For Those Who Look at the Stars and See Only Stars

First deep field image from the James Webb Space Telescope. Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA and STScl

An MIT astrophysicist trying to reconcile science with a quest for spiritual truth wrote upon the death of his parents, “I wish I believed.” I believe he just might.

July 5, 2023 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: The image atop this post is the first of many images transmitted by the James Webb Space Telescope parked one million miles from Earth in 2022 to survey the Cosmos. I first wrote this post in 2018 for an older version of this blog. It needed to be restored for our readers, but I ended up completely rewriting it. My goal was to highlight a bridge between science and faith, but some say it also highlights a bridge between life and death.

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When Beyond These Stone Walls was just a few months old back in 2009, I wrote a post about the death of my mother. It told a story about an event that occurred on her birthday a year after she died. At first glance it seemed an ordinary event, the sort of thing usually chalked up to coincidence. But its meaning and timing and how it unfolded made it an extraordinary grace beyond comprehension. It required that I set aside the mathematical odds against such a thing and see it foremost in the light of faith.

It remains to this day a pivotal moment, a wondrous event that shook my faith out of the closet of doubt where I tend to store it when times get rough — which is often. The story told in that post may shake you, too, if it hasn’t already. By that, I do not mean that it will challenge your faith. It’s just the opposite. My story lifted for me a corner of the veil between doubt and belief. So the title I gave it was “A Corner of the Veil.”

My friend, Pornchai Moontri was with me that night when the event occurred while I offered Mass in our prison cell. I asked Pornchai if he remembers it. “How could I forget it?” he said. He described it as an “ordinary miracle,” the kind he says he has seen a lot of since his eyes were opened.

I could repeat the whole story here, but it will take too long and I have written it once already. It is but a mere click away. I will link to it again after this post. You can decide for yourself whether the story it tells is mere coincidence or something more. My analytic brain tends toward coincidence, but sometimes that just doesn’t add up. This was one of those times.

I then came upon a strange little book of fiction by Laurence Cossé first published in French as Le Coin du Voile, and in English, A Corner of the Veil (Scribner 1999). It strangely fell at my feet from a library shelf after my post with the same title.

Laurence Cossé was a journalist for Radio France when she wrote this book described by Notre Dame theologian Ralph McInerney as “a theological thriller that makes a mystery out of the absence of mystery.” It is a spellbinding account of what happens to the people and institutions of Church and State when a manuscript surfaces that irrefutably proves the existence of God.

Science, religion, and politics all transform as their experts ponder its meaning and their own continued relevancy. The reader is left to wonder whether the discovery will spark a new era of harmony or launch the final battle of the apocalypse.

“Six pages further, Father Bertrand was trembling. The proof was neither arithmetical nor physical nor esthetical nor astronomical, it was irrefutable. Proof of God’s existence had been achieved. Bertrand was tempted, for a second, to toss the bundle into the wastebasket.” (p 15)

As it does for people who awaken to faith on a personal level, the discovery immediately altered the way its readers face both life and death. The transformation was astonishing. Death came to be seen, not as an entity unto itself, but as it really is a chapter in the continuity of life, of me, of the person I call "myself," integrated into the Great Tapestry of God.

I happen to know a lot of people whose experience of living is suddenly overshadowed by the prospect of dying. They have come to know that death is drawing nearer day by day. Some of them struggle. What does death mean, and why do we wage such war against it? The age of individualism and relativism distorts death into a fearsome enemy. As Dylan Thomas wrote,

“Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, Rage against the dying of the light.”

Carina Nebula image from the James Webb Space Telescope. Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA and STScl

If That’s All There Is, Then Let’s Keep Dancing!

While writing this post, I received a letter from a reader in Ohio who asked me to write a note of encouragement to a friend whose death is drawing near. After a lifetime of faith, he wrote, the friend is having grave doubts and fears about the end of life and the finality of death. He is asking the age-old question put to song: “Is that all there is?”

But that is our problem. We speak in terms of “finality” as though when faced with death, all that we once believed with hope takes on the trappings of a mere children’s fantasy. I know too many people who are dying, and many of us treat it as the silent elephant in the room because we know that sooner or later we will join them just as our parents did before us. It is part of the flow of life, but we ward it off as a terror in the night. In the face of death, science alone comes up empty.

When you think of it, death is best seen as an act of love. Imagine the inherent selfishness of a humanity without death. Those we love the most in this world — those who fulfill our very purpose for being in this world — would be left out of existence if this life were ours alone to keep. But facing death with no life of faith casts both life and death into a formless, meaningless void.

I recently came across a review of a book by noted MIT physicist and astronomer Alan Lightman entitled Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine (Pantheon 2018). It was reviewed by UMass physics professor Alan Hirshfeld in “A Longing for Truth and Meaning” in The Wall Street Journal April 7-8, 2018).

In some previous science posts here at Beyond These Stone Walls, I have cited both writers for other books and articles they have written. Mr. Lightman’s book, and Mr. Hirshfeld’s review of it, both raise provocative questions about “the core mysteries of human life” and the way science explores the Universe:

“Why are we here? What, if anything, is the meaning of existence? Is there a God? Is there life after death? Whence consciousness?”

I am very happy to see science ponder these questions, but they can never be answered by science alone. It comes up short when the task moves beyond the mere physics and chemistry of life to its meaning and purpose. Consider this explanation of the self, of who and what you are as a conscious being, offered by Mr. Lightman:

“Self is the name we give to the mental sensation of certain electrical and chemical flows in our neurons.”

It is too tempting for science to reduce us to fundamental biology and chemistry, but the mere mechanics of what I am do not at all define who I am. If science is the only contribution to the meaning of life and death, then it becomes obvious why so many spend significant time in denial or in dread of death.

In his new book reflecting on the Cosmos, MIT astrophysicist Alan Lightman takes up these questions and more. Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine is a view of the world through a scientist’s lens which requires the scientist to see in it, as Alan Hirshfeld describes,

“Tangible bits of matter and energy, all governed by a set of fundamental physical laws … In keeping with his ‘Central Doctrine of Science,’ he eschews unprovable hypotheses, most significantly the existence of God and the afterlife.”

But these hypotheses are only unprovable from the point of view of science which concerns itself, as it concerns astrophysicist Alan Lightman, with matter and energy and fundamental laws. But Professor Lightman has acquired the wisdom not to stop there. His reflection on the death of his parents brings him to the “impossible truth” that they no longer exist, and he will one day follow them into this nonexistence.

Is that all there is? “I wish I believed,” he wrote. But “a precipice looms for each of us, an eventual plunge into nonexistence.” As Alan Hirshfeld described it:

“A depressing prospect, for sure, yet the inevitable judgment of those for whom religious or spiritual alternatives carry no resonance.”

Pictured: Fr. Georges Lemaître, Albert Einstein and Fr. Andrew Pinsent

Threads of the Tapestry of God

I have written numerous articles about the sciences of astronomy and cosmology, the origins and mechanics of the Universe. But these are not the only tools with which to explore the universe and measure life and death. The conclusions of science and faith are not as inseparable as science might have you believe.

I have raised this analogy before, but consider these two passages from two sources that have become meaningful to me. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC 296) expresses a fundamental truth of faith God created the Universe and life “out of nothing.”

Among the many contributions of science that I hold in high regard, this is one by the mathematician Robyn Arianrhod whose book, Einstein’s Heroes: Imagining the World Through the Language of Mathematics (Oxford University 2005) draws the same conclusion. Don’t let the scientific language dissuade you from understanding this phenomenal bridge between science and faith:

“The Belgian priest and astrophysicist, Georges Lemaitre began to develop expanding cosmological models out of Einstein’s equations … In 1931, Lemaitre formally sowed the seeds of the Big Bang theory [which] showed that Einstein’s equations predicted the universe had expanded not from a tiny piece of matter located in an otherwise empty cosmos, but from a single point in four-dimensional spacetime … Before this point, about 13 billion years ago, there was no time and no space. No geometry, no matter. Nothing. The universe simply appeared out of nowhere. Out of nothing.”

— Arianrhod, pp 185-187

Reflecting on the death of his parents, Alan Lightman wrote that he wished he believed in the continuity of life after death. It could be at least a starting point that sometimes science and faith share some of the same language and conclusions about the origin of life. Faith, to have any real depth, is not simply an emotional experience to assuage our fears, but rather one arrived at also through reason. Catholicism presents 2,000+ years of faith seeking understanding, of belief built upon reason.

And sometimes reason just cannot explain away our intuition that life has an Author, and when we die, the book is still not finished. I am intrigued by Professor Hirshfeld’s use of the term, “resonance” for I have also used it in some recent posts. I have described it as a sort of echo that finds its way among the “threads of the Tapestry of God” in ways that give life meaning and purpose, in ways that connect us. One way spiritual resonance manifests itself is by giving meaning to suffering.

Consider this stunning action of spiritual resonance that was described in a post, “Fr Georges Lemaître, the Priest Who Discovered the Big Bang.” That post was co-authored by me and Father Andrew Pinsent, PhD, a priest, physicist and Director of the Institute for Science and Religion at Oxford University.

When my friend Pornchai Moontri came into the Catholic Church on Divine Mercy Sunday in 2010, one of our readers, the late Pierre Matthews in Belgium, inquired rather urgently asking to stand as Pornchai’s Godfather. They visited several times. However, it was only after I wrote about Father George Lemaitre that Pierre contacted me with the staggering revelation that the Godfather of Pornchai Moontri is the Godson of Father George Lemaitre. The mathematical odds against such a “mere coincidence” are ... well … astronomical!

It is a long time since I have viewed with awe the expanse of our galaxy spanning the night sky in all its brilliance, but like Alan Lightman, I have done so, and find it unforgettable. He is on the right track, and may one day come to see that the awe it instills in him is not the awe of science alone. “I wish I believed,” he wrote. I believe he just may.

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Fr. Georges Lemaître

Editor’s Note: Continue this great adventure of science and faith with these related posts:

A Corner of the Veil

The God of the Living and the Life of the Dead

Fr Georges Lemaître, the Priest Who Discovered the Big Bang

The James Webb Space Telescope and an Encore from Hubble

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap the image for live access to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

The James Webb Space Telescope and an Encore from Hubble

James Webb Space Telescope illustration courtesy of ESA/Hubble (Northrup Grumman).

As the James Webb Space Telescope entered orbit in a neutral gravity zone one million miles from Earth, the waning days of Hubble revealed an astronomical surprise.

June 22, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth? Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades or lose the chords of Orion?”

— Job 38:4,31

“Astronomy, Cosmology, Physics, Theology, History! Reading this blog is like enrolling in a graduate program at NYU.” That message was sent to me in a letter several years ago from a friend, an official of the Archdiocese of New York. I have written a good deal about the sciences of astronomy and cosmology, but only about a dozen posts over the 13-year lifespan of this blog.

In a recent telephone call from exile to my friend, Father George David Byers, STD, SSL, he chided me that I am way overdue for a science post. I cite his academic credentials here — a Doctorate in Sacred Theology from the Pontifical University Angelicum in Rome and a Licentiate in Sacred Scripture from the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome and Jerusalem — to reflect that his suggestion of a mere “science” post might contain just a hint of academic hubris. If so, I can only respond with a quote from the great English poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin is pride that apes humility.”

I actually did write a science post even before Father Byers brought it up. Please don't yawn or click me away just yet. For me, this is a very big deal and it has a “WOW” factor. The Hubble Space Telescope, launched into Earth orbit in 1990, has been operating for 32 years and has far exceeded its intended operational limit. In the waning days of Hubble, it surprised Earthbound scientists with an amazing discovery. I will get to it below, but first ...

Star Trek: The Next Generation

The next generation of space exploration was born with the December 25, 2021 launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). It has recently arrived at its designated orbit in what is called a “Lagrange point.” Named for the 18th Century French mathematician and physicist, Joseph Louis Lagrange, a “Lagrange point” is a zone of neutral gravity between the Earth and the Sun about one million miles from Earth. That point is now host to the revolutionary James Webb Space Telescope.

Thousands of scientists and engineers took part in this project on the cutting edge of astronomical science. The Space Telescope Science Institute will operate and monitor it from Baltimore. Webb successfully separated from its launch vehicle and unfolded a giant solar array to power the telescope. Armed with huge primary and secondary mirrors and a suite of cameras, spectrometers, and other instruments, the Webb Telescope is the size of a large truck. It is capable of producing spectral images of 100 galaxies at a time. As one scientist described it:

“[Webb] will crack open the treasure chest of the magnificent infrared sky invisible to the human eye. If a bumblebee hovered in space at the distance from Earth to the Moon, Webb will be able to see both the sunlight it reflects and the heat it emits.”

One of the burning questions of both science and faith that Webb may lend itself to solving is the existence of life elsewhere in the Universe. All the latest media craze about evidence of UFOs points only to Earth-bound technology. Distances between stars are like impenetrable barriers. If sentient life exists, we will detect each other long before we ever encounter each other. So far, after decades of searching, no such evidence yet exists.

A general consensus among astronomers is that life does exist “out there,” but complex life is much more rare, and sentient complex life like us, if it exists elsewhere at all, is extremely rare. I once wrote a post laying out a case for our uniqueness in the Cosmos. It was, “Star Trek and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.”

That post introduced readers to a remarkable contributor to the science that made the Webb Space Telescope possible. Astronomer Vera Rubin defied all the stereotypes of her time to become one of the great icons of cosmology. She discovered that the visible Universe that we see in the night sky is only about 10 to 15 percent of what is actually there. She wrote of this in “Dark Matter in the Universe” (Scientific American, 1998):

“As we have done for centuries, we gaze into the night sky from our planetary platform and wonder where we are in this cavernous cosmos. Flecks of light provide clues about great objects in space. And what we do discern about their motions and apparent shadows tells us that there is much more that we cannot yet see.

“From every photon we collect from the universe’s farthest reaches, we struggle to extract information. Astronomy is the study of light that reaches Earth from the heavens. Our task is not only to collect as much light as possible — from ground and space-based telescopes — but also to use what we can see in the heavens to understand better what we cannot see and yet know must be there.

“Based on 50 years of accumulated observations of the motions of galaxies and the expansion of the universe, most astronomers believe that as much as 90 percent of the stuff constituting the universe may be objects or particles that cannot be seen. In other words, most of the universe’s matter does not radiate. It provides no glow that we can detect in the electromagnetic spectrum. … We call this missing mass ‘dark matter,’ for it is the light, not the matter, that is missing.”

— Vera Rubin, 1998

In coming months, the first images to come from the James Webb Space Telescope now hovering one million miles between Earth and the Sun may provide humanity’s first illumination of dark matter, that 90-percent of the Universe that we have never before seen. The Webb Telescope enormous primary mirror has unfolded perfectly. In coming months Webb’s first images of the ancient cosmos will arrive on Earth. Be prepared to be amazed!

A Pre-retirement Surprise from Hubble

My favorite post of the past year is one that was only half written by me. The other (and far better) half was written by Fr. Andrew Pinsent, a noted particle physicist and Research Director at the Ian Ramsay Center for Science and Religion at Oxford University in the U.K. I was way out of my element in this joint venture, but it was this humble blog’s best foot forward. The jointly written post was, “Fr Georges Lemaître, the Priest Who Discovered the Big Bang.”

It was among our most popular and enduring posts of the last year. Perhaps it was just a nice break from this world’s seemingly never-ending preoccupations with war, pestilence, scandal, and other obsessions of our time.

In that post, I quoted an excerpt from the book, Einstein’s Heroes: Imagining the World Through the Language of Mathematics (Oxford University Press, 2005), a wondrous book by a brilliant mathematician, Robyn Arianrhod:

“In 1931, [Georges] Lemaitre formally sowed the seeds of the Big Bang theory when he suggested the universe had started as an explosion of a ‘primeval atom,’ and that it had continued expanding from that explosive beginning.... Einstein’s equation predicted the universe had expanded not from a tiny piece of matter located in an otherwise empty cosmos, but from a single point in four-dimensional space-time .... Before this point, about thirteen billion years ago, there was no time and no space. No geometry, no matter, nothing. The universe simply appeared out of nowhere. Out of nothing.” ( p. 187)

“The Universe simply appeared out of nowhere. Out of nothing.” And it all happened in an instant 13 billion years ago on “A day without yesterday.” This conclusion of modern cosmology was the work of a brilliant priest, mathematician and physicist, Fr. Georges Lemaitre. If you wonder about the relevance of faith in the scientific world, you may be surprised to learn that science and the Catechism of the Catholic Church are on the same page in describing the origin of a created universe:

“God created the universe out of nothing.” (CCC 290)

“We believe that God needs no pre-existent thing or any help in order to create. God created freely out of nothing.” (CCC 296)

“God said, ‘let there be light,’ and there was light” (Genesis 1:4). Scripture bears witness to faith in creation ‘out of nothing’ as a truth filled with promise and hope.” (CCC 297)

“Since God created everything out of nothing, He can also, through the Holy Spirit, give spiritual life to sinners by creating a pure heart in them, and bodily life to the dead through the Resurrection.” (CCC 298)

The Hubble Space Telescope is destined to soon retire, but not before it gave us some amazing images of the visible Cosmos. Its latest surprise is a photograph of the most distant star ever seen by human eyes or instruments, a star now called “Earendel.” It is 28 billion light years from Earth. A light year is a measure of distance and not of time. It is the distance light travels in a single year at the constant rate of 186,000 miles per second. A light year works out to be 5.6 trillion miles. Multiply that by 28 billion and that is the distance from Earth to Earendel. Please don’t ask me to convert this to kilometers.

The light Hubble captured from Earendel emanated from the star 12.9 billion years ago in the very infancy of creation as calculated by Fr. Georges Lemaitre. The only reason Hubble could spot this star is because of a rare cosmic alignment. A galaxy cluster beyond the Milky Way — our galaxy — was positioned in such a way that its gravity bent light creating a sort of cosmic magnifying lens.

If you did the math, you might have noticed that Earendel is twice the distance of the age of the Universe which is possible only because the Universe has continually expanded over those 13 billion years. This expansion, and the now proven fact that galaxies are defeating gravity by speeding away from one another, was also a discovery of the physics of Fr. Georges Lemaitre which in the end were applauded and embraced by Albert Einstein.

Who says priests are boring?

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Note: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. Please visit our “Special Events” page and these related links:

Star Trek and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Fr Georges Lemaître, the Priest Who Discovered The Big Bang

“A Day Without Yesterday:” Father Georges Lemaitre and The Big Bang

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“A Day Without Yesterday:” Father Georges Lemaitre and The Big Bang

The Catholic Church in Belgium can take pride in the story of Georges Lemaitre, the priest and mathematician who changed the mind of Einstein on the creation of The Universe.

(This post needs a disclaimer, so here it is. It’s a post about science and one of its heroes. It’s a story I can’t tell without a heavy dose of science, so please bear with me. I read the post to my friends Pornchai, Joseph, and Skooter. Pornchai loved the math parts.  Joseph said it was “very interesting,” and Skooter yawned and said, “You CAN’T print this.” When I told Charlene about the post, she said, “Well, people may never read your blog again.” Well, I sure hope that’s not the case. I happen to think this is a really cool story, so please indulge me these few minutes of science and history.)

The late Carl Sagan was a professor of astronomy at Cornell University when he wrote his 1980 book, Cosmos.  It spent 77 weeks on the New York Times  Best Seller List. Later in the 1980s, Dr. Sagan narrated a popular PBS series also called “Cosmos,” based on his book. Sagan was much imitated for his monotone intonation of “BILLions and BILLions of stars.” I taped all the installments of “Cosmos,” and watched each at least twice.

More than once, I fell asleep listening to Sagan’s monotone “BILLions and BILLions of stars.” I hope you’re not doing the same right now. Science was my first love as a geeky young man. Religion and faith eventually overtook it, but science never left me.  Astronomy has been a lifelong fascination, and Carl Sagan was one of its icons. That’s why I was enthralled 25 years ago to walk out of a bookstore with my reserve copy of Sagan’s first and only novel, Contact  (Simon & Shuster, 1985).

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.

Here comes the geeky part. For those who never caught the science bug, a “light year” is a unit of distance, not time. Light moves through space at a known rate of speed — about 186,000 miles per second. At that rate, light travels through space about 5.86 trillion miles in one year. That’s a “light year,” and in numbers it represents 5,860,000,000,000 miles. In the vacuum of space, radio waves also travel at the speed of light.

The galaxy in which we live — the one we call “The Milky Way” — is a more or less flat spiral disk comprised of about 100 billion stars. The Milky Way measures about 100,000 light years across.   That’s a span of about 6,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles, give or take a few. Please don’t ask me to convert this to kilometers!

This means that light — or radio waves — from across our galaxy can take up to 100,000 years to reach Earth. One of The Milky Way Galaxy’s approximately 100 billion stars is shining in my cell window at this moment. Our galaxy is one of about fifty billion galaxies now known to comprise The Universe. The largest known to us is thirteen times larger than The Milky Way. You get the picture. The Universe is immense.

If E.T. Phones Home, Make Sure It’s Collect!

In a recent post I made a cynical comment about UFOs. I wrote, “The real proof of intelligent life in The Universe is that they don’t come here.” It was an attempt at humor, but the problem with searching for extraterrestrial intelligence is one of practical physics. The limit of our ability to “listen” is a mere few hundred light years from Earth, a tiny fraction of the galaxy — a mere survey of our own backyard. If there is another civilization out there, we may never know it.

Even if we hear from them some day, it will be a one-sided conversation. The signal we may one day receive might have been broadcast hundreds — perhaps thousands — of years earlier. If we respond, it will take hundreds or thousands of years for our response to be detected. We sure won’t be trading recipes, or asking, “What’s new?”  If there’s anyone out there — and so far we know of no one else — we can forget about any exchange of ideas, let alone ambassadors.

Still, I devoured Contact  twice in 1985, then 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.

He developed both a mathematical equation and a scientific basis for what he termed the “primeval atom,” a sort of cosmic egg from which The Universe was created. He also concluded that The Universe is not static, as Einstein believed, but expanding at an ever increasing rate, and he put forward a mathematical model to prove it. In 1998, Father Lemaitre was proven to be correct.

Einstein publicly disagreed with Lemaitre’s conclusions, and the priest was not taken seriously by mainstream science largely because of that. In his book, The Universe in a Nutshell  (Bantam Books, 2001), mathematician and physicist Stephen Hawking addressed the controversy:

“If galaxies are moving apart now, it means they must have been closer together in 
the past. About fifteen billion years ago, they would have been on top of each other, and the density would have been very large. This state was called the “primeval atom” by the Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre, who was the first to investigate the origin of the universe that we call the big bang. Einstein seems never to have taken the big bang seriously”

— The Universe in a Nutshell, p. 22

Stephen Hawking actually calculated the density of Father Lemaitre’s “Primeval Atom” just prior to The Big Bang.  It was 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, tons per square inch.  I haven’t checked this math myself, so we’ll take Professor Hawking’s word for it.

Though Einstein disagreed with Father Lemaitre at first, he respected his brilliant mathematical mind. When Einstein presented his theories to a packed audience of scientists in Brussels in 1933, he was asked if he thought his ideas were understood by everyone present. “By Professor D, perhaps,” Einstein replied, “And certainly by Lemaitre, as for the rest, I don’t think so.”

When Father Lemaitre presented his concepts of the “primeval atom” and an expanding universe, Einstein told him, “Your mathematics is perfect, but your grasp of physics is abominable.”

They were words Einstein would one day have to take back. When Edwin Hubble and other astronomers read Father Lemaitre’s paper, they became convinced that it was Einstein’s physics that was flawed. They could only conclude that the priest and scientist was correct about the creation and expansion of The Universe from the “primeval atom,” and the fact that time, space and matter actually did begin at a moment of creation, and that The Universe will end.

It’s an ironic twist that science often accuses religion of holding back the truth about science. In the case of Father Lemaitre and The Big Bang, it was science that refused to believe the evident truth that a Catholic priest proposed to a mathematical certainty: that the true origin of The Universe, and of time and space, is its creation on “a day without yesterday.”

For his work, Father Lemaitre was inducted into the Royal Academy of Belgium, and was awarded the Franqui prize by an international commission of scientists. Pope Pius XI applauded Father Lemaitre’s view of the creation of the universe and appointed him to the Pontifical Academy of Science. Later, Pope Pius XII declared that Father Lemaitre’s work was a vindication of the Biblical account of creation.

The Pope saw in Father Lemaitre’s brilliance a scientific model of a created Universe that bridged science and faith and halted the growing sense that each must entirely reject the other.

Einstein finally came around to endorse, if not openly embrace Father Lemaitre’s conclusions. He admitted that his concept of an eternal, unchanging universe was an error. “The Cosmological Constant was my greatest mistake,” he said.

In January, 1933, Father Georges  Lemaitre traveled to California to present a series of seminars. When Father Lemaitre finished his lecture on the nature and origin of The Universe, a man in the back stood and applauded, and said, “This is the most beautiful and satisfying explanation of creation to which I have ever listened.” Everyone present knew that voice. It was Albert Einstein, and he actually said the “C” word so disdained by the science of his time: “Creation!”

“I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know God’s thoughts; the rest are details.”

— Albert Einstein

“The more we know of the universe, the more profoundly we are struck by a Reason whose ways we can only contemplate with astonishment” … Albert Einstein once said that in the laws of nature, ‘there is revealed such a superior Reason that everything significant which has arisen out of human thought and arrangement is, in comparison with it, the merest empty reflection.’ In what is most vast, in the world of heavenly bodies, we see revealed a powerful Reason that holds the world together.”

— Pope Benedict XVI, In the Beginning, (Eerdmans, 1986)

“In the Beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.”

— Genesis 1:1

“Live long and prosper.”

— Mr. Spock

For Further Reading:

‘A Day Without Yesterday’: Georges Lemaitre & the Big Bang