Pope Francis Supports Science While Having Faith In God.

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Just because you struggle with allegory doesn't mean that he does.

What evidence does Pope Francis provide in support of his assertion that "God" is not a "magician with a magic wand"?

Either God exists, or does not.
Magicians with magic wands do not exist.
If God exists, God is not a magician with a magic wand.

This is just another reason I'm glad I got out of the Catholic Church. The pope is not supposed to stand behind the Big Bang at all. He should be removed and replaced. Do you realize he's upholding the athiest point of view and not the Catholics? Everyone is getting away from the real point here - it's not whether his statement is true or false - he shouldn't be making the statement at all.

I think Pope Francis is quite innovative, and will leave a legacy that will be hard to top.

The Big Bang is completely consistent with "Let there be light" if a person is in the JudeoChristian tradition. It is not an atheist view at all. Atheists are a very small subset of the people who consider the Big Bang a plausible model of what happened.

He is justified in making the statement. There is also one whopper of a precedent.

http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2014/10/31/pope-franciss-comments-on-the-big-bang-are-not-revolutionary-catholic-teaching-has-long-professed-the-likelihood-of-human-evolution/



I bolded the whopper of a precedent but the bolding in WP 2.0 is nearly invisible. So I'll give it its' own quote.....


It was a priest, a CATHOLIC PRIEST who came up with the Big Bang theory in the first place.

Unsurprisingly he was a Jesuit. Unsurprisingly so is Pope Francis.

But you can't call it incompatible with Catholicism if it was thought up by a Catholic priest in the first place.

Here's a little bit about him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre

Actually "The point of view of the Catholics" since at least the reign of Pope John (1960's) is that "it is up to the individual Catholic to decide whether or not to believe in evolution" not "Creationism is right, and evolution is wrong".

Did Oldavid hijack your account? If not, that's a stellar homage.

Ok. So if one believes in the Big Bang then you would also believe that someone had to start it - God. Right? Which means that an atheist couldn't believe in the Big Bang?

I don't see a problem with the pope saying the theories are real, because I don't hear him saying that he believes the theories have been PROVEN. Sure, they're real----somebody made them up----so, they DO exist; but, that doesn't mean they have been proven, IMO. I feel that even to those who believe they HAVE been proven, they know how quickly science can change, and thereby DISprove a theory.

I'd consider the conflict like this; the Catholic church has a certain layer of 'deposits' - doctrines in religion that cannot be updated. Next layer up are dogmas which are close to that. That said I don't know how much the Catholic church, by its own internal structure, is able to change its interpretations of the bible. I was raised Catholic but PSR training up through confirmation doesn't take you very far at all - in fact what little 'bible' is in it is paltry. Things like that often make me wonder how much the Catholic church was really able to accept the works of Teilhard de Chardin. Similarly if the holy see came to the Renaissance and likely conclusion Sextus V that the Catholic church was fundamentally a Kabbalistic/Hermetic institution and that it was the only way, shape, or form their degree of adoration toward Mary or the communion of saints and angels made any sense - red tape would be prohibitive. I have to conclude - between examples like Athanaseus Kircher, Teilhard de Chardin, Guy Consolmagno, and most recently Pope Francis, that the beliefs and philosophies of the Jesuits by and large is quite a bit different in it's scope and open-endedness than the church itself. In a way it almost sits in connection like a sort of sanctioned masonic order.

I guess technically one can take science so far as it doesn't shatter cosmological arguments (within bible literalism). Evolution, if carrying both evolution and the bible, takes a very Rosicrucian sort of revamp of the early parts of Genesis and a theosophizing of what Christ's death on the cross meant. Some of this makes me wonder if Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI might have been reading Meditations on the Tarot - to see if Valentin Tomberg's devout yet theosophical/Martinist take on Catholicism was something they could accommodate within the hard lines of what they've been given through the centuries to work with.

Tom Horn and Christ Putnam had a couple heavy hitters - Prophecy of the Popes and Exo-Vaticana - which was their attempt at trying to make sense of Malachi O'Morgaire's prophecy as well as to try and extrapolate also a lot of the language that's been floating around regarding ET excitement.

The new pope's nomination was at a very unusual marker and I don't think this can happen by accident: 3/13/2013 at 8:13 PM (ie. 20:13) in their timezone. Obviously 20+13 is 33, both 13 and 33 are big numbers in the bible as well as other places and you see 13 constantly in the 12+1 configurations whether the tribes in the OT, Apostles around Christ, there were I believe 12 tribes under Ishmael, the Rosicrucians had Christian Rosencreutz with twelve brethren that he worked with, later the Mormons similarly had Joseph Smith and twelve disciples. Love and unity are both valued at 13, 13 is also half of 26 - YHVH. At time time I might not have guessed the Vatican to be in the number theology game but, as old and as stoic an institution as it is and having as big an esoteric library as they do (add to that where Pope Francis comes from - both Buenos Aires and the Jesuit side of the church), it shouldn't surprise me at all when I think about it.

What fascinated me in addition to that were the major meteors that dropped within a few days. I haven't seen anything like that on the news either before or after, it's not something that never happens I'm sure, but the timing, the media effect, a lot of things were just 'odd'.

Tom Horn was mentioning that the Zohar talked about Vatican city being in ruin at a given time and that it would either have to relocate or just be done with. Interestingly enough A.E. Waite might have had some things to say on the issue - the Death card in his deck is meant to symbolize the end of the Piscean age and the beginning of the Aquarian. The bible seems to span from Taurian to Aquarian and the Aquarian age is only hinted at briefly in Luke 22:10.

I have to remain agnostic on whether the Catholic institution will literally come to an end due to some calamity during Pope Francis' tenure. There may be a 'little apocalypse', there may not be. The problem with the Book of Revelations is that to make sense of it in an intellectually congruent manner we're forced to look at it one of two ways 1) as a book that discusses the 66-70 AD sacking of Jerusalem in depth, predicts the fall of Rome, and a 1,000 year kingdom of Catholic rule over Europe or 2) particularly with the seven churches you'd have a map of precessions of the equinox or certain epochs that humanity was passing through and that it's a narrative for story that goes MUCH beyond 2015 and any of our lifetimes. The more one holds up the Platonic cycle and the seven 2,160 year periods the dive down and rise back up in a certain kind of progression with five 2,160 years of golden age - that's 15,120 years (at least the 7 x 2,160 active portion) and it rhymes very much with something that Tom Horn said about Rene Thibault (one of the more famous Jesuit analysts of the O'Morgaire prophecy) who indicated his own belief that God would be done with his plan for us in 15,000 years.

I could blather on but we're in very heavily hyped times at least in terms of long-running prophecies. The 12/21/2012 thing was a bit of a bust, this might be as well, or it might happen but be a much more peaceful dissolution of an institution. Not sure which it will be and, if there are many more popes to come after Francis, it would be an interesting outcome - I suppose I won't be shocked too much that way either.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 16 Jul 2015, 7:05 pm, edited 3 times in total.

Atheist here. I'll answer your points in reverse order.

1- I don't "believe in" the Big Bang. However, I am satisfied that it is the current best explanation for the origin of the Universe.
2- It is not necessary to believe (nor disbelieve) in the Big Bang in order to be an atheist.
3- Your insertion of "God" as the cause of the Big Bang is a classic example of the "god of the gaps".
4- You have no basis for your assertion that "someone had to start it". The origin of the Universe has more possible hypothetical explanations than the entire human race can conceive of, the overwhelming majority of which do not feature intelligent beings.

You can postulate a deity being behind the Big Bang. Or not. Scientists don't do metaphysics. And Popes don't do physics. But the Pope is allowed to say that "current theories are consistent with current evidence (ie are 'real')".

The problem with that logic - if one believes that God created the universe then one can't be an atheist, at the most liberal they can be a deist. For an atheist to walk their observations backward along the bible in the manner your suggesting would mean that they wouldn't be allowed to believe that they exist right now because God created the universe and they don't believe in God. If their 'I' experience is still awake and ticking after receiving that bombshell it suggests that atheists and theists are both just as much in relatively stable reality where what one believes tends not to delete either them or the value of their observations in the material world.

That is the religious point of view and Pope Francis said as much in his speech. (Maybe you agree with him after all )


No. It's a religious view that certain things can only be accomplished by a conscious entity.

And you've missed the point I was making here entirely. The Pope isn't a scientist.