Pope Francis on Evolution and the Big Bang: “God Is Not a Magician”

No, Pope Francis did not suddenly announce in 2014 that evolution and the Big Bang are true. What he did was restate, in unusually vivid language, a position the Catholic Church had been moving toward for more than sixty years: that scientific accounts of how the universe and life developed do not compete with belief in a Creator. His line that God is “not a magician” made headlines around the world, and it is worth knowing exactly what he said, where, and why the reaction was bigger than the news.

What Pope Francis said, and where

The remarks came on 27 October 2014, when Francis addressed the plenary session of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in the Vatican. The Academy’s meeting that year was devoted to “the evolution of the concept of nature”, and the same occasion included the unveiling of a bronze bust of his predecessor, Benedict XVI, whom Francis praised as a great pope with a deep love of science.

The passage that travelled furthest was his warning about how believers read the opening chapters of the Bible:

“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.”

Francis went on to describe a God who brings creatures into being and lets them unfold according to the inner laws he has given them. On cosmology, he said the Big Bang does not rule out a divine Creator; in his view the beginning it describes actually points to one. And on biology he put it plainly: “Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve.”

He also spoke about the responsibility of scientists, urging them to help protect the earth from natural and human-made dangers and to build a world that is humane for everyone, not only for a privileged few. That part of the speech, which foreshadowed his 2015 encyclical on the environment, received far less attention.

Why the headlines made it sound new

Many websites framed the speech as a pope “declaring” evolution real, as if the Vatican had just reversed itself. That framing says more about popular expectations than about Catholic teaching. In the English-speaking world, the loudest religious voices against evolution have often been Protestant groups that read Genesis as a literal, six-day account. The Catholic Church has never made that literal reading a requirement, and its official statements have treated evolution as a legitimate scientific question for decades.

Francis was also a new and popular pope with a gift for plain phrases. “God is not a magician” is the kind of sentence that fits in a headline, while the careful theology behind it does not. The result was a wave of coverage that presented continuity as revolution.

How Catholic teaching on evolution developed

The Church’s relationship with science has not always been smooth. In 1633 the Roman Inquisition forced Galileo Galilei to recant his support for the idea that the Earth moves around the Sun, and he spent the rest of his life under house arrest. That episode still shapes the Church’s reputation, even though Pope John Paul II publicly acknowledged the errors of Galileo’s judges in 1992.

Pius XII opens the door (1950–1951)

In his 1950 encyclical Humani generis, Pius XII became the first pope to address evolution directly in a major teaching document. He allowed Catholic scholars to investigate whether the human body developed from earlier living matter, while insisting that each human soul is created directly by God. The following year, in an address to the same Pontifical Academy of Sciences, he welcomed the emerging cosmology of an expanding universe with a beginning. That theory had been developed by Georges Lemaître, a Belgian physicist who was also a Catholic priest; Lemaître is reported to have been uneasy with treating it as scientific proof of creation.

John Paul II: “more than a hypothesis” (1996)

In October 1996, John Paul II sent a message to the Academy noting that new findings were leading to the recognition of evolution as more than a hypothesis. Many popular articles claimed he called evolution an “effectively proven fact”. That wording does not appear in his message; the accurate phrase is the more measured “more than a hypothesis”. He also rejected any theory that treats the human spirit as a mere by-product of matter.

Benedict XVI and the design debate (2005–2008)

In July 2005, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna, a close collaborator of Benedict XVI, wrote a New York Times opinion piece titled “Finding Design in Nature”. He accepted common descent as possibly true but rejected evolution understood as “an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection”. Many readers took this as a tilt toward the intelligent design movement. Benedict himself took a more balanced line: he led a private seminar on creation and evolution at Castel Gandolfo in 2006 and in 2007 described the supposed clash between creationism and evolution as absurd, arguing that each answers different questions.

What the Church accepts and what it does not

Put simply, mainstream Catholic teaching accepts that the universe is very old, that it began in a hot, dense state, and that living things, including the human body, share common ancestry and changed over immense spans of time. What it rejects is a philosophical step that some writers attach to the science: the claim that because nature can be explained by natural processes, there is no purpose behind it and humans are nothing more than matter.

Three points are worth keeping in mind:

The soul is a theological claim, not a biological one. The Church teaches that each human soul is created by God. Science neither proves nor disproves that, because it lies outside what experiments can measure.
Intelligent design is not official teaching. Individual Catholics hold a range of views, but the Church has not endorsed intelligent design as a scientific theory.
Genesis is read as more than a science report. Catholic scholars generally treat the creation stories as conveying truths about God, humanity and meaning rather than a technical timeline.

Common misunderstandings about the speech

“The Pope said the Big Bang proves God exists.” Not quite. Francis said the Big Bang does not contradict a Creator and, in his reading, calls for one. That is a philosophical and religious argument about why there is something rather than nothing. The physics of the early universe does not depend on it either way.

“The Catholic Church has always fought science.” The Galileo case is real, but it is not the whole story. The Pontifical Academy of Sciences traces its roots to the Accademia dei Lincei, founded in Rome in 1603, of which Galileo himself was a member. The Vatican also runs one of the oldest astronomical observatories in the world, and its members today include Nobel laureates of many faiths and none.

“Francis rejected creation.” The opposite is true. His whole point was that creation and evolution describe different levels of reality: one answers why anything exists, the other describes how living things change over time.

Why the speech still matters

For students, teachers and families who feel caught between faith and science, the 2014 address remains a clear, quotable summary of a position many believers already hold. It shows that accepting modern cosmology and biology does not require abandoning religious belief, and that rejecting them is not a requirement of Catholic faith.

It also reflects Francis’s wider style. Throughout his papacy he tried to speak in ordinary language about difficult topics, from the environment to the dignity of migrants. Francis died on 21 April 2025, Easter Monday, at the age of 88. His “not a magician” line is likely to be quoted for a long time, partly because it captures in six words an idea that theologians have spent centuries trying to explain.

If you want to read the full context, the Vatican publishes the text of the address on its website, alongside the earlier statements by Pius XII and John Paul II. Reading them side by side is the easiest way to see how gradual, and how consistent, the Church’s path on this question has been.

Sources: Vatican: Address of Pope Francis to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 27 October 2014; Wikipedia: Catholic Church and evolution; Vatican News, 21 April 2025: Pope Francis dies on Easter Monday aged 88; originally shared via Collective Evolution.

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