an unjustified intuition that mostly stems from our sense of self-worth "I'm not just atoms!" - People still cling to Aristotle because he is still providing some philosophical basis for theistic lines of reasoning, but really come on most of his thoughts have been...ahhh... transcended by a whole philosophical tradition.

Try reading Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Nietszche, they also explain all of this much better than I could too (and no, I'm not being sarcastic, I'm just taking your words back at you because I'm tired and lazy, not to be sarcastic!).

[InsaneBaron]

I understand you're not sarcastic. I'd take Nietszche off the list though- I have read him, and he's downright demonic. Kant has some pretty good points though.

Okay, I want to avoid coming across as harsh, so I'm going to use some relaxing art.



I have to ask that you not assume I'm relying on wishful thinking. I believe in a God, not because I have this desperate desire for there to be a God or because I was raised that way, but because at a certain stage in my life I realized that God's existence was the single most important question I had to answer- basically my whole lifestyle depended on it. So, using my own reason (freshly sharpened from my debate training) I studied the topic voraciously, taking in the arguments from both sides. And I came out of that (year? year and a half? hard to say) convinced that there was a God. If you want to try and prove otherwise to me, I'm open to that. But please don't assume I'm using wishful thinking.

That said, you'd have to prove to me that Aristotle, and those who built on him (Aquinas, Dostoyevski, Hildebrand, and so on) have been "superceded". It seems to me that the majority of Philosophers who tried to go against him fell into absurdism or else abandoned Morality (Nietszche being an extreme example). Not all such philosophers lost it, certainly. But the fact that he wrote a long time ago doesn't reduce the value of his insight.

EDIT: Blarg. How do you get those image tags to work?