The Big Bang hypothesis is widely known in popular thought as the best explanation for how the universe came to be. However, very few people know that a Catholic priest formulated this theory in the late 1920s. Reverend Monsignor Georges Lemaître, a Belgian scientist, challenged the conventional thinking of his colleagues, including Albert Einstein, and rejected the static universe hypothesis for a dynamic model, an expanding universe. In the course of carrying out his research, he confronted illogical thinking that pitted faith against reason, and science against the Church. He believed that the greatest challenge for all of us is the search for truth.
Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître was born on July 17, 1894 at Charleroi, Belgium. He received a classical education at a Jesuit secondary school, the Collège du Sacré-Coeur in Charleroi, and realized at this age that he had a double vocation: to be a Catholic priest and to be a research scientist. He began studying civil engineering at the Catholic University of Louvain at the age of 17. In 1914, when the Germans invaded Belgium, he interrupted his studies to serve, with his brother, in the military. He served as an artillery officer in the Belgian army for the duration of World War I, enduring four horrific years of trench warfare. At the end of the war, he received the Military Cross with palms for his great courage.
After the war, Lemaître studied physics and mathematics, and simultaneously began to prepare for priesthood. He obtained his doctorate in 1920 and was ordained a priest in 1923. That same year, he became a graduate student in astronomy at the University of Cambridge in England, working with Arthur Eddington, who initiated him into modern cosmology, stellar astronomy and numerical analysis. He spent 1924 at Harvard College Observatory in Massachusetts, U.S.A., and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1925, he returned to Belgium and became a part-time lecturer (and later a full-time professor) at the Catholic University of Louvain, where he remained for the rest of his career.
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."
When Lemaitre first advanced the Big Bang theory, he was in direst conflict with the leading scientist of the day, Albert Einstein. (The photo below is of Lemaitre and Einstein in 1933.)
Lemaitre disagreed, arguing against the static universe. The importance of this insight is that if the universe is expanding, then, in the past, it must have been much smaller. In fact, the universe would have been extremely small and extremely dense.
At first, Lemaitre's theory was laughed off and jokingly called Lemaitre's "Big Bang Theory." In 1927, Einstein was in Brussels to attend the Solvay Conference. Lemaître collared the great physicist to explain his model. Einstein responded: “Your calculations are correct, but your grasp of physics is abominable.”
Over time, the negative opinion of Lemaitre's theory changed as Edwin Hubble began to observe the shift in the light spectrum of celestial objects, confirming that the universe is in a state of expansion. Due to these and other insights, Einstein reversed his opinion on Lemaitre's theory, calling it "the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I (Einstein) have ever listened."
Many people, both scientists and theologians, were confused by the priest scientist, thinking that there is a conflict between science and religion, that a person of faith could not be a scientist, and vice versa - as many still believe. In 1933, Rev. Vecchierello, O.F.M. made an observation on this topic and on Fr. Lemaitre 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."
Saint Augustine's famous line, "All truth is God's truth," was certainly shared by Monsignor Lemaître. Lemaître firmly believed that the goal of science was the search for the truth. In his own words at the Congress of Malines, Lemaître explained that "Man's highest activity is searching for the truth. It is the factor which distinguishes us from animals, and our specific activity is to grasp the truth in all its forms . . ."
Fr. Lemaitre also was wise enough to realize that the purpose of the Bible is to give us spiritual truths rather than scientific truths. He remarked,
"The writers of the Bible were illuminated more or less — some more than others — on the question of salvation. On other questions they were as wise or ignorant as their generation. Hence it is utterly unimportant that errors in historic and scientific fact should be found in the Bible, especially if the errors related to events that were not directly observed by those who wrote about them . . . The idea that because they were right in their doctrine of immortality and salvation they must also be right on all other subjects, is simply the fallacy of people who have an incomplete understanding of why the Bible was given to us at all....Once you realize that the Bible does not purport to be a textbook of science, the old controversy between religion and science vanishes . ."
Fr. Lemaitre was honored for his scientific achievements by both his country and his Church. Lemaître received the highest Belgian scientific distinction, the Francqui Prize, in 1934 (proposed by Albert Einstein, among others). He was elected a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1936, and remained an active member until his death, accepting the position of president in 1960. In 1941, he was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Belgium, and he received the very first Eddington Medal awarded by the Royal Astronomical Society in 1953.
Unfortunately, World War II greatly disrupted Lemaître's life. In May of 1940, Lemaître attempted to flee with his family to France but was flanked by German Panzer divisions. The Germans burned the University of Louvain to the ground just as they had done in the First World War and took many of his colleagues as prisoners. His apartment took a direct hit and Lemaître was sent to the hospital suffering from shock and multiple contusions. After the war, always the devoted son, he went to live with his mother, taking care of her in old age until her death in 1956.
Aged by the war, Lemaître began to enjoy leisure time with his brother Maurice, chief engineer of the Belgian railroad and a talented musician. Lemaître played the piano and Maurice played the alto. He also enjoyed photography, traveling and the study of the Chinese language. Father Lemaître obtained great joy from spending time with his many nieces and nephews. His interest in travel was further developed by his appointment to the Belgian-Italian commission for cultural exchanges, which permitted him to vacation throughout Italy, including the Ligurian coast, Naples, Capri, Florence, Bologna, Ravenna and Venice.
During the 1950s, he gradually gave up part of his teaching workload at Louvain, and he retired completely in 1964. Always the scientist, always curious and creative, he then devoted his time to numerical calculation, as well as keeping up his strong interest in the development of computers and in the problems of language and programming.
He died on June 20, 1966, shortly after having learned of the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation, which provided further evidence for his own intuitions about the birth of the universe. His assistant told him of this discovery in 1966 while Lemaître was in Hospital Saint Pierre suffering from a heart attack. The man called “the father of the big bang” died two weeks later at the age of seventy-one.
What are the theological and spiritual implications we can build from the Big Bang Theory? Fr. Richard Rohr, O.F.M. tells us
"In 1927, Georges Lemaître, a Belgian priest, astronomer, and physics professor, suggested that the expanding universe might be traced back to a single point of origin, a singularity. As Franciscan sister and scientist Ilia Delio describes, “[It] appeared like a little quantum size blip on the screen [creatio ex nihilo] and inflated rapidly like a balloon and since that time, it has been expanding.” I’ll let Delio, a scientist, explain the implications for this cosmology—our story of the universe:
'Every human person desires to love and to be loved, to belong to another, because we come from another. We are born social and relational. We yearn to belong, to be part of a larger whole that includes not only friends and family but neighbors, community, trees, flowers, sun, Earth, stars. We are born of nature and are part of nature; that is, we are born into a web of life and are part of a web of life. We cannot know what this means, however, without seeing ourselves within the story of the Big Bang universe. Human life must be traced back to the time when life was deeply one, a Singularity, whereby the intensity of mass-energy exploded into consciousness. Deep in our DNA we belong to the stars, the trees, and the galaxies.
"Deep within we long for unity because, at the most fundamental level, we are already one. We belong to one another because we have the same source of love; the love that flows through the trees is the same love that flows through my being. We are deeply connected in this flow of love, beginning on the level of nature where we are the closest of kin because the Earth is our mother.'
"We began as one and our goal is oneness. Studying evolution, the French Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) found that increased complexity and increased consciousness surprisingly lead to greater unity at a much higher level—which we would call love. Unity is not the same as uniformity! With increased complexity, there is actually greater diversity and a greater enjoyment of that very diversity, which is the fruit of love. As Teilhard said, “Everything that rises must converge.” We are in the midst of that convergence today—and seemingly at an accelerated pace—both in terms of good and resistance to the good."
If we believe that God is Love, Love created the Universe and animates all of it!
Gateway to Silence: We live, move, and have our being in love.