Big Bang!

A great article by Reuters which I thought you might enjoy:


God was behind Big Bang,pope says

'The universe is not the result of chance, as some would want to make us believe'

By Philip Pullella, Reuters

updated 1/6/2011 10:10:20 AM ET

"VATICAN CITY— 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 Thursday.

"The universe is not the result of chance, as
some would want to make us believe,"
Benedict said on the day Christians mark the
Epiphany, the day the Bible says the three
kings reached the site where Jesus was born
by following a star.

"Contemplating it (the universe) we are invited

to read something profound into it: the
wisdom of the creator, the inexhaustible
creativity of God," he said in a sermon to some
10,000 people in St. Peter's Basilica on the
feast day.

While the pope 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.

Researchers at CERN, the nuclear research
center in Geneva, have been smashing protons
together at near the speed of light to simulate
conditions that they believe brought into
existence the primordial universe from which
stars, planets and life on earth — and perhaps
elsewhere — eventually emerged.

Proof God doesn't exist?
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."

He said scientific theories on the origin and
development of the universe and humans,
while not in conflict with faith, left many
questions unanswered.

"In the beauty of the world, in its mystery, in
its greatness and in its rationality ... we can
only let ourselves be guided toward God,
creator of heaven and earth," he said.

Benedict and his predecessor John Paul 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 — 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 it 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."