Pope Advised Hawking Not to Study Origin of Universe 864
BlueCup submits a link to an Associated Press article running in the Northwest Florida Daily News which begins "Famous astrophysicist Stephen Hawking said Thursday that the late Pope John Paul II once told scientists they should not study the beginning of the universe because it was the work of God. The British author, who wrote the best-seller 'A Brief History of Time,' said that the pope made the comments at a cosmology conference at the Vatican."
According to the article, "The scientist then joked during a lecture in Hong Kong, 'I was glad he didn't realize I had presented a paper at the conference suggesting how the universe began. I didn't fancy the thought of being handed over to the Inquisition like Galileo.'"
Flawed Logic (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:If studying the work of God isn't allowed.... (Score:2, Interesting)
You know, kinda like the Xel'Naga did for the Protoss. Except in the end, the Protoss screwed up. And a bunch of bugs assimilated the Xel'Naga. Hmm, yeah, bad example, I suppose.....
Re:Nevertheless, it inflates (Score:5, Interesting)
The Vatican also has some fine astronomers (and one of the oldest astronomical research institutions).
http://vaticanobservatory.org/ [vaticanobservatory.org]
The Vatican isn't as backwards as those fundamental christian creationists that take everything the bible says literally.
One word (Score:1, Interesting)
Science and Religion (Score:3, Interesting)
Not quite right (Score:3, Interesting)
And as far as I know, the Pope so far is right; cosmologists will talk about t=1e-12 seconds after the Big Bang, and so forth, but few talk about t=0 (or t0) in anything but completely speculative ways. The Big Bang and "Let there be light!" are perfectly compatible if you're not a literalist.
Religion is being backed into a corner (Score:3, Interesting)
And yes, I read 'A Brief History of Time' several times and always enjoyed the bit about the Pope telling him to stay away from the beginning of the universe.
Speaking as a Young Earth Creationist... (Score:3, Interesting)
The Catholic church does not object to evolutionary theory, on the premise that "life evolved" and "God created life" are compatible--by way of "God used evolution to create life". (In much the same way, no Christian I've heard of objects to the study of embryology, even though Psalm 139 talks about God "knitting together" the psalmist in his mother's womb.) The reason people like me remain creationists isn't because God couldn't create with evolution, but because common descent isn't compatible with the Genesis account.
So why should the pope object to the idea of God creating using a Big Bang? Theologically speaking, that would be no different from God creating life using evolution.
Re:If studying the work of God isn't allowed.... (Score:1, Interesting)
Two hundred years from now, when kids are playing with the Mr. Evolution Biochem Kit and a device that changes water to wine fits on a key fob, these people will still be praying for a magical explanation of everything. Maybe the problem is just intellectual laziness.
Re:The Pope (Score:2, Interesting)
- What was created, in what order
- Where it was (I could sort of answer that: here)
- When it was created (up for debate amongst young-earthers and other factions)
- How (At first there was nuthin'...)
Re:what a pathetic religion (Score:3, Interesting)
I share the general feeling, however, unless other Christian religions are now completely ignoring the Old Testament, that's not unique to Catholics. The God of the Old Testament is very petty. "Look, people are cooperating and united. They're building a grand city and tower. Can't let that happen, the bastards. Let me make sure they don't understand each other, and let me scatter them around the globe." Moses also got a raw deal, spending so much time taking his fellow people to the promised land, only to die before he could set foot in it. Plenty of other examples to be found.
Yeah, in the New Testament God is loving and forgiving. I'm not aware of any Christian religion that takes the Old Testament to be false, though, and I don't know how you can reconcile the two views of God.
But wouldn't that also apply to the Bible? (Score:3, Interesting)
Isn't the Bible the work of God?
Isn't everything the work of God in some manner or another? Doesn't that make all quests for knowledge suspect?
reminds me of another story... (Score:5, Interesting)
I heard this same anecdote from Hawking himself when he visited Chile a few years ago.
I'm reminded of a story Carl Sagan used to tell. He once asked the pope (John Paul II, of course) what he would do if some scientific discovery proved once and for all and irrefutably that the precepts of Christianity were false. The pope lectured him for a few minutes about how this wasn't possible.
Sagan once asked the Dalai Lama the exact same thing. The Lama's answer?
"I would tell the world, of course! There are millions of buddhists in the world and if I find out their all wrong, I should tell them as soon as possible, and we should look for a better way to live then.
Very different mindset.
Re:Ah-ha, now you see the REAL problem (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Flawed Logic (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Flawed Logic (Score:4, Interesting)
The issue is not whether faith but whether reasonable or blind, unsubstantiated faith.
Rich
Re:Flawed Logic (Score:4, Interesting)
I mean seriously, what the fuck? Hair, bill, warm-blooded, lays eggs, nurses its young, males have venomous spurs..
(They also have the best electroperception of any mammal and swim with their eyes closed. You can't make this shit up, check out the Wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org]. They're even wierder than I thought.)
Re:what a pathetic religion (Score:3, Interesting)
The Gnostics had an interesting dualism world-view derived from Plato. The material world was not important and this is the world that the OT God had control over. The immaterial world is more important and this is the world of the God in the NT, or Monad.
I have a feeling that the Pope was talking about the Monad. The reason that creation can never be understood is because it is beyond the scope of human understanding.
Re:what a pathetic religion (Score:2, Interesting)
Personally, I have very basic, fundamental and simple objections to Abrahamic religions, none of which I'd consider straw-men.
Re:the obvious question: (Score:3, Interesting)
To expand on this:
The Universe exists, so something must have created it.
Thus, the universe exists, and something that created it exists.
You have just created the exact same problem again. You've just transfered the problem.
And don't say, "but maybe God's eternal and didn't need to be created!" because you could just say that about the Universe if you wanted to. As long as you're assigning unverifi(ed|able) attributes to something that may or may not exist to explain the existance of some other, known-to-exist thing, you might as well just assign those same unverifi(ed|able) attributes to the thing itself (the universe, in this case) instead. It's adding complexity for NO REASON if one throws God into the mix.
Re:Hardly news (Score:3, Interesting)
They never intended to burn him at the stake- that was NEVER the punishment for insulting the Pope (which was Galileo's real "crime", BTW, circular orbits having been removed from the realm of heresy some 20 years before with Copernicus) but they did lock him up under house arrest in a 47 room appartment with on-site laboratory, thus limiting his freedom of motion and publication.
ALS is a pretty awful disease, but it isn't quite like that.
I'd say it's worse than what really happened to Galileo- eventually Stephen Hawking will be a brilliant mind trapped in a decaying body with no chance of creative output whatsoever. Unless we find some way of keeping him in a jar first.
Re:If studying the work of God isn't allowed.... (Score:3, Interesting)
That's a strong claim that requires equally strong proof, and unless someone formally can make that proof, the BB is a pro-God theory. Problem is, it's not just religious types advancing that claim, it's all the Atheists who tried to use SS as a disproof, only to be disappointed when BB won out on other grounds. The people complaining that the Pope should stay out of a scientific discussion didn't object, by and large, to a lot of agnostic or Atheist philosophers injecting themselves into the same discussion with no more (or no less)qualifications than the Pope.
Cosmology has moved well beyond the basic BB, and it's not very clear now whether the inflationary model or any of the proposed successors says anything much one way or the other about God. If any do, it's certainly not as clear cut as with the BB/SS debate. I don't see much point in using the BB as a proof of God, now that the BB itself is just a very simplified version of the modern theories, but back in the 50's and 60's, a whole lot of SS supporters made arguements that justified their Atheism based on a theory, the opposite theory won out for the next 20 years or so, and (to my admittedly limited knowledge), not one of them changed their opinion one iota.
Re:Not Merely Flawed Logic (Score:1, Interesting)