On The First Day, God Created The Heavens & The Earth . . .

The Pope, Benedict XVI, used his sermon on this, the Day of the Epiphany, to address, among other things, the Big Bang theory, stating that it explains how the universe was created, but it does not explain the why. He stated that God was behind the big bang and that the creation of the universe was not an accident.

The Vatican has long been viewed as anti-science, at least since 1632 with the Church persecution of Galileo for heresy. But the reality is that, since the 19th, the Church became far more receptive and supportive of science, and indeed, engaging in cutting edge science itself in some areas. That said, the Church had retained a sort of ambiguous silence on the big bang theory up until today. This takes the Vatican firmly out of the camp of those who demand that the Bible be read literally, and with all the ramifications that has for teasing lessons from the Bible.

I have always thought that the Bible itself told us, in the opening sections of Genesis, that it could not be taken literally, and that the words therein had to be read with both an unterstanding of the time and place of their writing as well as knowledge of the audience to which they were directed. The Bible opens with two seperate stories of Creation that, when read literally, are in fatal contradiction.

At any rate, to finish with a quote in Live Science from a Cardinal given at the conclusion of his visit to CERN last year:

"The Church never fears the truth of science, because we are convinced that all truth comes from God," Cardinal Giovanni Lajolo, Vatican City's governor, said last year . . . according to USA Today. "Science will help our faith to purify itself. And faith at the same time will be able to broaden the horizons of man, who cannot just enclose himself in the horizons of science."