The Vatican Invites World's Leading Scientists To Discuss Cosmology (independent.co.uk) 305
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.
Catholics also believe in evolution (Score:5, Informative)
If you're going to be Christian and don't want to be a retard, Catholicism is where it's at.
Re:Catholics also believe in evolution (Score:5, Informative)
Catholic tradition is at odds with scripture (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Catholic tradition is at odds with scripture (Score:4, Interesting)
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What this is, I suspect, is the Catholic leadership realizing that the window of ignorance is just about to close on their fingers, so they're scrambling a bit to retrench a little further outside of their normal run of indoctrination.
Hmm. Your statement makes sense only if considered in super-slo-motion. From the summary (not even TFA), the Vatican Observatory has been around for more than 100 years. Lemaitre was one of the early people working out the connections between GR and cosmology. likely before anyone on slashdot was even born.
Reading over these comments as a whole (many of which are completely over the top, the one I'm replying to is merely inaccurate), I'm sad that Slashdotters are so ready to respond to something by sli
Re:Catholics also believe in evolution (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Catholics also believe in evolution (Score:5, Insightful)
How is that not retarded?
Take a look at their bank accounts and other holdings.
The church has nothing useful to discuss (Score:3, Insightful)
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 t
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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
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How is that not retarded?
Take a look at their bank accounts and other holdings.
Nothing like using religion to validate that Greed is Good.
Gee, isn't that refreshing...
Re:Catholics also believe in evolution (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:Catholics also believe in evolution (Score:5, Insightful)
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Curious how they interpret genesis then. If the big bang theory is accurate, then a god simply cannot have created the universe. 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, then there was no time for a god to create the universe.
I suppose that one could argue that a god created "the heavens and the earth" after the fact, with heavens referring to places immediately visible t
Different tools for different jobs (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Religion and science are not orthogonal (Score:2)
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.
They are not orthogonal unfortunately because for religions to work they have to manipulate how people think. Science is really nothing more than a rigorous method of thinking and it routinely comes into conflict with religions on this point. Islam, Christianity and the rest are also methods of thinking primarily used to control people by received "wisdom". To accomplish this they insist that followers believe certain tenets which are routinely in direct conflict with scientific methods, objective eviden
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It kind of make sense with a bunch that started off by claiming that the San Francisco earthquake was an
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You are logically inconsistent. If God made the Universe, and if time did not exist at the moment of creation, then God doesn't need time in which to create. That's proven by the existence of the Universe. If either supposition is incorrect, then the original question is irrelevant. You are then either saying God did not create the Universe, so the question about time is moot, or you're saying that time isn't needed, so it doesn't matter whether time existed prior to the point of creation.
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You are looking at it via the prism of Pentacostalism and not as Mendel and Kepler would have seen it. Reason outside of the Church was not seen as an enemy but just a different field.
Re: Catholics also believe in evolution (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
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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...
Organized religion has always been used as a tool to control and manipulate the masses, which continues to be demonstrated thousands of years later. A man may find himself incapable of killing another man, but give him a God, and he suddenly validates bloodshed defending a belief system.
Why anyone would not understand this, in 2017, is beyond me.
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Political ideologies have been used to the same end. Use of such social levers to accomplish vile things is hardly unique to religion, and whether you're killing in the name of Yahweh or Marx, the use of such symbols and imagined authority are symptoms of tribalism.
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At that time, each tribe was having its own "one true God"
I don't think we have any reason to believe that the tribes of Israel believed in just one god at that time - there are indications, as far as I remember, of them admitting to the existence of other gods; the ten commandments start with 'you must not have other gods ...' or something to that effect, which rather implies that although there were other gods, Yahwe would not tolerate playing second fiddle. Theology later retrofitted the monotheistic view onto the story. I think this is more plausible than imag
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The evolution of monotheism is an interesting subject, and indeed, the early Hebrew tribes were simply a group of Canaanites who originally took on Yahweh as their main deity, while still accepting the existence of other gods (traces of this can be seen in Genesis 1:26 "Let us make man in *our* image...", and indeed the mention of Elohim in Genesis is an indication that the original creation myth was born out of an either polytheistic or henotheistic phase.
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if parts of the Bible were "invented" and not a revelation, then the whole thing collapses. It's no longer a religion, it's just a poorly written code of conduct.
There are three paths to the meaning of life.
There is a pre-existing purpose to life, and it must be discovered.
There is a purpose to life, but it is the creation of humanity.
There is no purpose to life.
Religion is mostly in the first camp, while the second camp is mainly the province of science and humanism. Personally i feel the third camp leads to nihilism and is ultimately self-defeating.
However there is nothing that fundamentally declares that either discovery or creation must be fait accomp
On the contrary, say quantum physicists (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:On the contrary, say quantum physicists (Score:5, Insightful)
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.)
Religion cannot help intrude on science (Score:2)
Religion and science go together wonderfully as long as the other doesn't try to diletantly invade the domain of the other.
They do not go together wonderfully because religion cannot help but attempt to instruct people about the world around them. There is no way to entirely separate the claims religion makes regarding the material world around us and the human experience from those that science makes. This is why religion continues to try to limit scientific thinking because it reduces the ability of organized religions to dole out made up explanations for how the world works. Their "business model" depends on it. The prob
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And yet, science can actually give an answer to some of the "why" questions or at least attempt an answer - to me 5% truth is still better than 0% which is offered by religious answers.
For instance "why do we die?" - because unchanging organisms in a forever changing environment cannot adapt. You need death to promote life in this Universe we live in. Even the "eternal" microorganisms change when cloning so after a time it is not the same organism; the previous version disappeared [i.e. died].
"Why are we he
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Don't mix god and science.
I completely disagree with this statement. To understand science is to understand God.
God is not there to fill the gaps in physics books.
God is not only in the gaps of the physics book, but everywhere else in that book as well. The laws of physics are God's creation, both the ones we know and the ones we have yet to discover.
Stop pretending you understand quantum physics (Score:2)
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.
Sigh... Just because you don't understand the physics of something doesn't mean that you need to invoke a deity to explain it. You are thinking of the big bang like a conventional explosion. It isn't. This is well trodden ground by physicists and no meta-physics is required.
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.
So you are making a god of the gaps [wikipedia.org] argument. Whatever we cannot explain currently must be god. Curious how "truth" from religions only seems to come in the form of 2000 year old holy books full of preposterous stories.
And the physicists say that *before* the big bang can happen, quantum physics must *already* be true.
No physicist
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The fuck?
You are aware quantum physics involves actual tests that can - and have been performed . Quantum electro-dynamics produces results that are so accurate they have lead many to call it the most precisely tested theory in the history of science [scienceblogs.com]
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That's really where one religion (Quantum Mechanics) meets another religion (Big bang consmology).
Nope.
Quantum mechanics fails because it defies causality creating paradoxes they ignore
Defying causality is an interesting way of putting it.
Ignoring basic conflicts in reasoning to support a theory make QM a religion not a science.
There's no basic conflict in reasoning.
Equations do not make science, logic does.
Equations are logic. Valid ones, anyway. Equations that describe reality such that they make predictions are science.
Quantum Mechanics makes accurate predictions about reality that no other theory of similar or lesser complexity makes, and does not make inaccurate predictions within its broad domain.
Pure logic divorced from this is philosophy, which is a superset of science.
Why not two big bangs, or three or 33?
That's like saying that gravitation
Deities have to be timeless. (Score:2)
Deities have to be timeless - at least I won't settle for anything less. If an entity has apparent super powers, but is still subject to the passage of time (and thereby to the second law of thermodynamics), it is merely technologically more advanced.
Time, to a deity, has as much meaning as page numbers in a book. Or CPU clock cycles to a programmer who is able to observe, preserve and set every single state of the machine, t
Traditionally God outside the universe ... (Score:3)
Curious how they interpret genesis then. If the big bang theory is accurate, then a god simply cannot have created the universe. 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, then there was no time for a god to create the universe.
It is unlikely that the big bang presents any sort of theological problem for the church. The theory was put forward by a Catholic priest teaching at a Catholic university after all.
Keep in mind that communications between two parties needs to be a least common denominator sort of thing. An all powerful God has to use concepts that humans can understand. The pre-scientific farmers and shepherds of the bible's day needed something a bit simplified compared to a modern astrophysicist. Perhaps if God were t
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Evolution and theory of origin of species are related but significantly different statements about two different things.
Evolution is an experimental observation of biological organisms changing in generations.
Theory of origin of species uses this observation to claim universality of evolution and that it can explain all diversity of current species by deriving it from a single primordial organism.
Evolution is an undisputable fact, while theory of origin of species is not even a scientific theory. It fails P
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I don't agree with that at all. What the Catholic position is is simply "If your Biblical interpretation insists that science must be wrong, it is your Biblical interpretation that is faulty." That was basically St. Augustine's point.
You're not going to be able to use science to disprove the existence of God. Science can't really even disprove the existence of Thor, which is a far more limited god than Yahweh. What science can do is remove the need for Thor, and in much the same way some of the things tradi
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If you're going to be Christian and don't want to be a retard, Catholicism is where it's at.
Anglican (Church of England) is better. Only a minority of self-described Anglicans believe in God.
Even some of their priests openly doubt the existence of God, or Jesus as a literal truth.
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Why start from scratch when you can join an organisation that is already fabulously wealthy and is immune from all taxes?
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This is only a relative statement. The Catholic church finally acknowledged Darwin a couple of decades ago, and still hasn't come to terms with him. For instance, man isn't fallen creature in need of redemption, but an uplifted one.
Their acknowledgement puts them ahead of the least intellectual protestant branches, and the Muslims, the world's two worst religions, and that's about it.
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Evolution does not rate various species. It says nothing about whether man is damned or uplifted.
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If you're going to be Christian and don't want to be a retard, Catholicism is where it's at.
But if you accept the Big Bang Theory and Evolution, you presumably have to accept that the first few books of the Bible aren't literally true, which means that the whole Christian belief system is built on sand.
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Personally I find the word "retard" a bit offensive, as I had a brother with Down's syndrome who really was a retard. So instead of that word, let's be more specific and less pejorative.
In order to judge either the ethics of belief or the quantitative quality of belief, one needs an ordinal system of ranking belief(s) and belief systems. These need not be complex -- they can be as simple as: "It is best to believe the most that which you can doubt the least, given the evidence and the (Bayesian) network
They should throw a curve ball (Score:4, Funny)
Now that the Pope has lured them in, he should put them all on trial for heresy.
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That's offensive. He's of Italian descent, not Spanish. :-D
The US Catholic's seem to have missed it (Score:3)
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You are conflating Catholics with "all Christians." Generally speaking, Catholics do not generally use the term intelligent design, nor do they believe that arose over time out of causality is in conflict with the concept of a universe created by God.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... [huffingtonpost.com]
Basic abstraction (Score:3)
Notice, it is an ID, not necessarily a UniqueID... "This is my universe. There are many like it, but this one is mine. It is my life."
The Vatican has a telescope? (Score:2)
Is it anything like this one?
http://www.hwdyk.com/q/images/... [hwdyk.com]
IT'S A TRAP! (Score:2)
I just figured it out why the Pope has been so progressive: it's all been a lure for this moment! You see, when they arrive in the Vatican, the world's most prominent cosmologists will be put on trial for heresy. It's too bad this warning won't reach them in time because nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! ;)
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I just figured it out why the Pope has been so progressive: it's all been a lure for this moment! You see, when they arrive in the Vatican, the world's most prominent cosmologists will be put on trial for heresy. It's too bad this warning won't reach them in time because nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! ;)
"It's a trap" my fist thought. Nobody knows what happened till 378,000 years after the Big Bang. That's when the cosmic microwave background radiation is dated to. Earlier is most agreed upon scenario.
Cognitive Dissonance (Score:2)
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.
It sounds like Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno is experiencing some cognitive dissonance. He has to believe in God to keep his job, but he has to also believe in the Big Bang theory to be a real astronomer.
I imagine it's a pretty sweet gig, but there are other jobs out there.
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God couldnt use the Big Bang to create the universe?
Quite a lot of Catholics and pretty much all Jesuits take a lot of the bible as metaphor. The big bang or evolution isnt incompatible to the faith for these people.
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Well no one really cares what you would do so your points are irrelevant.
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Also, God is inherently abstract. If something has the power to create the universe a human most certainly cant conceptualize it.
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God couldnt use the Big Bang to create the universe?
Quite a lot of Catholics and pretty much all Jesuits take a lot of the bible as metaphor. The big bang or evolution isnt incompatible to the faith for these people.
The trouble is that once you start to say that parts A and B of the Bible are metaphors it becomes unconvincing to say that parts C and D are divinely revealed truth.
LHC Invites World Leading Clerics To Discuss Myths (Score:3)
and the Big Bang theory are real (Score:2)
Of course it is real. You need to be a complete idiot to deny that such a theory exists.
Folks, you're picking the wrong demon here (Score:4, Informative)
The Vatican has maintained an astronomy office since 1774: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] .
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.
Re:When did the big bang happen though? (Score:5, Informative)
Because young earthers are generally not Catholic.
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Because young earthers are generally not Catholic.
Indeed. The fundamentalist protestants that believe in the Young Earth, and build replicas of Noah's ark, also believe that the pope is the antichrist. They are two completely different groups.
But to answer the original question: God put the fossils and other evidence for evolution on earth to test our faith. It is a trick to separate the true believers from the doubters that will be consumed in the Lake of Fire when the moment of Rapture arrives.
At least this is why my fundamentalist brother-in-law tel
Re:When did the big bang happen though? (Score:5, Funny)
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God put the fossils and other evidence for evolution on earth to test our faith.
The majority of young earth creationists do not believe that God put the fossils there to test our faith. The majority of young earth creationists believe at least some of the following:
1) That the majority of fossils exist because many animals were buried in the flood and that the torrential flood caused the different rock layers (rather than millions of years)
2) That fossilization can happen much quicker than previously thought...in a matter of years rather than hundreds of thousands of years.
3) Because f
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Except all "discoveries" of dinosaur DNA are generally believed to be caused by contamination. One, for example, turned out to be a human Y chromosome. To date, AFAIK, they haven't been able to extract nontrivial fragments of DNA from any samples that are more than a few hundred thousand years old, if that.
Current models suggest the complete destruction of DNA after about 6.8 million years, which is approximately an order of magnitude shorter than the time that has passed since dinosaurs last walked the e
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Never met a young earther in my years of doing public science outreach but I've found tons of morons who think they understand science because they like the Jurassic Park movies.
You guys are worried about the wrong things.
Hahaha... I have to echo the same sentiment. The number of people I witness using their limited/misguided knowledge of science as a "weapon" to prove they're smarter than everyone else is a little distasteful. Really wish there was more *real* exposure to proper science instead of just Hollywood-type flashiness. It's worse than the almost-true "based on real events" movies that fictionalize history and just confuse people for the sake of money and entertainment. What can we do? Well, at least each of t
Re:When did the big bang happen though? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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 s
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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.
Um, that was in the 16th century. A little bit of history has happened since then - including the fact that Benedict is no longer Pope (current guy is Francis).
Back in the 18th and 19th century many Americans were practising slavery, so perhaps you could let go of a Pope that lived in the 16th century. He, like the early Americans, was a creature of his times. It is time to get over it. We all have skeletons in the historical closet.
Re:When did the big bang happen though? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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.
Because they understand that political lobbying is much more effective that excommunication nowadays.
Can you get federal funding for stem cell research in 2017? Mostly no, because "research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death" (so, most of the really useful research) is prohibited. And they didn't need to burn anyone at the stake.
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Because they understand that political lobbying is much more effective that excommunication nowadays. Can you get federal funding for stem cell research in 2017? Mostly no, [...]. And they didn't need to burn anyone at the stake.
Please don't move the goalposts. PopeRatzo was clearly stated that the Church would “slap down pretty hard”, which indicates direct use of power. John Oliver exercises much more “slapping power” than the Catholic Church in the USA. Even the lobbying wasn't that effective since human embryo research is still allowed, just not the federal funding.
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The Bible is a catalog of archetypes and has no interest in knowledge of the objective universe for its own sake.
But I imagine most Christians would be offended if you described the Bible as purely a work of fiction like Ovid's Metamorphoses or Aesop's Fables..
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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 [biblestudy.org], and the number 40 means a period of testing [biblestudy.org].
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 empha
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provable science
You fail science.
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everything evolved from something.
That's not clear at all. I suggest you read Lawrence M. Krauss' excellent book "A Universe From Nothing" for an easy read about this topic.
And also read a bit more about time. It's hard for us to conceptualize a beginning of time itself, as we always think there must be something before that. But the word "before" (and your "from something") implies that time is ticking, which was not necessarily the case [hawking.org.uk] at the Big Bang.
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Not a terribly good argument. If Galileo was present today, I'd think he'd have a slightly easier time of it.
Give due where due is deserved. The Catholic church does appear to be trying to modernise. I say, good for them! They're a bit slow, but at least they are changing.
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Slow by what metric?
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Not by much. Very publicly calling a major political figure with an autocratic streak a mile wide an idiot (simplicio) doesn't tend to go down well in any era.
Re:Please (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [slashdot.org]. You want to know more about the details of Galileo's theories and the problems? I've explained that here [slashdot.org]. 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.
Re:Please (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Ptolemaic system was scientific they tried to create a model that better fit their observations. What's anti-scientific is defending it violence.
Re:Please (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
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If you persecute scientists because they go against scientific thinking, you're about as anti-science as it gets. The renaissance broke a long period of violent inquisition into any deviations from official doctrine.
A whole lot of original thinkers ended up in prison or burned before they got around to Galileo, so don't give us this "Not this again." bullshit.
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When was Galileo excommunicated? He was put under house arrest for the rest of his life, and most certainly his rejection of the Ptolemaic model played into his troubles, and he was criticized for insisting that the Copernican model was true.
Re:Please (Score:4, Informative)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair
Re:Baha'i's Believe This (Score:5, Insightful)
- Saint Augustine of Hippo
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It's a hopeless cause. Instilling faith in "the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven" hampers the ability to think logically.
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That may be true, but then what happened to your ability?
Re:But of course (Score:5, Informative)
They've been doing astronomy for over a century. They're hardly trying to look "hip" or "cool".
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Actually, the church's involvement in astronomy predates modernism. From the time of the late Roman Empire the Catholic Church managed the calendar for Europe, a tasks that was made complicated by the Computus -- the calculation of the date of Easter, which unlike other feast days is not tied to a specific date in the calendar.
Easter is supposed to fall on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the vernal equinox. Note the combination cycles: solar, lunar, and day of week. Up until the late
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Tell you what, when you have an alternative explanation for the CMBR (and its neutrino counterpart), nucleosynthesis (ratio of hydrogen, helium and lithium in the observable universe), and the red shift of distant galaxies, you let us know.
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Those telescopes will also find the film set for the faked moon landing. It was carried up to the dark side of the moon by Armstrong so no one would know the moon landing was faked.
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Big Bang is a "socially accepted theory" just like the geocentric model or spontaneous generation used to be.
Next generation telescopes launched in the next 10 years will determine the Big Bang is false, just another human-friendly creationist theory dressed up in 20th century scifi.
And that will be science doing what it's supposed to do. Coming up with theories of how things work and testing them all the time, trying to disprove them. When something is found not to work, new evidence is used to come up wit
Re: Big Bang is false too, just like Creationists (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Do us a favor; don't wait.