The Director of the Vatican Observatory celebrates Msgr. Georges Lemaître at St Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge
Founder of the Big Bang Theory
“Why Do We Look Up?: An Astronomer's Reflection on the Universe and the Call to Study It”, is the title of a lecture by Jesuit Brother, Guy Consolmagno, Director of the Vatican Observatory, held on Wednesday, 20 November, at the Von Hügel Institute for Critical Catholic Inquiry at St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge.
The lecture explored the scientific activity of Msgr. Georges Lemaître, founder of the Big Bang Theory, and his studies of the Universe. The Director delivered the Von Hügel Lecture on the occasion of the centenary of the Belgian priest’s scientific work at St. Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge. Br. Consolmagno explained that Msgr. Lemaître had gone against what is known as “the cosmological principle”, which claimed that no place in the universe, and no time, is different from any other place and time.
Lemaître’s theory was a point of departure in time, a time that was different from all other times. Even worse, as Brother Consolmagno noted, some people linked this point of departure to the account of the Creation in Genesis, thus, “a first day”. The fact that Lemaître was a Catholic priest made this idea even more suspicious. Even though Lemaître himself was careful never to make this connection, some believed he was looking for a creatio ex nihilo theory that was in harmony with the following passage from 2 Maccabees (7:28): “look at the heavens and the earth and see all that is in them; then you will know that God did not make them out of existing things”. In the Soviet Union, for example, there were complaints that “reactionary scientists Lemaître… and others [used galaxies] to strengthen religious views on the structure of the universe. These scientists were ‘Falsifiers of science’ (who) want to revive the fairy tale of the origin of the world from nothing”.
Through time, complaints of the sort were unable to survive the accumulation of scientific proof. Msgr. Lemaître’s theory has become a leading scientific theory today. There will thus be many opportunities in the future to celebrate numerous centenaries of Lemaître, each of which, will represent a crossroads between science, history and religion. Because the Von Hügel Lectures (at St. Edmund’s Von Hügel Institute for Critical Catholic Inquiry) have the aim of highlighting the interdisciplinary aspect, the 2024 lecture was the perfect opportunity to celebrate the first of these centenaries, which was also celebrated with a scientific conference on Lemaître at the Vatican Observatory, during the summer.