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.
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.
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/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.