Francis goes against Benedict XVI’s apparent support for 'intelligent design' - but does hail his predecessor’s 'great contribution to theology'
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The theories of
evolution and the Big Bang are real and God is not “a magician with a magic wand”, Pope Francis has declared.
Speaking at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Pope made comments which experts said put an end to the “pseudo theories” of creationism and intelligent design that some argue were encouraged by his predecessor, Benedict XVI.
Francis explained that both scientific theories were not incompatible with the existence of a creator – arguing instead that they “require it”.
“When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so,” Francis said.
Pope Francis (born 1936) is the head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State. Francis is the first Jesuit pope, the first from the Americas, the first from the Southern Hemisphere, and the first pope from outside Europe since the Syrian Gregory III, who reigned in the 8th
Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. Evolutionary processes give rise to bio-diversity at every level of biological organisation, including the levels of species, individual organisms, and molecules. In the mid-19th century
Charles Darwin formulated the scientific theory of evolution by natural selection, published in his book On the Origin of Species (1859). Evolution by natural selection is a process first demonstrated by the observation that often, more offspring are produced than can possibly survive.
The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological model for the universe. Taken from the earliest known periods through its subsequent large-scale evolution. The model describes how the universe expanded from a very high-density and high-temperature state, and offers a comprehensive explanation for
a broad range of phenomena, including the abundance of light elements, the cosmic microwave background (CMB), large scale structure and Hubble's law.
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