God Was Behind the Big Bang, Says Pope

Though he has no scientific evidence and hasn’t published on the subject, Pope Benedict XVI had an epiphany on the feast of Epiphany, the Catholic day celebrating the arrival of the Three Kings to the birthplace of Jesus. During the mass in honor of the day, the Pope said that God was responsible for the Big Bang.

According to an ongoing MSNBC.com poll here’s what almost 30,000 people think. (You can vote here).

13.2%
God created everything in seven days as the Bible says, no Big Bang necessary.
3,891 votes

23.6%
There is no God and the Big Bang was probably responsible for all creation.
6,987 votes

38.9%
I agree with the Pope. If there was a Big Bang, it was God’s work.
11,507 votes

24.3%
No one really knows and likely never will.
7,180 votes

The Pope said, “The universe is not the result of chance, as some would want to make us believe. Contemplating it (the universe) we are invited to read something profound into it: the wisdom of the creator, the inexhaustible creativity of God.”

The church has been trying to shed its anti-science label that first stuck when Pope Urban VIII accused Galileo of heresy for Adopting the Copernican view– against Bible teaching — that the Earth revolved around the sun. Since then most recent two popes have been reaching out to bridge gaps between the church and science.

Pope John Paul II said the theory of evolution didn’t contradict the teachings of the church. But rarely does a Pope comment on a scientific theory like the formation of the universe. By saying that the Big Bang got the universe rolling, the church is extending another olive branch to the scientific community.

But the church believes that the mind of God was responsible for the Big Bang and for our scientific understanding of how the universe began.

Pope Benedict said January 6 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 …”

In 2009, a senior Vatican delegation visited CERN, the giant European atom smasher, where particles are smashed together at near light-speed in an effort to simulate conditions of the very first moments following the birth of the universe about 13.7 billion years ago.

“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, Told USA Today during that visit.