Supplement to analysis of Angels and Demons sent to K. Plumb
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Fr. Georges Lemaître (1894-1966)
On pages 86-87, in chapter 19 of Angels and Demons, Max Kohler, Director of CERN, Vittoria Vetra and Robert Langdon, are discussing the life and work of the recently murdered Leonardo Vetra, priest and adoptive father of Vittoria. That there should be such extended “scientific” discourse at this critical juncture in the story incredibly stretches the boundaries of verisimilitude. But let that be for the present. The reading public, especially Catholics, should be given an opportunity to sift the truthfrom the errors concerning Father Georges Lemaître and his place in the history of the Big Bang hypothesis. Here are the main points in the dialogue of Brown's novel:
Vittoria… “when the Catholic Church first proposed the big bang theory in 1927, the -- …. the Big Bang was aCatholic idea?
Of course. Proposed by a Catholic monk, Georges Lemaître in 1927.” …
“Wasn't the Big Bang proposed by Harvard astronomer Edwin Hubble?”
… American scientific ignorance.
Hubble published in 1929, two years after Lemaître. … The idea belonged to Lemaître. Hubble only confirmed it by gathering the hard evidence that proved the Big Bang was scientifically probable. …
When Lemître first proposed the big bang theory, scientists claimed it was utterly ridiculous. Matter, scientists said, could not be created out of nothing. So, when Hubble shocked the world by scientifically proving the Big Bang was accurate, the church claimed victory heralding this as proof that the Bible was scientifically accurate. The divine truth.
Of course scientists did not appreciate having their discoveries used by the church to promote religion, so they mathematized the Big Bang Theory, removed all religious overtones, and claimed it as their own. Unfortunately for science, however, their equations, even today, have one serious deficiency that the church likes to point out.
... The singularity. ...
Yes, the singularity... The exact moment of creation. Time zero.... Even today, science cannot grasp the initial moment of creation. Our equations explain the early universe quite effectively, but as we move back in time, approaching Time Zero, suddenly our mathematics disintegrates, and everything becomes meaningless.... and the Church holds up this deficiency as proof of God's miraculous involvement. … (pp. 86-88)
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Here is error piled upon error resulting in a nearly delirious confusion.
But some main points can be extracted for clarification. Some of these are brought out by John Farrell in his book, The Day Before Yesterday: Lemaître, Einstein and the Birth of Modern Cosmology. (N.Y. Thunder’s Mouth, Avalon, 2005.)
In a footnote (p. 217) Farrell says:
To this day, ignorance and misunderstanding of Lemaître’s background and his specialty continues to color popular accounts of his work in the most slipshod fashion. This is most amusingly on display in Dan Brown's lightweight thriller Angels and Demons, where he refers to Lemaître as a “monk” who all along planned to reconcile science and faith by positing the “big bang” theory in 1927. Brown not only errs in assuming the big bang was outlined as such by Lemaître, but he also incorrectly datesLemaître’s version, the primeval atom hypothesis (it was in 1931). He propounds this howler by further stating that Hubble “proved” the theory in 1929 with his famous report on the redshifts of extragalactic nebulae. In fact, Hubble, notoriously cautious to the very end of his life, never claimed any such thing. Not only was there no such theory known as the Big Bang in 1929, but Hubble suggested in his paper only that the redshifts measured by him and Milton Humason appeared to support non-static relativistic models of the cosmos (i.e., expanding universe models), and that there was a direct relation between the distance of nebulae measured and the velocity of their apparent recession. (p. 217)
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What needs clarifying, therefore, is
- Lemaître’s hypothesis;
- the real nature of the redshifts;
- Hubble's real position;
- Lemaître’s real position and his encounter with Pope Pius XII.
With relation to numbers 1, 2, and 3, Robert Sungenis (Galileo Was Wrong, The Church Was Right), Vol. 1, pages 319-332, Lemaître on page 328).
First of all, I recommend Sungenis’ work for the true history and science of geocentricity.
Lemaitre first in 1931, proposed a convenient explanation for the problems that Hubble had raised. There were severalexplanations for the observed red shift and Hubble himself was never dogmatic about the expanding universe model. Lemaître’s first explanation was that yes, the universe expands, but then it slows down enough to allow the Earth to age sufficiently to account for the long ages of radiometric dating.
One can see in all the speculations that the primary goal and purpose is to justify and preserve, at all costs, the very long ages -- billions and billions of years -- for the age of the universe and of earth because that is really the only basis for evolution -- the illusion of time.
Trying to answer Arthur Eddington's thesis of an infinite universe, LemaÎtre proposed, in 1950, his theory of the primeval atom. This theory was eventually dubbed the “cosmic egg” theory and led to the concept of the “Big Bang.” This popular term was originally coined in jest by Sir Fred Hoyle. And it was George Gamjow who seems to have given some semblance of scientific respectability to the concept of the Big Bang. For he reasoned, as late as 1970, that just as the atom bomb coming from the Manhattan Project (in the 1940’s) “could create in one-millionth of a second, radioactive elements that were later found in the deserts of Midwestern test sites, so too, the elements of the universe could have been created in a super explosion at the beginning of time.”
Gamow’s explanation was accepted with great relief by the scientific community because it solved or seemed to solve the problem of the origin of the universe. As for just how the super explosion originated, there was always the evasion of the Singularity.
Singularity is defined by the QPB Sci. Encyclopedia as:
In astrophysics, the point in space-time at which the known laws of physics break down. Singularity is predicted to exist at that center of a black hole, where infinite gravitational forces compress the infalling mass of a collapsing star to infinite density. It is also thought, according to the Big Bang model of the origins of the universe, to be the point from which the expansion of the universe began.
Physicists today are proving the opinion of St. Thomas over that of St. Bonaventure, that Creation ex nihilois a truth of divineFaith and not of reason. For this definition of Singularity acknowledges that there is a point at which “the known laws of physics break down.”This is the point at whichFaith transcends Reasonwithout contradicting it.
The rest of the definition is full of the fantasy speculations that seek to evade the fact of Creation as such which is available to natural reason.
Collapsing stars into black holes, infinite gravitational forces, and an expanding universe are all attempts to evade the plain facts of Creation in toto and ex nihiloas narrated in Genesis. Sungenis (p. 332) narrates from George Gamow, the idea of how a star can be created from nothing since at the point zero its negative gravitational mass defect is numerically equal to its positive rest mass.
This is the mathematization of Creation of which Langdon speaks in the novel.
In Gamow’s narrative, when he enunciated this mathematization of Creation, Einstein, with whom he was conversing, stopped in his tracks... Crossing a street.. several cars had to stop to avoid running him down.”
But Sungenis adds:
Indeed, the whole world has been stopped in its tracks because of the preposterous idea that matter creates itself. Matter has become the god of modern man, powerful enough to bring itself into being, evolve into stars and human beings, and continue into eternity while watching its creatures die their hapless deaths… How long will Catholics, and especially those in high places, continues to allow such blasphemous fantasies to infect the minds of children and adults alike? (p. 330)
But I find the most significant fact about Fr. Georges Lemaître to be his background and his later encounter with Pope Pius XII, an encounter that brought out the extreme naïveté of the Pope vis a vis modern science and the sophisticated unbelief of Fr. Lemaître.
Sungenis seems to present the belief of Lemaître in a better light than I am inclined to accept. For example, he says that Lemaître, being a Catholic priest, was committed to at least some semblance of exegetical logic. The only “cosmic egg” to which Genesis gives any credence is the Earth on the first Day of Creatio. So if the Earth is the first thing in existence, then there cannot be a Big Bang. (Sungenis, vol. I, pp. 328-329.)
Exactly so!
But Farrell seems to present a fuller and therefore somewhat different view of Father Lemaître vis a vis Genesis and Scripture in general.
In a 1933 article in Literary Digest entitled “Salvation Without Belief in Jonah's Tale” (quoted by Ferrell page 203) Fr. Lemaître wrote:
The writers of the Bible were illuminated more or less - some more than others -- on the question of salvation. On other questions they were as wise or as ignorant as their generation. Hence it is utterly unimportant and that errors of historic or scientific fact should be found in the Bible, especially if errors relate to events that were not directly observed by those who wrote about them.
The idea that because they were right in their doctrine of immortality and salvation, they must also be right on all other subjects is simply the fallacy of people who have an incomplete understanding of why the Bible was given to us at all.
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All of this is in direct contradiction to the essential teaching of Leo XIII’s Providentissimus Deus in 1893 and Benedict XV’s Spiritus Pracletus in 1920.
Pope Leo had said quite emphatically that “all the books which the Church receives as sacred and canonical are written wholly and entirely with all their parts, at the dictation of the Holy Spirit; and so far is it from being possible that any error can coexist with inspiration, that inspiration not only is essentially incompatible with error, but excludes and rejects it as absolutely and necessarily as it is impossible that God Himself, the supreme Truth, can utter that which is not true. This is the ancient and unchanging faith of the Church, solemnly defined in the councils of Florence and of Trent, and finally confirmed and more expressly formulated in the Council of the Vatican [I]…”
And Pope Benedict XV insisted that there can be no distinction between primary and secondary elements, that is, between elements pertaining to salvation and those pertaining to history and science.
Another interesting point about Lemaître is given by Paul Dirac, (apparently the inventor of “antimatter.” See Ian Stewart, Why Beauty is Truth, p. 214) in his work, The Scientific Work of Georges Lemaître, quoted by Farrell on p. 191:
When I was talking with Lemaître about this subject [of cosmology] and feeling stimulated by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion. However, Lemaître did not agree with me. After thinking it over he suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.
Psychology? Well of course! For the Modernist, as defined by Pascendi,
… when natural theology [Metaphysics] has been destroyed, and the road to Revelation closed by the rejection of the arguments of credibility [parts of the Traditional Apologetics], and all external Revelation absolutely denied [the historical and scientific messages of the Bible], it is clear that this explanation [of Religion] will be sought in vain outside of man himself. It must, therefore, be looked for in man; and since religion is a form of life, the explanation must certainly be found in the life of man. In this way is formulated the principle of religious immanence. …
In other words, the Subjective experience of the Faith or Modernist immanentism. (For a chronicling of the influences of Subjectivism in religion, see this writer’s The Power of Darkness.) Fr. Lemaitre placed it in what used to be a respectable branch of Scholastic Philosophy, namely, Psychology. But it was even in his time being taken over by Freud (1856-1939), Carl Jung (1875-1961), William James (1842-1910 and other explorers of religiousexperience, demonstrating the predominance, so evident today (2009) of the subjective and emotional over the objective and doctrinal. The Truths of Divine Faith are being lost by being submerged in the sea of the sensational-immediate pragmatic. The intensity of the Pro-Life Movement is witness to this fact.
But Father Lemaître’s lived separation of his science from his faith was most probably entrenched in his mind by his experience, at age 16, in a Jesuit school where he was preparing for the entrance exam to the College of Engineering in Louvain. Farrell narrates:
Of Lemaître’s many teachers from this period, one Father P. Ernest Verreux stands out, not only because he represented a rôle model for young Lemaître as a priest and scientist, but also because of his thoughtfulness regarding the boundaries that separated the two disciplines of theology and science, a subject that would remain central to Lemaître’s thinking throughout his life. In later years, Lemaître recalled one occasion from the classroom when Verreux gave him pause. After the young Lemaître expressed himself excitedly on a particular passage from the Book of Genesis, that to his imagination seemed to suggest a foreshadowing of developments in science, the older priest suggested Lemaître curb his enthusiasm. He shrugged at his pupil’s naïve excitement. “If there is a connection,” Verreux told his pupil, “it’s a coincidence, and of no importance. And if you should prove to me that it exists, I would consider it unfortunate. It will merely encourage more thoughtless people to imagine that the Bible teaches infallible science, whereas the most we can say is that occasionally one of the prophets made a correct scientific guess.” This careful distinction would not be lost on Lemaître, especially decades later when Pope Pius XII ignited a small controversy by reading a little more into the physics of the Big Bang than Lemaître felt he should have. (pp. 24-25)
Indeed, the quote given by Farrell of Pope Pius XII’s exclamation in November of 1951 to the Pontifical Academy Of Sciences, where Lemaître was present as a member of the Academy, demonstrates how far the Pope himself had strayed from the doctrines laid down in Providentissimus Deus and Spiritus Paracletus. His own encyclical, Divini Afflante Spiritu, of 1943, was an attempt to allow more freedom to the exegetes who were feeling censored by the previous documents. Divini Afflante allowed them to expand upon the notion of “literary form”-- a concept, by the way, whicherroneously opposes form and content in the literary construct.
There is no such opposition. It is the form, the structure that means, and internal evidences always distinguish truth from fiction. (see this writer’s “Cardinal Ratzinger’s Idea of Creation.”)
Here is the speech that so embarrassed Lemaître:
What was the nature and condition of the first matter of the universe? The answers given differ considerably from one another according to the theories on which they are based. It is agreed that the density, pressure and temperature of primitive matter must each have touched prodigious values.
Clearly and critically, as when it [the enlightened mind] examines facts and passes judgment on them, it perceives the work of creative omnipotence and recognizes that its power, set in motion by the mighty Fiat of the Creating Spirit billions of years ago, called into existence with gesture of generous love and spread over the universe matter bursting with energy. Indeed, it would seem that present-day science, with one sweep back across the centuries, has succeeded in bearing witness to the august instance of the Fiat Lux, when along with matter, there burst forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation, and the elements split and churned and formed into millions of galaxies. (p. 196 in Farrell)
As early as 1832, Cardinal Wiseman, in his celebrated lectures on science, (see this writer’s Weissmann Paper) had accepted the long ages of uniformitarian geology, thereby effectively denying the Six Days of Genesis 1 andExodus 20, and calling into question the Traditional teaching of the Fathers and Doctors. In the 1920’s, Cardinal Ruffini and Father Patrick O’Connell both accepted the long ages, and Fr. O’Connell denied the universality of the Deluge (Genesis 6-11).
From the Galileo case (1632) onwards, the Church has been severely weakened by its failure to uphold the intrinsic and necessary relation between the natural sciences and theology. And the most painful fact of all is that the “Science” by which the Church has been seduced into doctrinal error -- though never taughtde fide -- is the false science of which St. Paul speaks (1 Tim. 6:20; 2 Tim. 3:7; 2 Tim. 4:4; and 2 Thess. 2:10-11), turning from the truth unto fables. Cardinal Wiseman was deceived by the so-called “gap theory” which makes an indefinite period of “geological” time between the first two verses of Genesis 1 -- an interpretation unknown to the Fathers and Doctors of the Church.