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Apologetics · Science and Faith

What Does the Church Say About the Big Bang? Didn't a Catholic Priest Propose It?

The Short Answer

Yes. The theory now called the Big Bang was first proposed in 1927 by Fr Georges Lemaître, a Belgian Catholic priest and physicist. The Church has welcomed it; Pope Francis said in 2014 that the Big Bang “does not contradict the intervention of a divine creator but depends on it.” But the Church does not treat the theory as a proof of God, and neither did Lemaître. The Big Bang describes how the universe developed from a hot, dense early state. Creation is a different claim: that the universe, whatever its history, depends on God for its existence at every moment.

Many people assume the opposite: that the Big Bang replaced the idea of creation, or that the Church must have fought it. Others, on the believing side, claim it proves that God made the world. Both overstate what the science shows.

What the Church Does and Does Not Claim

The Church does not claim:

The Church does claim that God created the world freely and “out of nothing” (CCC 296), and that the many scientific studies of the origins of the cosmos have “splendidly enriched our knowledge” and should lead us to admire the Creator all the more (CCC 283).

Why Catholics Welcome It

The priest who saw it first

Working from Einstein’s equations of general relativity, Lemaître proposed in 1927 that the universe is expanding. In 1931 he went further: run the expansion backwards, and everything converges on what he called a “primeval atom.” Edwin Hubble’s observations of receding galaxies, published in 1929, supported the expansion. The name “Big Bang” was coined later by the astronomer Fred Hoyle, who preferred a “steady state” universe with no beginning.

The evidence went Lemaître’s way: the abundances of light elements and, above all, the cosmic microwave background radiation discovered in 1965, the faint afterglow of the early universe. Lemaître learned of that discovery shortly before he died in 1966. He was president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences at the time.

A scientist who kept the distinction

In 1951 Pope Pius XII, in an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences known as Un’Ora, spoke of modern cosmology as if it confirmed the moment of creation. Lemaître was uneasy. His theory was not yet proven, and he did not want it used as an argument for the faith or seen by colleagues as theology dressed as physics. In his next address on the subject, to astronomers in 1952, the Pope did not repeat the point.

At the Solvay Congress of 1958, answering Hoyle’s charge that he was mixing science and religion, Lemaître said that such a theory stays completely outside any metaphysical or religious question. That is the mature Catholic view. Science and faith do not compete, because they answer different questions. Lemaître studied the expansion of the universe as a physicist and prayed the breviary as a priest, and saw no conflict between the two.

What creation means

When the Church speaks of creation, she does not mean only a first moment. She means that the whole universe, at every moment, receives its existence from God. “God did not make them out of things that existed,” says the mother of the seven martyrs in 2 Maccabees 7:28. “By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God” (Hebrews 11:3).

That is why St Thomas Aquinas, who believed the universe had a beginning, held that this was known by faith rather than proved by reason (Summa Theologiae I, q. 46, a. 2). A universe that had always existed would still need God to hold it in being. The Big Bang is welcome to Catholics, but creation does not depend on it.

Common Objections

”The Big Bang shows the universe created itself from nothing.”

Physicists who speak of a universe arising “from nothing” usually mean from a quantum vacuum, a field, or a set of physical laws. None of those is nothing. They are something, with definite properties, and the question of why they exist remains. Whatever physics eventually says about the earliest moments, it describes the behaviour of what exists. It cannot explain why anything exists at all.

”Then the Big Bang proves God exists.”

Not by itself, and Catholics should be careful here. The theory may one day be revised or set within a larger picture, and the faith should not be tied to the fate of a scientific model. Aquinas warned that weak proofs for what we hold by faith give unbelievers occasion to laugh (Summa Theologiae I, q. 46, a. 2). The strongest arguments for God do not depend on a beginning in time. (See Does God Exist?)

”Genesis says the world was made in six days.”

The opening of Genesis uses a literary pattern of six days to teach that everything was made by God, that it is good, and that human beings have a special place in it. The Church does not read it as a scientific timetable, and many early Christian writers, St Augustine among them, did not read the days literally either (CCC 337).

”The Church opposes science. Look at Galileo.”

The Galileo affair was a real failure, and St John Paul II acknowledged it in 1992. But it is one episode among many. The same Church gave the world Lemaître, the Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel, the founder of genetics, and the Vatican Observatory, one of the oldest astronomical institutions in the world. (See Isn’t Science the Only Real Path to Truth?)

In Summary

The Big Bang was first proposed by a Catholic priest, confirmed by decades of evidence, and welcomed by the Church. It describes how the universe developed from a hot, dense beginning. It does not show that the universe came from nothing, and it does not prove God by itself. Creation is a deeper claim: that everything that exists, at every moment, receives its being from God. Lemaître kept the two distinct, and saw no conflict between them. Catholics can do the same.

See also Does God Exist?, Does the Church Accept Evolution? and Does the Fine-Tuning of the Universe Point to God?

This article follows the method St Robert Bellarmine used in his Controversies*: state the question fairly, clear away misunderstandings, make the case, then answer each objection. See How We Answer Objections.*

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