Catholicism just absorbed the Big Bang (and even Darwinism) as another part of their dogma. Stephen Hawking tells how John Paul II once admonished him about new

Catholicism just absorbed the Big Bang (and even Darwinism) as another part of their dogma. Stephen Hawking tells how John Paul II once admonished him about new alternative theories that might interpret the big bang as "not really the beginning", such as the cyclic model, or Hoyle's steady state model, or multiverses, etc. Not different at all from previous popes approving current science like Ptolemy's and Aristotle's, making theology compatible with that, but then expecting the science to remain fixed. In fact, even the traditional Big Bang theory never states that the big bang was an absolute beginning from absolutely nothing. Quite the opposite. But I think creationists can still accept it as long as the "pre-bang" state is highly chaotic (no organized matter; no time arrow as consequence of maximum entropy, etc.). All religious texts have this idea of a Great Chaos before the primordial god started the creation. But we may end up finding that the correct model is something like local big bangs, where each universe sprouts out from an older universe. This leaves zero opportunity for a creator, not even a Cartesian first-mover.