Post #1506

On friar Georges Lemaitre Friar Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian priest and astrophysicist, published a paper in 1927 in the Annals of the Scientific Society of Brussel that first presented the idea of an expanding cosmos. In 1931, Lemaitre proposed what later became known as the 🔗Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. The Catholic Church honoured Lemaitre's work: he was elected to the Pontificial Academy of Sciences (sic!) in 1936 and named prelate in 1960. By contrast, in 1948, astronomers in the atheist Soviet Union were urged to condemn the Big Bang as a reactionary theory helping clericalism, a hostility shared by many scientists and philosophers until the 1960s. Besides showing the compatibility of faith and science, the case of Lemaitre illustrates the way in which minds and cultures shaped by the belief that (the Abrahamic) God is a Trinity of reason and love have proved fruitful in perceiving order in the universe. Moreover, it is arguable that belief in (the Abrahamic) God who is beyond creation has freed us to theorise about the causation and change of the cosmos as a whole, rather than simply accepting the totality of material reality as an eternal, unchanging given. #physics#history @EuropeanTribalism