Did you know that a Belgian priest invented the Big Bang Theory? Outside of Belgium, his contribution to modern science is all but forgotten. Nevertheless, it was Father Lemaître who developed a relativistic model of a universe in expansion (1927), formulating the first cosmological theory according to which the universe, at first in a dense state, began expanding after a great explosion.

In 1922, he wrote a paper on special and general relativity called “The Physics of Einstein.” In fact, studying the equations developed by the father of the Theory of Relativity, Lemaître observed that the universe couldn’t be static, and had to be dynamic, or else the whole mass would collapse upon itself.

As a professor in Louvain he published his most important article in 1927. Albert Einstein read it and was very impressed, though he would initially reject Lemaître’s theory. 

The Jesuit priest would come to hypothesize that in the beginning, the universe had to be concentrated in an extremely hot and tremendously dense “primitive atom,” which immediately exploded and began to expand, creating galaxies and then stars. In 1950, the British astronomer Fred Hoyle jokingly called this theory -- proposing an initial explosion -- the “Big Bang.” (Hoyle subscribed to a stationary theory, believing the universe to be static.) Today, the scientific community largely agrees that some 13 billion years ago, the “Big Bang” occurred.

From the moment of publishing his theory in 1927, Father Lemaître was accused by Hoyle and others of attempting to bend science to conform with the biblical account.

Lemaître had hypothesized that the great explosion must have left some relic radiation behind, but the world of science had paid little attention to this observation. Then, a Russian-born American, Georges Gamow, developed Father Lemaître’s theory and calculated the exact relic radiation. He calculated it in the form of thermal radiation of a black hole at the temperature of 5 Kelvin (in the range of microwaves).

The relic radiation was finally discovered by chance in 1965, by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, researchers at the Bell Telephone Company, who were in charge of handling the first radio telescopes. This relic radiation has a temperature of 2.7 Kelvin and emanates from every corner of the universe.

It was fellow Belgian astronomer Odon Godart who told Father Lemaître about the discovery of relic radiation, which the priest had elegantly called “the vanished brilliance of the origin of the worlds.”

Lemaître had been carried to the hospital two weeks earlier, struck by leukaemia. The author of the Big Bang Theory replied to the news of the discovery: “I am happy now. At least now we have evidence..” That evidence would earn Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson a Nobel Prize. 

Opposition to the Big Bang Theory, nonetheless, would carry on from 1950, even into the 1980s.

While talking about the Big Bang Theory in 1958, Father Lemaître said that the role of the Bible and the role of science in explaining the origin of the universe are different: “Such a [scientific] theory remains entirely outside any metaphysical or religious question. It leaves the materialist free to deny any transcendental Being. […] For the believer […] it is consonant with the wording of Isaiah speaking of the 'Hidden God' hidden even in the beginning of the universe.”

The Big Bang Theory was quickly welcomed by people in the Church, so much so that in 1951 Pope Pius XII already stated: “…it would seem that present-day science, with one sweep back across the centuries, has succeeded in bearing witness to the august instant of the primordial ‘Fiat Lux’ [Let there be Light], when along with matter, there burst forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation, and the elements split and churned and formed into millions of galaxies.”

It should also be noted that from the beginning, Lemaître was intent on distinguishing between scientific method and theology, and avoiding an erroneous blurring of the scientific understanding of the natural and physical beginning of the universe with the theological concept of “creation.”

If the notion that the Big Bang Theory opposes the Bible still reigns (though this is ironic, since its first proponent was accused of conforming his science to the biblical account), it is because beneath this notion is the observation that science seems to contradict the Bible, and that therefore, there must be a contradiction between faith and science.

“Some theologians, at least, should be sufficiently well-versed in the sciences to make authentic and creative use of the resources that the best-established theories may offer them. Such an expertise would prevent them from making uncritical and overhasty use for apologetic purposes of such recent theories as that of the ‘Big Bang’ in cosmology. Yet it would equally keep them from discounting altogether the potential relevance of such theories to the deepening of understanding in traditional areas of theological inquiry.”