The surprise that Pope Francis has endorsed the reality of evolution and the validity of the Big Bang theory only goes to show you that most people don't have any idea of what not only he but his predecessors said about it. The Church was never opposed to the theory of evolution in any big way and hardly any official way. As I recall Cardinal Newman supported the idea. There isn't any contradiction in what Benedict XVI and Francis said about it, there might be a slight difference of emphasis but, really, both of them are expressing a view that evolution was the mechanism by which God created the diversity of life on Earth and that it works according to God's design. Even the ID industry contains people who accept that evolution is real, though some of them are forced to refute the scientific evidence that our species is a part of it. The extent to which they won't accept the science is the extent to which they're wrong about that, but that has little to do with the acceptance of evolution, in general.
Pope Francis noted that God gave creation full autonomy while also guaranteeing a constant divine presence in nature and people’s lives. The world comes not from chaos but from “a supreme Principle who creates out of love.”
The pope continued: “The Big Bang theory, which is proposed today as the origin of the world, does not contradict the intervention of a divine creator, but depends on it. Evolution in nature does not conflict with the notion of creation because evolution presupposes the creation of beings that evolve.”
What Francis doesn't appear to have been saying is what people get confused over, he doesn't seem to have been asserting the neo-Darwinian claim that all of evolution is guided by random mutations weeded out by some ill-defined force called "natural selection" without any intelligence having a role or even a controlling role on the process. The large majority of people who believe in the validity of evolution believe in that, what might be called a "soft" form of intelligent design. And when looked at hard, the idea that life processes could have originated in or changed by random events under the laws of probability look preposterously unlikely. That imposition of probability on, not the actual processes of evolution - which we can't observe, anyway - but on what people in science are allowed to say and think about it, was always ideological, which you can read in the writings of the early Darwinists and in Darwin, himself. It was an ideological imposition on what was allowed to be said about it, though it was always covering up the incredible complexity of the issues involved. That is especially true of the forever to remain unsolved issue of the origin of life on Earth. As biologists look ever more closely at the biology of cells and their component bodies, the more complex that seems and the more improbable it seems that it happened by random chance events seems ever more improbable with ever new level of complexity. And that's only getting to the chemistry of it.
Rafael Vicuna, professor of molecular genetics and molecular biology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, told academy members that the actual origin of life remains a perplexing question.
In a newspaper interview, he later added: “I can know perfectly what a cell is made up of, but how it works deep down, what really is the dynamism that makes it move—that is, life—I don’t know. A refrigerator and a car are complex structures that move, but only with an immense amount of energy from the outside. Life, in its deepest essence, remains something that escapes us. Life is more than molecules.”
One of Benedict's faults was he had a tragic inability to communicate ideas, even those he understood. In addition to having no obvious pastoral talents, he had no talent to communicate outside of the realms of academic theology which was his specialty. Richard McBrien called him probably the foremost academic theologian in the history of the papacy. And some of his closest confidants were as bad if not worse. The man simply had no idea of how to talk to people outside of academia or the Vatican. Perhaps that inability was related to his obvious inability to have much sympathy for the realities of the lives of lay people or even the necessities of parish priests. Benedict's papacy is certainly one of the least successful since Pius IX.
The modern Popes have all been highly educated, most of them have had deep training in philosophy that leads them to think more completely and clearly than many, though not all, celebrity scientists*. Even those scientists who have had some training in philosophy aren't that good at it. They are not, as almost all of us are not, specialists in the complexity of evolutionary theory. But you don't have to be conversant with those complexities to understand that if something doesn't logically cohere or if it is not supported by evidence that its scientific validity is rightly questioned. The crude version of evolutionary biology most of us carry around as our scientific faith, largely based in an already thread-bare framing of neo-Darwinism, has always relied on a good deal of hegemonic coercion to maintain itself as the dominant ideology in science and the popular understanding of science. And even within academic science, leaving out the Intelligent Design industry, these questions are the farthest thing from settled and, from what I can see, there is every reason to believe they are ever less settled with every new discovery or asserted theory within the scientific study of evolution.
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The other day the idiot who most often trolls me made a comment that I had, somehow, said there was no reason to believe in the Big Bang when, if you look at this blog, almost every mention I've made of the theory was to point out that it was atheists, from the time of its promulgation in the 1920s, right up to today, who have rejected it because, as Arthur Stanley Eddington, commenting on the new theory of an expanding universe, said in the 1930s, "The beginning seems to present insuperable difficulties unless we agree to look on it as frankly supernatural." I don't know if the Big Bang theory will last or be any more successful than the various schemes atheists [including several of those mentioned in the footnote] invent to try to save their ideological position that God "isn't necessary" to explain the origin of the universe, why there is something instead of nothing, how the universe came into being at a specific time - that event also being the beginning of time, if not the origin of time, itself - without the intentionality of a non-physical, extra-physical being. None of us has an ability to tell what the future will bring in the way of scientific discovery, though all of the evidence I've seen is that if for mere practicality, the kind of physics we got used to in the 20th century, might have reached limits in such things.
The primary attack on the Big Bang has been from atheists and their ideological motives are baldly stated in their attacks. It's incredible how often atheists bring up God when the topic is that or the fine tuning of constants observed in our universe or the various schemes such cosmologists and physicists invent to try to get past an absolute beginning of time and the universe as forced by modern physics.
If you want to read more about that, this recent article by Sabine Hossenfelder about that and the prospects of physicists and cosmologists to sell us another, more massive collider (which, if George Ellis is right, would be ridiculously inadequate to tell us much of what such scientists want to know) is a good place to start. Her article on the death of Stephen Hawking is worth reading, too.
I don't think my most persistent troll knows enough to understand what I just wrote about this. I doubt he spends much time reading or listening to Russell, Hoyle, Eddington, . . . Maddox, Sean Carroll or Lawrence Krauss, Ellis, Woit . . . Neither do most of those who know no more about this than what side they're supposed to be on because . . . well, atheism. It's sports fandom, for them, nothing deeper, nothing more substantial. It's certainly not a question of science.
* I love to read about the brawl between those who want to junk the requirement of verification in the real world in science and those who insist it must be retained for science to have any claim to reliability and even truth. It was interesting to read this in a recent piece by Massimo Pigliucci, the day before Stephen Hawking died.
Let me begin with two caveats: first, there are many people involved in the controversy, including Sean Carroll, Peter Woit, Sabine Hossenfelder, George Ellis, and Joe Silk (not to mention astute commentators such as Lee Smolin and Jim Baggott). Refreshingly, almost all of them have respect for philosophy of science, unlike ignorant (of philosophy) physicists like Lawrence Krauss and Stephen Hawking. So, who knows, some of them may even read the following with some interest. Second, I actually know most of these people, obviously some better than others. I like and respect them all, even though — as we shall see — in this post I will come squarely down on one side rather than the other.
The disdain and disregard for philosophy was apparent in Hawking's book, The Grand Design and it is obvious in Krauss's debate appearances with people who are competent philosophers. And in neither case did it make their case stronger, it was the primary reason that their critics were able to blow huge holes in them. You can see in Pigliucci's article that even with his knowledge of philosophy, Carroll's argument was seriously weakened by not knowing it sufficiently. I've been amazed at what some of them figure they can get away with in that regard, sometimes "doing philosophy" without even realizing that's what they're doing.
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