Lesson 24 –
Catholic Origins of the Big Bang Theory

Fr. Lemaître possessed a perfect match of scientific and mathematical understanding to comprehend Einstein’s relativity theory, which provides the theoretical framework for the Big Bang theory. Furthermore, Fr. Lemaître was unusually well attuned to contemporary astrophysical discoveries, which were starting to provide some hints for an expanding universe. These two facts could be sufficient, when combined with Fr. Lemaître’s own touch of creative genius, to explain his remarkable discovery. But his theological knowledge, that the Universe had a beginning in time, may have also had something to do with it and might have prepared him to take his scientific idea of the Big Bang seriously when it arose in his mind.

Course Reading

Summa Contra Gentiles bk. II, c. 15 | St. Thomas Aquinas

Faith and the Creed 2.2-3 | St. Augustine

Excerpt from Faith and the Creed by St. Augustine:

[W]e are perfectly right in believing that God made the world from nothing, because even if the world was made from some kind of matter, that matter has itself been made from nothing. Thus there first was produced the capacity for forms and then form was given to such things as were formed, in keeping with God’s well-ordered bounty. We have made this assertion so no one will think that the utterances of sacred Scripture are at variance with one another, for it is written both that God made the world from nothing and that the world has been made from unformed matter.

Course Listening

God, Evolution, and the Big Bang: The Theology of Creation according to Aquinas | Prof. Gaven Kerr

Big Bang Cosmology and Christianity | Dr. Karin Öberg

This episode was made possible through the support of a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this project are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.