This Is the Kind of Thing I've Been Talking About

Why does the pope have anything at all to say about scientific, causal explanations of events? Because he sees Christianity as a religion about belief, and he wants to keep it that way. If your religious practice is not about how you personally experience the world, but about what you believe is or is not — actually and inarguably — the case in it, you will side with others whose beliefs agree with yours and against those who disagree. And that kind of thinking is the only thing that keeps an antiquated but powerful institution like the Catholic Church going.

So we find His Holiness swooping in after the scientific community has found the most verifiable explanation of a matter, in order to give their work his redundant blessing and tack a little rider onto the end, based on nothing but his desire to maintain the status quo. "Good work there, boys. Oh, and by the way, God is responsible for what you discovered, because I decree it."

In this case, however, he's revealed his ignorance of the principle he's ostensibly endorsing, because the really interesting feature of the Big Bang is that it can't properly be said to have a cause. The Big Bang, by definition, created not only all the matter that makes up our universe, but time itself. There was no time before it. Cause and effect, along with all other principles by which we know our universe to work, break down when we look back to that moment. That's what makes it a "singularity."

So God is here being credited with a logical impossibility. I know He's supposed to work in mysterious ways, but logically impossible ways seems to go a bit far. It reminds me of the medievals wondering whether His omnipotence should cover crazy cases like making a stone so heavy that He can't lift it.

Another way to look at it is to say that whatever might have happened before the BB, assuming it even makes sense to talk about such a time, is irrelevant to us because once the BB happened, time and space started over. It created a completely clean slate. So from this point of view, if God did cause the universe to come into existence, He destroyed Himself in the process and no longer has any effect on it. Of course, the same principle applies if it was created by Satan or a mischievous kid with a chemistry set. The true cause can never be known, but fortunately it makes absolutely no difference to anything.