Lemaître features in the CTS booklet by Fr Marcus Holden and Fr Andrew Pinsent, Lumen. The Catholic Gift to Civilisation which I wrote about back in March (see: Practical apologetics in the English context)
The Reluctant Sinner has written a post with more about Mgr Lemaître. Apparently, a few years later, Lemaître and Einstein were touring California together for a series of seminars and this time, when the priest explained his theory, Einstein said
"This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened."The Reluctant Sinner quite properly points to the importance of Catholic contributions to scientific endeavour. We should not be surprised at this, since the perennial philosophy espoused by the Catholic Church provides the very basis for science to be conducted at all. The list of great Catholic scientists given in Lumen is not a coincidence.
2 comments:
Msgr. Lemaitre had a huge advantage over Dr. Einstein, of course, in that he was filled with divine and catholic Faith.
It is no fault of Msgr. LeMaitre's that his assumptions of isotropy and homogeneity have now, at the largest visible scales of the universe, failed to survive their inevitable collision with observations.
This is the way of all contingent, ever-shifting science. If science were, within its methodological constraints, capable of coming up with a Theory of Everything, then certainly we should have had science as the language of Revelation.
But it can't. Science's proper domain excludes the One element without which no consistent and complete explanation of the cosmos were possible.
In the end, there is only one Observer Who stands in a position to tell us the Truth about this cosmos, its origin, its meaning, and its destiny.
His name is not Einstein.
Science will struggle nobly for a while, but its eventual retreat back to its proper sphere of competence, back from its presently-floundering attempt to storm the bastions of metaphysics and theology (see ":multiverses" for a dreadful taste of how bad things have gotten), is already in the cards.
You can read the Dictionary of Scientific Biography entry for Lemaître here.
Post a Comment