Lumen Fidei: The Science of Creation and a Tale of Two Priests

By Father Gordon J. MacRae @ These Stone Walls

FATHER GEORGES LEMAITRE

Perhaps the best example in modern science is one I tackled in my first “science post” on These Stone Walls three years ago, and used again as an encore post last week. It was about the Belgian priest, mathematician and physicist, Father Georges Lemaitre, originator of the Big Bang theory and the man who changed the mind of Albert Einstein on the true origin of the created Universe. In a brief disclaimer at the beginning of that post, I asked TSW readers to “indulge me in this few minutes of science and history.” Well, please do so again, for it’s a necessary prelude to this post. What follows will make much more sense if you’ve had another look at “A Day Without Yesterday: Father Georges Lemaitre and The Big Bang.”

At the very end of that post, there is a photograph of Father Lemaitre with Albert Einstein who once told Father Lemaitre in response to his theory about the Big Bang, “Your math is perfect, but your physics is abominable.” Six years later, in 1933, Einstein declared that his own “Cosmological Constant” – his theory that the Universe always existed – was his greatest error, and he called Father Lemaitre’s work “the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation I have ever heard.” For Einstein to use the “C” word – Creation – was a pivotal moment in modern science.

The story of Fr. Lemaitre’s role in modern cosmology was often stifled by science because he was a Catholic priest. Today, it is told well in How It Began: A Time Traveler’s Guide to the Universe by Chris Impey (Norton 2012), a professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
Something astonishing happened after I wrote “A Day Without Yesterday.”

I first mentioned my friend, Pierre Matthews, a TSW reader from Belgium who has visited me several times in prison, in my post, “Saints Alive! Padre Pio and the Stigmata.” It described Pierre’s encounter with Padre Pio when he visited San Giovanni Rotondo as a teenager in 1954. It was like a bolt of lightning to know that there are but two degrees of separation between me and Saint Pio of Pietrelcina, one of the patrons of These Stone Walls. Pierre is also Pornchai Moontri’s Godfather... (continued)

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Link:

• Lumen Fidei: The Science of Creation and a Tale of Two Priests 

Related:

• Fr. Gordon MacRae: Federal Court to Hear Oral Arguments in Habeas Corpus Appeal

“A Day Without Yesterday:” Fr. Georges Lemaitre & The Big Bang

By  Fr. Gordon J. MacRae

...Contact was about radio astronomy and the SETI project – the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. It wasn’t science fiction in the way “Star Trek” was science fiction. Contact was science AND fiction, a novel crafted with real science, and no one but Carl Sagan could have pulled it off. The sheer vastness of the Cosmos unfolded with crystal clarity in Sagan’s prose, a vastness the human mind can have difficulty fathoming. Anyone who thinks we are visited by aliens from other planets doesn’t understand the vastness of it all.

The central theme of Contact was the challenge astronomy poses to religion. In the story, SETI scientist Eleanor Arroway – a wonderful character portrayed in the film version by actress Jodie Foster – becomes the first radio astronomer to detect a signal emitting from another civilization. The signal came from a planet orbiting Vega, a star, not unlike our own, about 26 light years from Earth. The message of the book (and film) is clear: if another species like us exists, and we are ever to have contact, it will be in just this way – via radio waves moving through space at light  speed...

...I wrote Carl Sagan a letter at Cornell.  I understood that Sagan was an atheist, but the central story line of Contact was the effect the discovery of life elsewhere might have on religion, especially on fundamentalist Protestant sects who seemed the most threatened by the discovery.

I thought Carl Sagan handled the controversy quite well, without judgments, and even with some respect for the religious figures among his characters. In my letter, I pointed out to Dr. Sagan that Catholicism, the largest denomination of Christians in America, would not necessarily share in the anxiety such a discovery would bring to some other faiths. I wrote that if our galactic neighbors were embodied souls, like us, then they would be in need of redemption in the same manner in which we have been redeemed.

Weeks later, when an envelope from Cornell University’s Department of Astronomy and Space Sciences arrived, I was so excited my heart was beating BILLions and BILLions of times! Carl Sagan was most gracious. He wrote that my comments were very meaningful to him, and he added, “You write in the spirit of Georges Lemaitre!”

I framed that letter and put it on my rectory office wall. I wanted everyone I knew to see that Carl Sagan compared me with Georges Lemaitre! I was profoundly moved. But no one I knew had a clue who Georges Lemaitre was. I must remedy that.  He was one of the enduring heroes of my life and priesthood. He still is!

FATHER OF THE BIG BANG

Georges Lemaitre died on June 20, 1966 when I was 13 years old. It was the year “Star Trek” debuted on network television and I was mesmerized by space and the prospect of space travel.  Georges Lemaitre was a Belgian scientist and mathematician, a pioneer  in astrophysics, and the originator of what became known in science as “The Big Bang” theory -which, by the way, is no longer considered in cosmology to be a theory.

But first and foremost, Father Lemaitre was a Catholic priest. He was ordained in 1923 after earning doctorates in mathematics and science.  Father Lemaitre studied Einstein’s celebrated general theory of relativity at Cambridge University, but was troubled by Einstein’s model of an always-existing, never changing universe. It was that model, widely accepted in science, that developed a wide chasm between science and the Judeo-Christian understanding of Creation. Einstein and others came to hold that The Universe had no beginning and no end, and therefore the word “Creation” could not apply.
Father Lemaitre saw problems with Einstein’s “Steady State” theory, and what Einstein called “The Cosmological Constant” in which he maintained that The Universe was relatively unchanging over time. From his chair in science at Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium from 1925 to 1931, Father Lemaitre put his formidable mind to work... (continued)

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Link:

• TSW Encore: “A Day Without Yesterday,” Fr. Georges Lemaitre

Related:

• Fr. Gordon MacRae: Federal Court to Hear Oral Arguments in Habeas Corpus Appeal

Is the Higgs Boson the “God Particle?”

By Father Gordon J. MacRae

...If ever you bristle about the typical anti-Catholic mythology that religion attempts to hold back science, remember that the originator of all the science behind this model of creation was a Catholic priest, and many of the great scientists of his time did everything they could to suppress his ideas. They failed because they could not successfully refute either his faith or his science. In the end, even Einstein bowed to Father Lemaitre declaring that his model “was the most satisfactory explanation of creation I have ever heard.” If you have not read “A Day Without Yesterday,” please do.

Pope Pius XII applauded Father Lemaitre’s discovery of The Big Bang because it challenged the acceptable science of the time which claimed that the Universe was not created, but always existed and is eternal. Einstein later acknowledged that this “Cosmological Constant” was his greatest error...

On July fourth, physicists announced they had a momentary glimpse of the elusive Higgs boson, the subatomic particle long theorized to exist, and without which matter itself would not exist. The physicists who reported that they only found “evidence” of the Higgs boson are just being careful scientists. The discovery has a 99.9999% rate of certainty. There is no doubt left. The Higgs boson does indeed exist.

SO, IS IT “THE GOD PARTICLE?”

The short answer is “no.” Imagine for a moment that you’re on an archeological dig on the outskirts of Rome. Standing in your carefully excavated hole, your spade strikes a metal box. Inside you discover a small, worn chisel, and a note written in 16th Century Italian: “Herein lies my favorite chisel.” The note is signed, “Michelangelo Buonarroti.”

Well, if you’re an art historian, what you now hold might be priceless. If you’re also a person of faith who has viewed the magnificence of Michelangelo’s Pieta, you may treasure this forever as one of the tools used to create a work of artistic genius. Your discovery might land on a shelf with your name on it in the Vatican Museum. There will be no doubt that what you discovered is a tool used to create an inspired work of art, but it is not itself the art’s creator.

What does the discovery of the Higgs boson mean for faith in a Universe created by God? Absolutely nothing. To say that the Higgs boson and gravity are responsible for the creation of our Universe is sort of like saying that Michelangelo did not sculpt the Pieta, his chisel did... (continued)

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