Not many people realize that the Vatican employs astronomers and even operates its own observatory. While many Roman Catholics would expect these scientists to defend the Scriptures (such as Genesis 1:16, which teaches that God made the sun after the earth, thus contradicting the big bang), the Vatican astronomers reject Genesis as straightforward history. In fact, some of them use words like paganism and plague to describe the efforts of creationists who say Genesis gives a literal account of the universe’s creation.

At one session of the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science [Spring 2006], Father George Coyne, an American who is the director of the Vatican Observatory, declared that people who take Genesis 1–11 literally are “a plague in our midst.”¹

At about the same time, Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno declared that a belief in the doctrine that God created the universe in six days is “superstition” and “at the end of the day is a kind of paganism.”²

In reality, it is the evolution philosophy—accepted by Vatican astronomers and somehow incorporated into their religious beliefs—that is akin to paganism. Indeed, evolutionary beliefs are a cousin to paganism since they both reject the truth found in God’s Word. http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/am/v1/n2/six-days