Pope: "Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve"

Had the privilege of hearing Dr. Oats from Marantha Baptist University and Seminary preach. His text was a chunk of 1 Cor 15 where he showed how theology was more like “a bowl of spaghetti than a bunch or bread sticks” (his analogy) because you cannot simply tug on one thread in isolation. Each thread touches many other parts which, in turn touch many more parts. Using the mention of Adam, he specifically sowed how removing historical Adam as depicted in Genesis 1-3, touches inspiration, anthropology, hamartiology and soteriology. Sadly, the Big Bang absolutely contradicts and undermines the Divine Creator, making Him either a liar or a fool.

Chip (or someone else of the 6 people that liked his comment), since you brought it up, please define “Big Bang” so I can know what you know (and don’t know) and what you are rejecting.

Been down that road already Mark, and it’s a red herring. It has no bearing on the statement here. The big bang, in any permutation, and evolutionary theory contradict the literal presentation of scripture. Evolution cannot coexist with an historic Adam. When the message I referenced is posted to the church website, I will link here for you to review yourself.

Chip,

I would agree. Without an actual, historical Adam as articulated in Scripture, there are serious theological ramifications. Peter Enns and others like to gloss over this (as does the pope it appears). Whether God created the universe on the first day with a Big Bang event or whether he created it all instantaneously is less relevant, since Scripture is not clear on how the mechanics actually happened. But we can’t have an evolutionary process pre-Adam and still hold to the vaste majority of Scripture.

for those who don’t know is SIMPLY AND ONLY the observation that the universe is expanding, and was therefore smaller in the past. Are you denying that we can measure that the universe is expanding?

1. It has been confirmed many times that the speed of light (in a vacuum) is the same for all observers, so using the speed of light is a good “measuring rod” for the universe.

2. Many measurements have been made over the years to confirm that the speed of light has never changed.

3. In the late 1920s Edwin Hubble used the work of Henrietta Swan Leavitt and others to measure the distance to the Andromeda Nebula (he used a certain kind of star called Cepheid Variables to do so) and found that the distance was at least 1 million light years. So, it was found that the Andromeda Nebula was not in the Milky Way galaxy, but was a separate galaxy on its own.

4. In the early 1930s Edwin Hubble continued his work and measured the distances to many galaxies using Cepheid Variables. He combined these distances with the work of a man named Slipher who had measured the Doppler shift of these galaxies. Putting the two results together Hubble found that the universe was expanding in a uniform (meaning the same everywhere) and continuous (meaning with the same amount of “growth”).

5. A Belgian priest physicist named Georges LeMaitre then concluded that if the universe was expanding farther apart, then it used to be closer together! He ran that back in time and suggested a “primeval atom” for the beginning of the universe. Up until this time physicists, who tended to not be very Christian, thought of the universe as static and eternal.

6. Based off of LeMaitre’s work George Gamow and Ralph Alpher in the late 1940s predicted that if the “primeval atom” theory was correct there would be a lingering microwave radiation background observable coming from all directions in the Universe at a temperature of around 3 Kelvin.

7. Around this time a proponent of the eternal static universe named Fred Hoyle mocked the theory of LeMaitre and Gamow/Alpher by calling it the “Big Bang”.

8. In 1964, two physicists working for Bell Labs inadvertently found this microwave radiation background while working on satellite communication in New Jersey. The prediction of the “Big Bang” hypothesis had been verified.

So, the conventional Big Bang theory ended in the late 1960s. It had been shown to be valid in its predictions. Many other points have been ADDED as other theories based on the Big Bang made other predictions. Most of you all are thinking of THOSE THEORIES and NOT the BIG BANG when you reject modern cosmology. To reject the basic Big Bang theory means you reject the overall principle that we can observe anything useful about the universe…it is EXCEEDINGLY SIMPLE in its observations and conclusions.

The expanding universe is one thing. But the extrapolation of that assumes that everything has stayed the same since creation, and that is a big theory. There are a number of issues that have not been solve in modern cosmology. The universe expanding does not prove or disprove a Big Bang. It could be that the universe was kept in perfect stasis prior to the fall, at the fall, God removed his hand and allowed the universe to begin a deteriotion process. We have no idea if the expansion will continue or if contraction begins tomorrow.

With that said, it is entirely irrelevant to the discussion, since the pope was focusing on evolution and not the Big Bang which are totally two different activities within science. It is an assumption that we can take the rate of expansion today and extrapolate it to a point and then assume exactly what happened at that point. We have a very low level of understanding as to the age of the universe.

The actual title of the article at Breitbart is “NO BIG BANG WITHOUT GOD, SAYS POPE FRANCIS“…so the Big Bang is germane to this discussion.

Second, BY DEFINITION, the Big Bang is the expansion of the universe. That is what I am saying!!!!!!!!!!! The Big Bang, properly used, means that and only that. How do I know? Doctor of Philosophy in Physics specializing in experimental cosmology.

to get you guys to learn something so you can better defend the Bible and Christianity.

What good was there in me “wasting my time” earning a PhD in physics if I can’t help you guys learn something?

Mark,

I don’t have a problem with the idea that the universe is expanding but I always thought the big bang referred to the origin of the universe in evolutionary thought. Is that not correct?

Andy

STRICTLY SPEAKING, the Big Bang is the theory that says the universe used to be smaller and hotter, and is now bigger and cooler. That is to say it is expanding. That is IT!!!

Now, in everyday language, people use it to mean the “godless” origin of the universe, but that is NOT CORRECT.

Also, many theories have been proposed and added to “the Big Bang” theory, such as inflation, nucleosynthesis, etc.

One more caveat-> Science works by assuming uniformitarianism (you can’t do anything if the rules are always changing…and there is observed NO EVIDENCE in nature that rules have changed), so along with the Big Bang with the simple measurement from it that the universe is about 13.6 billion years old.

Mark,

Yes, but remember the Big Bang is only a model that fits an explanation of what we see. That is it. The model holds true for what we see now. But there is more we don’t know about cosmology than we do know about cosmology. The fact that it is expanding, I don’t ever feel, was a contention of whether God created the universe or not. The concern is the age that the Big Bang theory extrapolates. And since we 1) have no recorded measurement and observation of the Big Bang, 2) have no idea on the uniformity over time, and 3) have no absolute picture of cosmology, only ever changing models, none of this stuff bothers me.

It isn’t that rules are changing, it is that our knowledge is woefully incomplete. Newton discovered gravity. For all intents and purposes at the time, it was a pretty rock solid law of gravity that he developed. Then our knowledge expanded far beyond what Newton had access to, and we found that his law of gravity was lacking. It wasn’t that uniformitarianism wasn’t in effect, it was that he had no concept of other elements, and so while his model fully explained what he saw and observed, it didn’t take into account what he didn’t understand. Einstein comes along at updates this law on gravity. Even now, as our knowledge expands there are some elements that still don’t fit into Einsteins law. You have to remember that science isn’t progressing because we are getting more refined, it is progressing when things “break”. We say it is 13 billion years old, but what says that our knowledge of dark matter doesn’t grow and change that? What if we find the universe is bigger? Some of the study around gravitational ripples is stretching some ideas that maybe the expansion could go past the speed of light.

The fact that light is constant in a vacuum is not an absolute. It is a statement that helps us build models, it is subject to change as observations change and as long as our observations change, we must be open to the possibility than any one of our models, no matter how absolute could be subject to change.

This isn’t being naive about science and the Bible. It is understanding that there are limits to both. It is fine to say that the universe is 13.8 billion years and is expanding, as that fits our current model and allows us to continue to do calculations on things, but to be so naive as to think that in the last 10,000 years that somehow man has some unique perspective, at this single moment as to say that this model is an absolute explanation of what is observed and that this observation is never going to change is ridiculous. Even as short as the last 30 years has flipped cosmology around.

It is fine to say that the universe is 13.8 billion years

I want to focus on this one statement, because I think it is really at the heart of the matter. How do you reconcile this with the literal interpretation of scripture?

[Chip Van Emmerik]

Quote:

It is fine to say that the universe is 13.8 billion years

Dave,

I want to focus on this one statement, because I think it is really at the heart of the matter. How do you reconcile this with the literal interpretation of scripture?

I think Dave is making an appearance of age remark. In other words, he is not saying that the universe is actually 13.8 billion years old but acknowledging that that number works with current scientific hypothesis and that it is OK to use that number in current cosmological research because the model that gives that number is currently the “best.” We should all expect that number to change, though, as science and thus the model changes.

[AndyE]

Chip Van Emmerik wrote:

Quote:

It is fine to say that the universe is 13.8 billion years

Dave,

I want to focus on this one statement, because I think it is really at the heart of the matter. How do you reconcile this with the literal interpretation of scripture?

I think Dave is making an appearance of age remark. In other words, he is not saying that the universe is actually 13.8 billion years old but acknowledging that that number works with current scientific hypothesis and that it is OK to use that number in current cosmological research because the model that gives that number is currently the “best.” We should all expect that number to change, though, as science and thus the model changes.

Exactly what Andy stated. First, we don’t know the exact age of the universe from a Scriptural perspective. There is no clarity, but I would think that those who believe in a literal interpretation of Scripture would say that the universe is relatively young in comparison to 13.8 billion years.

With that said, if I was a doctor at the time and I was treating Adam, I would have to make assumptions that he was older than he really was. Even though that would not truly be correct, from a scientific perspective, using the assumption that Adam was, let’s say, 38 would be useful and advantageous as I treated him. I view the 13.8 billion years as the same. We have a model that is created, and in order for us to practice science and such, we may need to use the fact that the universe may appear to be that old. That doesn’t mean that those both have the same weighting or exactness in terms of Truth. We would say that the world in reality is young, but because of miraculous activities outside of the realm of any scientific explanation or framework, the universe appears to be older, more vast……. I could even argue that it is possible that God created the Universe in a single 24 hour day through an explosive event, but I would not agree to the point that this explosive event was either a random or a natural event.