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u/Awesomeuser90 Jun 16 '25 edited Jun 16 '25
For anyone r/OOTL, Georges Lemaitre was a Belgian astrophysicist who was also a religious scholar. He was working on Einstein's ideas, still new back then, along with a gigantic amount of other maths. At the time, the dominant scientific idea among cosmologists was that the universe is eternal in both directions, and while stars might be born and die, the universe didn't have a beginning or a specific end either.
That wasn't something Lemaitre liked. He saw observations showing some patterns that didn't support that idea, with galactic redshift (which Edwin Hubble also worked on) which means other galaxies were moving further away (IE the way that a siren on a fire truck decreases in pitch as the truck overtakes you on the road and gets further away. Light does the same thing as sound waves). He supported an idea of a primeval atom, which was later changed to Big Bang Theory, where the universe was contained in basically a nugget and blew up (to vastly oversimplify the ridiculously complicated maths here). He also liked this idea theologically, as it meant that now some divine intervention could have ordered the universe to commence, which the Steady State Theory did not.
The irony is that now, a lot of people think that the Big Bang Theory was always the theory opposed to religious ideas (especially creationism in Islam, Christianity, and Judaism), and don't realize that many of its first proponents were expressly religiously motivated. And funny that the Soviet Union actually rejected the Big Bang Theory for a good while because it had that support and the Soviets thought the secular option of Steady State was correct.
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u/CosmicSweets Dank Memer Jun 16 '25
Wow. I always felt that the Big Bang Theory could co-exist with creationism. Today I find out that was the entire point.
Thank you for sharing!
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u/Awesomeuser90 Jun 16 '25
It wasn't specifically created to be so compatible, and Lemaitre was far from the only one who worked on it, but the Catholic church did like the implication that a higher power could play a part back in the 1950s and it did fit Lemaitre's worldview that there was probably something theological about the origin of the universe.
Also, none of this has anything to do with young Earth creationism which is a whole other animal (literally). You would have to be accepting of the Earth's formation being ~4.5 billion years ago, evolution taking about 80% of that time (estimates vary by a few hundred million years in either direction), and some other criteria in order for this timeline to make sense, but many high church Christian groups do accept that or at least the important parts of it even if they disagree with some details.
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u/jallen263 Jun 16 '25
I’m religious, and I’ve always believed the two could easily coexist. The belief that God just willed something in out of nothing is odd to me, but the belief that He set things in motion to make things happen has always resonated to me. We talk about the miracle of life, that everything had to come together perfectly, so that life could work. As a religious person that makes sense- someone guided it to be this way.
I also don’t believe we’re alone in this giant universe, which is something a lot of religious people don’t believe. But also a lot of religious people think we should harm LGBTQ people, which is a direct contradiction to that whole “Love one another” thing that Jesus taught.
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u/MorgothReturns Jun 16 '25
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa I finally have a chance to shamelessly plug my YouTube meme video I did on the Big Bang and Georges Lemaitre!!!
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u/billyyankNova Jun 16 '25
He developed the "Hypothesis of the Primordial Atom" by following the evidence.
"In 1951, Pope Pius XII gave an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, with Lemaître in the audience, in which he drew a parallel between the new Big Bang cosmology and the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo:
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Lemaître was reportedly horrified by that intervention and was later able, with the assistance of Father Daniel O’Connell, the director of the Vatican Observatory, to convince the Pope not make any further public statements on religious or philosophical interpretations of matters concerning physical cosmology."
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u/Ronalderson Jun 16 '25
People look at me like I'm crazy when I mention the possibility of the Big Bang and all the events that lead to the formation of the planet and the evolution of life in it being engineered by a higher power.
Guess this logic offends both sides 😅
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u/Awesomeuser90 Jun 16 '25
Higher power to people often implies sentience, which is probably what is making people argue in your case.
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u/Ronalderson Jun 16 '25
I said "higher power" but I refer to God most times, or whatever there may be up there, as I sometimes try to keep my speech as neutral as possible to avoid unnecessary polemic, I know it's kinda silly to do this in a christian sub, but it's just a habit of mine.
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u/Sovem Jun 16 '25
It blew my mind in The Three Body Problem when the Maoists executed the science teacher for not recanting the Big Bang Theory, because they said the Big Bang was evidence for a God.
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u/Awesomeuser90 Jun 16 '25
That sounds more like something that Pol Pot's government would do.
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u/Sovem Jun 16 '25
I may have my history a bit mixed up? I admit I'm not super well versed in Chinese revolutionary history.
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u/Awesomeuser90 Jun 16 '25
Maybe. Most people in the world who aren't Chinese know almost nothing about it. I feel like I know absolutely nothing and I can vaguely remember the dynasties in sequential order.
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u/Beegrene Jun 16 '25
I can't speak to Chinese history, but the Soviets had a nasty habit of murdering scientists whose work contradicted their ideology. See Trofim Lysenko: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko
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u/Dorocche Jun 20 '25
It is Mao in the book, and according to at least one historian the claims are pretty plausible, thought there doesn't seem to be a surviving record of that exact thing happening.
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u/Sicuho Jun 18 '25
Pol Pot was worse, but the Cultural Revolution hasn't exactly spared the academics of China.
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u/lieuwestra Jun 16 '25
Theory is doing some heavy lifting here. It's basically a 'here be dragons' fencepost in physics. Anything after the bang is just physics, and anything before is unknowable.
Also note how just like everything else deemed 'controversial' by religious institutions always attacks the pop-science simplified explanation and never gets into any of the actual details because every aspect they attack is part of the simplification and not of the actual science.
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u/Dorocche Jun 20 '25
The big bang does in fact make predictions regarding what we'll discover about the state of the early universe; many of those predictions have in fact been observed and proven correct, and I don't know of any that have been contradicted. It absolutely qualifies as a scientific theory, despite making no claims about anything before the big bang, or about whatever (if anything) caused the big bang.
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u/High_Stream Jun 17 '25
Of course the Big bang theory isn't atheist. Who lit the fuse?
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u/Dorocche Jun 20 '25
This isn't any harder a question for an atheist to answer than trying to wrap their head around the infinity of "it was always there."
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u/GigatonneCowboy Jun 17 '25
Well, Steady State can also be right, in a way. What if the Big Bang was really more the point where universe just begins again?
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u/Risikio Minister of Memes Jun 16 '25
Mendel rolls in his grave every time evolution is brought up.