If God possesses a sense of humor—and the evidence, from duck-billed platypuses to the American politics, suggests He does—then one of His more exquisite jokes was to reveal the beginnings of the universe not to a militant atheist or a materialist philosopher, but to a Roman Catholic priest. This is no small irony, nor is it merely poetic. It is a gentle rebuke to the modern conceit that the pursuit of science must begin with the exclusion of metaphysics and end with the dethronement of God.
The man in question, Georges Lemaître, was not just a priest but a physicist of formidable intellect. Born in Belgium in 1894, Lemaître was ordained a Catholic priest and also earned advanced degrees in physics and mathematics. He belonged to that now-rare species: the man of the cloth who was also a man of the cosmos. In the early 1930s, Lemaître proposed that the universe had a definite beginning—a “day without yesterday,” he called it—originating from what he described as a “primeval atom.” We now know it as the Big Bang.
In doing so, Lemaître contradicted not religious dogma, but scientific orthodoxy. The prevailing cosmological model of the day, supported by no less a mind than Albert Einstein, held that the universe was eternal and static. The idea that it might have a beginning—an origin point—smacked uncomfortably of Genesis 1:1, and was therefore regarded as scientifically suspect. Einstein, when first presented with Lemaître’s theory, is said to have replied, “Your calculations are correct, but your physics is abominable.” What he meant, of course, was not that Lemaître had erred, but that he had strayed too close to theology.
Later, Einstein would recant. Upon hearing Lemaître present his theory at a conference, he stood up and applauded, remarking that it was “the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened.” This was not merely scientific concession; it was philosophical acknowledgment. The evidence, drawn from Doppler redshifts and the receding galaxies observed by Edwin Hubble, pointed inexorably to a universe that had not always existed, but had begun.
Here we arrive at the moment of philosophical vertigo. A universe with a beginning is, by necessity, a universe that invites the question of causation. It is one thing to contemplate the movement of the planets or the mechanics of gravity; it is quite another to ask how, and why, there is something rather than nothing. A cosmos with a starting point implies a starter. In short: creation implies a Creator.
Lemaître himself was cautious. He resisted efforts by the Church to wield his theory as a cudgel for apologetics, insisting that science and faith are distinct disciplines, each with its own purview. “There are two paths to truth,” he is often quoted as saying. “I choose to follow them both.” Or, as he put it elsewhere with equal elegance: “The Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.” He saw no contradiction between the two. Faith answered the why, science the how. Each, in its own domain, testified to truth.
That a priest—clad in the humble black cassock of Catholic service—was the first to grasp what would become the dominant cosmological model of the modern age is not merely ironic. It is illustrative. It suggests that openness to the idea of creation may be more than a theological posture; it may also be a conceptual advantage. Those who are oriented toward God are perhaps less likely to recoil from the philosophical implications of a universe with a beginning. Lemaître did not set out to prove Genesis. But his lack of hostility to its implications made him better able to see what others would not.
There is, in this, a cautionary tale for the militant secularist. Truth, as it happens, is not bound by ideological fences. It has a way of leaping over them. And when it does, it is just as likely to land in the study of a priest as in the laboratory of a physicist. In fact, the two are not mutually exclusive.
Lemaître’s legacy is not merely scientific. It is civilizational. It reminds us that the conflict between science and religion is not inevitable, but constructed—often by those with a vested interest in stoking it. The mind, like the eye, sees best when both sides are open. One can peer through a telescope and still believe in miracles.
The universe, Lemaître concluded, is expanding—hurtling outward from a single moment of origin. But that expansion points backward, always, to a beginning. And beginnings, by their very nature, are pregnant with purpose.
The Big Bang does not, by itself, prove the existence of God. But it does something arguably more disruptive: it proves a beginning, a time before time, necessitating, somewhere along the way, self-creation. It keeps open the door to the oldest question of all, the one asked by prophets and philosophers alike: Why is there something, rather than nothing? Except now it demands we ask not just “why,” but “how,” and that, taken to its logical extension, leads us to “who”?
That a priest was the first to ask that question in scientific terms is no accident. Nor, perhaps, is it coincidence.
It is irony. And, just possibly, grace.
