by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
God's mind was behind complex scientific theories such as the Big Bang, and Christians should reject the idea that the universe came into being by accident, Pope Benedict said recently.
"The universe is not the result of chance, as some would want to make us believe," the Holy Father said on the 2011 Feast of the Epiphany; the Feast of the Epiphany being the day that the Bible says the three kings from the East, the Magi, reached the site where Jesus was born by following a star.
The Pope said in a sermon to some 10,000 people in St Peter's Basilica that contemplating the universe we are invited to read something profound into it: the wisdom of the creator, the inexhaustible creativity of God.
While the Holy Father has spoken before about evolution, he has rarely delved back in time to discuss specific concepts such as the Big Bang, which scientists believe led to the formation of the universe some 13.7 billion years ago.
Some atheists say science can prove that God does not exist, but Benedict said that some scientific theories were "mind limiting" because "they only arrive at a certain point ... and do not manage to explain the ultimate sense of reality ..."
The Holy Father said scientific theories on the origin and development of the universe and humans, while not in conflict with faith, left many questions unanswered.
The point could be made, once again, about the chicken and the egg, as to which came first and it is at that very point, and similar ones, that the scientists normally come up with strange explanation, in the same way that some Christians, who take the Bible as completely literal, handle the issue of Adam and Eve and their two sons, especially as regards to Cain and Abel and Cain going into another country and taking unto himself a wife.
"In the beauty of the world, in its mystery, in its greatness and in its rationality ... we can only let ourselves be guided towards God, creator of heaven and earth," Pope Benedict said.
Pope Benedict XVI, and his predecessor Pope John Paul II, have been trying to shed the Church's image of being anti-science, a label that stuck when it condemned Galileo for teaching that the earth revolves around the sun, challenging the words of the Bible.
Galileo was rehabilitated and the Church now also accepts evolution as a scientific theory and sees no reason why God could not have used a natural evolutionary process in the forming of the human species.
The Catholic Church no longer teaches creationism – that is to say the belief that God created the world in six days as described in the Bible – and says that the account in the book of Genesis is an allegory for the way God created the world.
But the Church objects to using evolution to back an atheist philosophy that denies God's existence or any divine role in creation. It also objects to using Genesis as a scientific text.
Finally, I would say, we are coming to some sense in the field of the Christian Faith and many other groups would do well to have a look at the stance that the Vatican and the Church is no taking.
As far as many of us are concerned – and I haste to add that I am no Christian per se – science cannot explain the great majority of the wonders of the Universe in any manner that makes sense. Thus, somewhere along the lines one has to, perhaps, accept that there is a higher entity out there somewhere that one might refer to as G-d or in the plural as g-ds.
© 2011
