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The Independent reports that Pope Francis, speaking at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, has declared that the theories of evolution and the Big Bang are real.
“When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so,” said Francis.
“He created human beings and let them develop according to the internal laws that he gave to each one so they would reach their fulfillment."
Francis explained that both scientific theories were not incompatible with the existence of a creator – arguing instead that they “require it”.
“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.”
Experts say the Pope's comments put an end to the “pseudo theories” of creationism and intelligent design that some argue were encouraged by his predecessor, Benedict XVI who spoke out against taking Darwin too far.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by TrumpetPower! on Wednesday October 29 2014, @02:20AM
I must admit, I always find fascinating the crass hubris and shameless hypocrisy of religious statements such as the one you just made.
I mean, here you are, declaring with unquestionable certainty the motives and specific limitations of an entity that you would have us believe personally created Life, the Universe, and Everything just so that you yourself could make such pronouncements about it. And, I'm sure, all in the name of humble religious humility, to boot.
And the name of the game isn't to come up with some theory that can't be proven worng. That's the very definition of a paranoid conspiracy theory. After all, you also can't prove that we're brains in vats, or living in the Matrix, or that your tinfoil hat has slipped and aliens are controlling your thoughts with their mind rays. Indeed, there are an infinite variety of such conspiracy theories, all every bit as likely and un-disprovable as this "God" one you've latched onto.
Rather, the sane approach is to apportion beliefs in proportions indicated by a rational analysis of objective observation. And there are not only no observations of gods, but overwhelming observations that there are no powerful agents with humanity's best interests at heart -- an observation Epicurus made centuries before the invention of your Christ.
So, please. By all means, continue to (try to) fool yourself that a lack of contrary evidence (whose existence you desperately ignore) isn't enough to demonstrate you're deluding yourself. But don't for a moment think that you're fooling anybody other than yourself.
Unless, of course, you want to fool yourself about that bit, too....
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Wednesday October 29 2014, @03:48AM
I mean, here you are, declaring with unquestionable certainty the motives and specific limitations of an entity that you would have us believe personally created Life, the Universe, and Everything just so that you yourself could make such pronouncements about it. And, I'm sure, all in the name of humble religious humility, to boot.
The way I see it, if such an entity exists, it has better things to do with its time than worry about what I think of it. Likewise, I have better things to do with my time than worry about what it thinks of me. Whether it exists or not is irrelevant beyond being a thought exercise, and if it does exist, I'm content to live and let live.
Well, it's irrelevant unless you buy into the notion that a higher power is watching you and will punish you if you do something shitty. That's a principle that bothers me, because fear of a bogeyman shouldn't be the primary motivation that keeps people from being shitheads to each other.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday October 29 2014, @10:38AM
Indeed. I think the idea of an all-powerful, universe-encompassing deity that makes the time to peek in through peoples' bedroom windows and make a note of who's poking what body part in where shows a complete lack of appreciation[1] of just how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big time and space actually are. I guess it's natural for a person to tend to think of things in terms of how those things affect him/herself personally, we all do it to an extent. But to imagine that a god with an entire universe to run really gives a crap how much you prayed lately or whether you're eating the wrong kind of meat is to position oneself, or at least the human race, at the very centre of absolutely everything.
If there is an omnipresent, universe-building deity up there, my guess is that it spares about as much thought and interest in you as you do to a transient individual bacterium in the middle of a colony on the back of some rock that you drove past on the way to work this morning.
[1] I don't think any human mind can fully appreciate it, but with a little thought and study we can at least begin to appreciate how unappreciable[2] it is.
[2] If that wasn't a word before, it is now.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 29 2014, @11:59AM
the idea of an all-powerful, universe-encompassing deity that makes the time to peek in through peoples' bedroom windows and make a note of who's poking what body part
Let us enumerate a hierarchy of stupidity. Dante style. In the first ring of stupidity you have people trying to enforce their will WRT the morality of various sexual activities or cultural attitudes upon SN commenters. Thats pretty dumb, but it gets worse. The next ring of stupidity would be trying to enforce will on the site admins. The next level of stupidity would be trying to enforce their will on political entities, first municipal, eventually the UN.
Finally, the pinnacle of stupidity, would appear to a bunch of camel f*ckers 2000 years ago talking back to their god like insolent little children, "Well, our backassward 3rd world hellhole doesn't like wimmins or homos, so you think you're all high and mighty creating universes and suns and floods and shit, but around here its our way or the highway so you're officially gonna hate wimmin and homos coincidentally because we do, or you can just run away from home and go create a universe over there or sumptin" I mean really, think about it, trying to lay down the smack on an all powerful all knowning diety who does shit like lightning bolts (oh wait thats his frat bro Zeus). "You better agree with us while you're living under my temple roof, or you're in big trouble you all powerful diety!"
The greek pagans certainly had one thing right, given all powerful diety / dieties, ignorant hairless apes trying to make sense of them or even worse tell them what to do, just isn't going to pan out well.
I guess if you're superior to a mere god then its "correct" although maybe a little immoral to tell that mere god what to believe which coincidentally always matches up with ignorant uneducated backwards tribal custom. None the less, I'd make sure the lightning rods on the house are properly connected and maybe get a boat, because an all powerful diety is gonna be pissed at some stupid hairless apes telling him how its gonna be.
(Score: 3, Informative) by drgibbon on Wednesday October 29 2014, @04:12AM
Rather, the sane approach is to apportion beliefs in proportions indicated by a rational analysis of objective observation.
This mostly works, but when it comes to matters of spirituality it is usually the subjective experience that determines beliefs. If someone experiences God/spirits/whatever, there really is no objective way at present to prove or disprove the ontological status of these things. By "objective observation" I presume you mean to always look outward (as in "I see it with my eyes/infer it through some measurement tool"), but this is not a sufficient explanation of the actual workings of life and consciousness. If a person feels that they truly experienced the divine, perhaps even on a regular basis, I see no serious scientific method of coming to any conclusions about the ontological status of their experiences. In fact, for that person, their experience is an objective verification of their beliefs.
And there are not only no observations of gods
Taking this loosely, there are actually abundant observations of God(s)/spirits/entities/transpersonal worlds. They are very likely the source of the great religions for starters, and in fact spiritual experiences can be induced through various means (serious and disciplined meditation is one, the ingestion of psychoactive plants is another obvious one). A great many indigenous groups held spiritual beliefs that were based on the experience of spirituality. The logic and rationalism we have in the modern world does not alter the fact that 1) spiritual experience is actually quite common, 2) people seem to be equipped with this capability biologically, 3) truly firm conclusions regarding the ontology of spiritual beliefs are very often nigh on impossible to reach.
The problem is not that one can create any hypothesis that cannot be disproved (e.g. we live in the Matrix, God is a benevolent banana that you can't see), the problem is that spiritual/transpersonal experience is extremely common amongst human beings, and can even be experimentally induced. This constitutes actual data about the state of the world and humanity, and perhaps about what lies beyond the limits of that which is presently taken to be rational.
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(Score: 2) by geb on Wednesday October 29 2014, @08:33AM
In my experience, people do not have a scientific attitude about such subjective experiences. Anybody who believes in the supernatural wants to find proof of it, and given even very feeble, poorly fitting evidence, they'll try to take it as that proof instead of finding a better explanation.
I can give an example. A few years ago I woke up, having had a dream about a new banking regulation that was going to affect my bank account. I mentioned this to a friend, and they immediately pounced on it as evidence that visions of the future were possible, and that spirits guided us in sleep.
What had actually happened was that the neighbouring room had a clock radio, and a morning news program was playing. It could be heard through the wall.
Privileging one hypothesis because you want it to be true is profoundly not a scientific attitude, and prevents finding the truth. It is for this reason that I reject any witness accounts of gods that happen inside people's heads, indistinguishable from imagination. It's not impossible that a god would choose to manifest only in dreams, but there wouldn't be any good reason to expect that behaviour, and there would be good reason to expect a fantastically high false positive rate on observations.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 29 2014, @12:43PM
In other words, there are no serious scientists that are religious.
(Score: 1) by drgibbon on Wednesday October 29 2014, @06:46PM
Well, there are many ways to confuse this issue, but I'll say that the large amount of airy-fairy bullshit around matters of spirituality has almost no bearing on a serious scientific consideration of the matter of whether such a spiritual/beyond world exists. The fact is that subjective spiritual/mystical experience is a real phenomenon, and by that I mean death-like experiences where one merges in with some infinite love/energy/source whatever; it's varied and that's a very thin slice of it (there's lots of other types), but those experiences most certainly exist and appear to be available to humans. In fact there's reasonable evidence that we have this kind of circuitry built in, which may be activated at special times (like actual death).
We can talk about the mechanics of (genuine) spiritual experience (or non-genuine/made-up for the purposes of "religious/spiritual business", but that's interesting in a different way), we can speculate about it being a mental illness, a figment of imagination, a glimpse of something real, and so on, but anyone who claims to have objective scientific proof of the ontology of these things is either ignorant or pushing an agenda (for instance wanting to "disprove" once and for all to the airy-fairy types that there is no beyond, or wanting to "prove" to the rational scientific types that there is). The amount of zealotry is extremely high on this issue in both camps. The belief that a seemingly inaccessible spiritual world is illogical is a very feeble proof to hold on to; the fact that the world itself exists seems highly improbable and illogical, especially given that no one even knows how it came into being in the first place, but that doesn't disprove it being here.
There really is a lot less science in this than people are led to believe. In most cases, beliefs about the ontology of spirituality are more like mass-cultural artefacts than anything concrete. The question is truly not within our grasp, we don't even understand our own bodies (i.e. the stuff that lets us perceive our slice of reality in the first place), whether God/Gods/spirits are "real" is way out of our league. The true and honest scientific take on this question is "at present unknowable". Everything else is belief (which is not necessarily a bad thing, we can't live without it).
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(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday November 02 2014, @04:52PM
Proof!!!
My sister says she was hugged by Jesus... when i asked her how she could tell it was Jesus and not, say, the Devil or John Belushi, her answer was "I just know."
You can't argue with that, by Gum.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 1) by Frost on Wednesday October 29 2014, @08:38PM
"Experience"? A more accurate word would be "imagination". People imagine the divine. There is no particular method of coming to any conclusion about the ontological status of their imagination except to classify it as imaginary. Since it exists only in their minds, it's exactly the opposite of "objective".
Every night when I sleep I "experience" lots of things; what is the ontological status of those things? There is no objective, scientific evidence for them, even though the "experience" is vivid and undeniable. I call them "dreams" and don't let them interfere with my waking life, except perhaps for some occasional comedic or inspirational value.
Imagine God all you like, if it makes you feel better and helps you live your life. But don't mistake your imagination for external, objective fact.
(Score: 1) by drgibbon on Wednesday October 29 2014, @11:16PM
"Imagining" is a very poor choice of word for the extremely powerful experiences that people undergo during mystical/spiritual experiences (imagining makes it sounds like they are daydreaming, when really it would be more like everything you know and understand as reality is being fundamentally altered), experiencing is much more general and applicable. For instance you may say that you imagine your dreams (with which not everyone would agree), but no one would disagree that you experience your dreams. So you can call it imaginary (and it may be) but that claim alone does not constitute scientific evidence of anything. You may believe that dreams have no relevance in your life, and only provide "occasional comedic or inspirational value", but again, that is in no way scientific proof of anything. This is my point, you are actually propping up a personal (and culturally derived) belief about something and presenting it as an objective fact, when there is scant little objective evidence to be found. I did not say that God exists, I merely pointed out that (a) profound experiences of spiritually do exist, (b) that they can be empirically and pretty reliably induced, and (c) that we have no scientific means available to assess their ontological status (with which I am actually not all that concerned).
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(Score: 1) by Frost on Thursday November 06 2014, @03:38AM
Well, sir, you have a pretty high tolerance for delusion.
(Score: 1) by drgibbon on Thursday November 06 2014, @07:00AM
It's not much to do with tolerance for me, more like an honest appraisal of the state of play.
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(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday October 30 2014, @11:26PM
> And there are not only no observations of gods.
Pray tell how do you tell a god of a universe from a sufficiently powerful creature in it. If I could manipulate brain waves, I could make you believe I can tell the sun to turn pink and resuscitate your grandma.
Pray tell how a creator should be observable in a creation by default, since that is an anomaly. (Example you play the game of life, get lucky and create some self aware creatures, that cannot observe you because you are nowhere in the simulation. You could *PROJECT* yourself there but the projection is not you, it has to be believed as coming from above instead of being a new phenomenon of the simulation itself, see preceding point)
> but overwhelming observations that there are no powerful agents with humanity's best interests at heart.
You are discussing a parallel religion you have just invented where God acts in your best interests in this life instead of making the judgement later, but never mind.
Pray tell how do you know that the current situation is not providing the best possible outcome for humanity.
- God, why don't you save this child he's dying of hunger.
- WAT? NO WAI (God speaks in memes, I hate to break it to you)
- Why, you monster?
- Because his grand grand grand grand grand grand nephew would bang a girl who then would carry his child instead of the future dr. eijieqjrqw, who will save the galaxy in galaxy war IV, obviously.
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