Pope Francis: 'The Big Bang & Evolution are true. God is not a Magician'

[DonDadda59]

Pope Francis declares evolution and Big Bang theory are real and God isn't 'a magician with a magic wand'

http://www.independent.co.uk/incoming/article8552224.ece/ALTERNATES/w460/pope-francis1.jpg

[I]Francis goes against Benedict XVI

[Jailblazers7]

Can't the next pope just come along and say "Pope Francis was on crack. That heathen was wrong about everything"?

[DonDadda59]

Can't the next pope just come along and say "Pope Francis was on crack. That heathen was wrong about everything"?

Yup. But it seems like outside of Emperor Palpatine, most of the modern popes accept evolution and the big bang as fact.

[DonDadda59]

God sawed my bitch in half

And she died. Magicians don't actually kill bitches.

[HitandRun Reggie]

Wasn't this same topic posted a few days ago

[boozehound]

Can't the next pope just come along and say "Pope Francis was on crack. That heathen was wrong about everything"?
except that his statement is in line with the church's position since the 70s (?). Most other major christian sects have put out similar statements over the years. Its really only the "evangelicals" or "bible" churches that are hard-core evolution deniers. Of course, many individual adherents of any particular sect are confused on the issue, but most major churches agree that evolution is compatible with their view of the bible. Other groups, like the LDS, have stayed silent on it and let individual members make their own decisions.

[embersyc]

Waiting for the first Atheist Pope.

"People there is no god, but we have a good thing going with this whole Catholism thing, so why let facts **** it up?"

[DukeDelonte13]

except that his statement is in line with the church's position since the 70s (?). Most other major christian sects have put out similar statements over the years. Its really only the "evangelicals" or "bible" churches that are hard-core evolution deniers. Of course, many individual adherents of any particular sect are confused on the issue, but most major churches agree that evolution is compatible with their view of the bible. Other groups, like the LDS, have stayed silent on it and let individual members make their own decisions.

this.

[cuad]

Big Bang was real?! Conceding evolution is fine, but big bang may be a step too far.

[~primetime~]

:applause: Good for him

religion and science can exist together

they need to view it as though the laws of science were designed

[DonDadda59]

[QUOTE=~primetime~
they need to view it as though the laws of science were designed[/QUOTE]

They really don't but they choose to (by necessity to keep the money train rolling :lol ). But it's a huge step up from the idiots who watch the Flintstones like it was a documentary.

[nzamcdza]

Big Bang was real?! Conceding evolution is fine, but big bang may be a step too far.

Why??

[MavsSuperFan]

guess all the previous popes were fallible lmao Catholics :rolleyes:

[magic chiongson]

except that his statement is in line with the church's position since the 70s (?). Most other major christian sects have put out similar statements over the years. Its really only the "evangelicals" or "bible" churches that are hard-core evolution deniers. Of course, many individual adherents of any particular sect are confused on the issue, but most major churches agree that evolution is compatible with their view of the bible. Other groups, like the LDS, have stayed silent on it and let individual members make their own decisions.

this. just the media hyping stuff. here are better written articles that tells isn't something new from the Catholic church:

http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/10/pope-reminds-catholics-evolution-big-bang-are-true/

http://www.ucatholic.com/blog/pius-xii-1951/

[quote]The Church and the Popes have long been patrons of the sciences, from the earliest developments of the scientific method by Roger Bacon, OFM, a Franciscan Friar to [B]Monseigneur Georges Lema

[sweggeh]

This Pope is making Christianity look stupid as hell these days. No conviction at all. How can Christianity be legit when pretty much everything in the Bible at this point is proven to be wrong and then rejected by Christians?

Why don't they just discontinue this religion already?

[magic chiongson]

This Pope is making Christianity look stupid as hell these days. No conviction at all. How can Christianity be legit when pretty much everything in the Bible at this point is proven to be wrong and then rejected by Christians?

Why don't they just discontinue this religion already?
here's a very long post from ars technica with some bible quotes that hints at evolution and prominent catholics who studied it waay before charles darwin:

http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/10/pope-reminds-catholics-evolution-big-bang-are-true/?comments=1&post=27860353


Very good writeup. Much better than the usual “Pope Francis is changing Catholic teaching” angle. The Catholic Church has never had a problem with evolution per se, only with metaphysical naturalism, an atheistic philosophy sometimes grafted onto it.

St. Thomas Aquinas intriguingly wrote, “[S]pecies, also, that are new, if any such appear, existed beforehand in various active powers; so that animals, and perhaps even new species of animals, are produced by putrefaction [i.e. distillation, development] by the power which the stars and elements received at the beginning” (Summa Theologica, I.73.1 reply 3). Species coming into being through natural causes? That sounds suspiciously like something near to evolution, from the pen of the man who is most famous for his proofs of the existence of God. And in the 13th century, no less. But evolution fits far better with Aquinas’ intensely rational explication of God’s causality than a God who creates over arbitrary twenty-four hour time periods.

Aquinas’ cosmological argument establishes that, since “from nothing nothing comes” (apologies to Lawrence Krauss, but gravity and quantum fields do not constitute “nothing"), there must exist a transcendent cause which never came into being but always is, and which relies on nothing outside of itself to explain its existence. This being, whose existence is identical to its nature, grounds all else that exists, at every moment, even time itself. That’s not a being that would create, pause, and create again. For Aquinas, creation is not a process over time at all. It’s not even a MOMENT in time. It’s the continuous ongoing dependence of all else that exists — even time itself — upon this transcendent cause. The “days” of creation, then, refer to what Augustine called the “unfolding of generations” — natural causality at work over time.

This also means that natural causality is real. It’s not, as the Muslims tend to believe, and illusion (i.e. when a camel poops in a tent, it only looks like a natural cause-effect event happened. Really, it’s God doing that). It’s real, and it’s really natural. When a bird soars through the air, its wings are shaped for flight, its muscles move those wings in just the right way to catch the air, the air is molecularly structured in such a way as to be able to hold the bird in motion between earth and sky. But it is God who keeps the bird itself and the natural laws that govern its flight and the movements of its muscles and the flowing of its blood and the structure of the air and the entire system of cause-and-effect in existence at every moment. He underlies it, upholds it, creates it, holds it in being. It is caused naturally. It is caused by God. They are different kinds of causation. Neither rules out the other.

This is also why Catholics tend to be leery about “intelligent design.” The way it is usually formulated, intelligent design theory holds that God reaches into the natural order and tweaks evolution to go where he wants. But he doesn’t need to do that. He underlies the natural order. He upholds it. It is what it is because of him. The idea that he needs to tweak it accepts the atheist view of the natural order as something that is not dependent on God but independent, such that it runs by itself and he needs to adjust it. That makes God just another being alongside of nature, even if a very powerful one. And it means that the natural order doesn't have the foundational, transcendent cause that it must have to exist at all.

The only reason there’s a debate like this over evolution is because the protestants see it as a threat to their bible-only-and-with-exacting-literalism faith. And, of course, many atheists believe that evolution somehow dispenses the need for a God (which just means that they have a Sunday school idea of God: a stern old man with a beard in the sky who is very powerful and smites you when you do wrong). Both sides see the other as a threat, and so they’ve been fighting for a hundred and fifty years. But the protestants would do well to read their bible a little more closely. It says very clearly in Genesis 1:24:

And God said: Let the EARTH BRING FORTH the living creature in its kind, cattle and creeping things, and beasts of the earth, according to their kinds."

It’s even clearer in Genesis 1:20 and 1:21:

"God also said: Let the WATERS BRING FORTH the creeping creature having life, and the fowl that may fly over the earth under the firmament of heaven.

“And GOD CREATED the great whales, and every living and moving creature, WHICH THE WATERS BROUGHT FORTH, according to their kinds, and every winged fowl according to its kind. And God saw that it was good."

This explicitly acknowledges both natural causality and God’s causality. “God created . . . which the waters brought forth.”

So I really don’t know why there’s a debate.

Oh, and: the Big Bang was originally posited by Georges Lemaitre . . . a Catholic priest.

[BasedTom]

Protestants stay losing.

[Patrick Chewing]

This Pope is making Christianity look stupid as hell these days. No conviction at all. How can Christianity be legit when pretty much everything in the Bible at this point is proven to be wrong and then rejected by Christians?




Evolution.

[sirkeelma]

This Pope is making Christianity look stupid as hell these days. No conviction at all. How can Christianity be legit when pretty much everything in the Bible at this point is proven to be wrong and then rejected by Christians?

Why don't they just discontinue this religion already?

Catholic is different from Christianity.:no:

[Smoke117]

God is not a magician, but his son was. He turned water into wine, made a few pieces of bread and fish into thousands of pieces. That is a prime time illusionist. Jesus of Nazareth > Chris Angel? Jesus might win by that bad asd moniker: Jesus of Nazareth...that had to bring in the ***** and kids.

[Swaggin916]

God is not a magician?

MIND BLOWN