The Way Matt Sees It

Pope Francis has recently declared that The Big Bang Theory and the Theory of Evolution are true, and that God is not “a magician with a magic wand.”   Read the article here and here . A few thoughts: GOD, THE GREAT MAGICIAN The Pope says that we shouldn’t view God as “a magician with a magic wand.”   This is quite silly.   How would the Pope (or scientists, or anyone else for that matter) know concretely how God created the world?   There is in fact no way of knowing for sure.   We can try our best to research and discover, but postulating how God actually created the universe is mere speculation.   The Pope may be rejecting one view of creation, but this doesn’t mean that God couldn’t have created the world that way.   God’s power is not restricted by our limited understanding of it.   Science is best understood in the words of Johannes Kepler: “Science is thinking God’s thoughts after him.”   It isn’t religion vs. science, faith vs. reason or evolution vs. the

Today marks 50 days until the release of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies.  In honor of it, I'm posting this blog.   The Hobbit movies have become something that I hold near and dear to my heart.   While they started simply as movies about a story and world I already loved, the Hobbit films have become to represent the deep friendship that has been fostered between my college friends and me. The Lord of the Rings films and the world of Middle-Earth was the glue that brought us together.   Our mutual love of the world of Middle-Earth brought us closer, and we eventually made it tradition to watch the films together every single semester. In a way, we kind of fed off each other, and grew to love LOTR and Middle-Earth even more.   Throughout the years, we all bought different bits of memorabilia that came to sort of represent us.   Every semester, we constantly talked about LOTR and when our next viewing would be.   A few of us learned to read and write Dwarvish.

“We are Christians in a very real sense and that is coming to be more and more widely recognized. Once upon a time people everywhere said we are not Christians. They have come to recognize that we are, and that we have a very vital and dynamic religion based on the teachings of Jesus Christ. We, of course, accept Jesus Christ as our Leader, our King, our Savior...the dominant figure in the history of the world, the only perfect Man who ever walked the earth, the living Son of the living God. He is our Savior and our Redeemer through whose atoning sacrifice has come the opportunity of eternal life. Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints pray and worship in the name of Jesus Christ. He is the center of our faith and the head of our Church. The Book of Mormon is Another Testament of Jesus Christ and witnesses of His divinity, His life, and His Atonement.” –Gordon B. Hinckley, prior President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (1995-20