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Catholic priest, scientist, and military veteran Georges Lemaître made astonishing theoretical discoveries in the 1920s and 1930s—discoveries that overturned the view of the universe as eternal and unchanging. Fr. Lemaître argued that the universe had been created at a particular moment in time and space and that it was a physical rather than a metaphysical occurrence. His discoveries provide much fodder for the metaphysician, the theist, and the Roman Catholic to contemplate.
Science Is the New God
The development of science, from the ancient Greeks to the Middles Ages, to the Renaissance, to the Scientific Revolution, to modern science has reached a point now where scientists are confident that most questions of the universe can and will be answered. As Paul Davies proclaimed in God and the New Physics, “science has actually advanced to the point where what were formerly religious questions can be seriously tackled.”
The replacement of religion with science as the source of answers to the great questions of existence has, however, proved elusive. Even so great a savant as Stephen Hawking believed that the origin of the universe is ultimately unknowable, and that its origin is not part of the purview of science anyway, because there is no physical evidence of what existed before the creation.
Catholic Origins of the Big Bang
Scientists refer to the “Big Bang” as a singularity, when an unknown mass and potential energy exploded at the beginning of time and space and eventually expanded into the universe that we have today. Long before Einstein proclaimed that mass is energy at rest, and energy is mass in motion, the Book of Genesis proclaimed, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” The theologian and philosopher Augustine in The City of God argued that God precedes time and space, that God is the origin of what modern physicists refer to as “the singularity.”
Ironically—or, perhaps there is no irony involved at all—the scientist who first conjectured the Big Bang was a Catholic priest, the Belgian Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître, a veteran of World War I, a Ph.D. physicist and mathematician who, in 1927, published a paper in an obscure scientific journal that few scientists read. In it, he argued for a unique interpretation of the universe that was not steady-state nor eternal and infinite, but rather a universe that was expanding. In 1931, in the journal Nature, he elaborated on this theory by suggesting that such an expanding universe must have had a point of a beginning and from this point expanded throughout billions of years into a universe without a clear center.
Lemaître did not refer to this point of origin, what physicists term “the singularity,” as the Big Bang, but rather as a “primeval atom.” What was exciting for some and concerning for others was that the scientist who proclaimed this “beginning of an expanding universe” was not just a physicist, but a Roman Catholic priest, who’d been ordained in 1923. Lemaître was aware of the disparity in his roles, and that he lived at a time when scientists were distancing themselves from religion and God, opting instead for completely secular explanations of the universe.
Many scientists at first refused to accept such an idea of a primeval atom. Being beyond the scope of scientific investigation, they deemed it irrelevant. Science only deals with perceived phenomena, not miraculous moments and supernatural beginnings, they argued.
Lemaître himself tried to separate his work as a scientist from his role as a priest. In the 1931 Nature article, he made no reference to God nor a divine creation. He wrote that “the beginning of the world happened a little before the beginning of space and time.” In other words, the moment of creation was the moment when space and time were created.
“It is possible,” he continued, “to conceive the beginning of the universe in the form of a unique atom, the atomic weight of which is the total mass of the universe.” This atom he called the primeval atom. “This highly unstable atom would divide in smaller and smaller atoms by a kind of super-radioactive process. Some remnant of this process might…foster the heat of the stars until our low atomic number atoms allowed life to be possible.” This is, in brief, the theory that came to be called the Big Bang.
Interestingly, in the original draft of the article, which is a very brief four paragraphs, Lemaître added a fifth, subsequently crossed out and not published, in which he wrote:
I think that everyone who believes in a supreme being supporting every being and every [action], believes also that God is essentially hidden and may be glad to see how present physics provides a veil hiding the creation.
This fascinating comment implies that Lemaitre realized that his theory of the primeval atom would be recognized by theists as the Divine Creator. That he marked it out implies that he did not want to mix science and religion in his 1931 paper.
The Limit of Science and Piety
He did not need to worry. His theory of the primeval atom begged the question of who or what caused it, which science cannot explain. This is the limit of science, which is not able to explain anything beyond the physical phenomena of the universe—and hence cannot explain the Prime Mover, the Creator, God.
Lemaître’s words in the crossed-out fifth paragraph of the 1931 article in Nature—“that God is essentially hidden” by what occurred before the primeval atom, which provides “a veil hiding the creation”—are particularly revealing. The promise of science ultimately falls short.
Humans cannot know everything, despite the enthusiastic progressivism of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, nineteenth-century positivism, and the humanistic philosophers, such as Julian Huxley, of the twentieth century. The ultimate cause of all things, the ultimate force in existence, the ultimate source of life, the ultimate being, is ultimately unknowable to us—except by divine revelation. We gather knowledge about this Being by studying God’s handiwork in nature, the Elder Scripture, as well as from God’s revealed Word, the Scripture of the Old and New Testaments.
The varied articles in Catholic Exchange during the past four months, beginning with the first, “Piety and Science: The Paradigm Shift,” have explored the relationship between piety and science over the course of the past 2,500 years. As we come to the end of the series with this essay on Georges Lemaître, we come to the end, the limit, as it were, of piety…which might be the ultimate expression of piety.
Human reason, mathematics, physical science, and technology have penetrated so many secrets of the earth and universe, but there is a limit. Lemaitre reached the limit, beyond which human knowledge cannot go, and where only faith can venture: the unknowable before the beginning, which in contemplating we can only do so in awe and wonder.
Editor’s Note: Read the previous installments of The Pious Scientist series here.
Photo by Casey Horner on Unsplash
