For the Umpteenth Million Time; the Big Bang Theory was Proposed by a Catholic Priest

[JimBowie1958]

I am constantly amazed by how many people think that the Big Bang is incompatible with Christian theology when it is the product of a highly trained and educated Christian mind.


Georges Lemaître - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Monseigneur Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître, (French: [ʒɔʁʒə ləmɛtʁ] ( listen); 17 July 1894 – 20 June 1966) was a Belgian Roman Catholic priest, astronomer and professor of physics at the French section of the Catholic University of Louvain.[1] He was the first known academic to propose the theory of the expansion of the universe, widely misattributed to Edwin Hubble.[2][3] He was also the first to derive what is now known as Hubble's law and made the first estimation of what is now called the Hubble constant, which he published in 1927, two years before Hubble's article.[4][5][6][7] Lemaître also proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe, which he called his "hypothesis of the primeval atom" or the "Cosmic Egg".

Library : The Faith and Reason of Father George Lemaître - Catholic Culture

Father Lemaître's intellectual background was unique. His education was a synthesis of the classics, philosophy and theology along with engineering, mathematics and physics. Perhaps this powerful combination is what allowed his mind to formulate a concept as abstract and significant as the primeval atom hypothesis — his term for what we now colloquially refer to as the Big Bang. In the words of the mathematician Father Gabriel Costa, Ph.D., commenting on the value of a formation in mathematics before studying theology, "There isn't much difference between infinity and eternity."4 We live in a world off infinite quantities. A mathematician must qualitatively understand the significant difference between 101000 and ? (infinity). As a theologian, similarly, one must be able to distinguish between a long life on Earth followed by a finite amount of time in purgatory, and eternity in heaven or hell.

In May of 1933, Albert Einstein was scheduled to deliver a series of lectures in Belgium. However, following the second lecture, Einstein announced that Lemaître would be delivering the final seminar, much to Lemaître's surprise. Einstein told the scientists that Lemaître "has interesting things to tell us" and following the seminar said simply, "Very beautiful, very beautiful indeed."5 That September, Lemaître accepted appointment as a visiting professor of physics at the Catholic University of America. In 1933, Rev. Vecchierello, O.F.M. made an observation on this topic that is still valid today:


It is a point of great interest nowadays, when there is so much loose thinking and still looser writing and talking about the non-existence of God, of the immortal soul, and of a host of eternal verities, to see a man who is both a priest and a scientist fraternizing on the most intimate terms with the world's most illustrious scientific geniuses. He not only associates with them, but he is their peer; and in that is the lie given to the old and empty charge that the study of science means the loss of belief in religion. Lemaître, of course, is usually an object of great curiosity — not so much to his coreligionists as to many not of the faith who marvel at the "phenomenon" of a Catholic priest being a scientist, yes, not only a scientist of the regular run, but a genius whose theories are most daring.6


The following year, Lemaître made a presentation to Cardinal O'Connell of the Archdiocese of Boston at the Roundtable of Catholic Scientists and was also awarded the Mendel Medal from Villanova College for outstanding service to science. The culmination of these and other honors landed Lemaître with the Francqui Prize, which gave him about $390,000 in 2007 U.S. dollars. Lemaître's dedication to his vocation continued to earn him accolades. On July 27, 1935, he was named an honorary canon of the Malines cathedral by Cardinal Josef Van Roey. Later, on October 28, 1936 Pope Pius XI appointed Canon Lemaître to the newly reorganized Pontifical Academy of Sciences. By his motu proprio In Multis Solaciis, the Pope announced that the Church intended to be well informed on the current scientific revolution. Clearly, this was an implementation of the first Vatican Council's decree that faith and reason are complementary.7 Subsequently, Father John O'Hare, the president of the University of Notre Dame, hired Father Lemaître as a visiting professor. During that year, his course on cosmology was not only attended by graduate students, but also faculty members in the physics and mathematics departments.

Big Bang Theory: A Roman Catholic Creation | WGBH News

In the late 1920s, Lemaître quietly put forth a theory he called his "hypothesis of the primeval atom." At the time, Einstein’s notion of a finite-sized, static universe ruled the day. But the fields of astronomy and cosmology were developing rapidly on the heels of Einstein’s breakthrough 1916 Theory of General Relativity. And as brilliant minds began extrapolating new equations from Einstein’s work, a static universe was posing some serious problems in the math. Problems that in many cases, could be ironed out if the universe was not fixed, but rather growing.

Lemaître imagined that if the universe was expanding, it had to be expanding from somewhere and some point in time. He figured that if you traced the idea of the universe back in time, all the way to the very beginning, everything had to converge into a single point. Lemaître called that point a superatom. He suggested that the expansion of the universe had resulted from the explosion of this superatom that hurled materials in all directions, and set the universe as we know it in motion....At a conference in the 1930s, where Lemaître presented his theory, Einstein reportedly remarked, "This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened."

As astonishing as Lemaître's idea was, perhaps equally surprising to us now was the reaction of the church. Lemaître was not jailed by the Pope like Galileo. He was not excommunicated the way Johannes Keppler was by the Lutheran Church. Quite the opposite. In the early 1950s, Pope Pius XII not only declared that the big bang and the Catholic concept of creation were compatible; he embraced Lemaître's idea as scientific validation for the existence of God and of Catholicism.

For his part, Lemaître was not pleased with the Pope’s position. He believed fiercely in the separation of church and lab. He viewed religion and science as two, equally valid, distinct ways of interpreting the world, both of which he believed in with deep conviction:

"We may speak of this event as of a beginning. I do not say a creation. Physically it is a beginning in the sense that if something happened before, it has no observable influence on the behavior of our universe, as any feature of matter before this beginning has been completely lost by the extreme contraction at the theoretical zero. Any preexistence of the universe has a metaphysical character...The question if it was really a beginning or rather a creation, something started from nothing, is a philosophical question which cannot be settled by physical or astronomical considerations."

 

[Moonglow]

They have already proven the Big Bang theory to have missed the mark...

 

[JimBowie1958]

They have already proven the Big Bang theory to have missed the mark...

Lol, in response I present the evidence that you are an idiot.




All scientific theory is flawed because it is based on incomplete information, but the information that is available at that time. So all scientific theory gets improved and refined over time unless it is completely disproven.

The Big Bang has not been disproven but only refined. It is still the basic starting point of todays cosmology.