Kerk & Leven (“Church & Life”) is the leading weekly Catholic magazine in the Flemish region of Belgium. Since October 2025, on the invitation of the chief editor of the local edition of the parish of Olen, Cis Marinus, I have been writing a reflective article every two weeks from a philosophical and theological perspective, exploring Christianity in a scientific age.
17 December 2025
Encounter with Georges Lemaître
In 2005, a poll was held in Flanders (the Dutch-speaking region of Belgium): who is “The Greatest Belgian”? By a wide margin, first place went to Father Damien, the missionary who became famous for his work among lepers on the island of Molokai and who was canonized in 2009. I gladly grant him that honor: he was, and still is, an inspiration to many. Not without reason is Damien the only non-American ever to have received a statue in the United States Capitol in Washington. In third place we find our national cycling hero Eddy Merckx, and in fourth place the painter Pieter Paul Rubens. Only in 61st place do we find Georges Lemaître: a Roman Catholic priest and one of the most important physicists, whom many have probably never even heard of. It continues to amaze me: show a photo of Albert Einstein and almost everyone immediately recognizes him. Lemaître, on the other hand, is recognized by almost no one. Yet both profoundly changed our view of the universe. As far as I am concerned, Lemaître could just as well have taken first place as the greatest Belgian.
Let me take you back in time to the 1920s, about a hundred years ago. Our image of the universe was completely different then. Most scientists were convinced that the universe was no larger than our own Milky Way and that it was eternal, static, and unchanging. The universe had always existed as it was and would always remain so. That was the generally accepted scientific view of the time.
But that was about to change. The astronomer Edwin Hubble made a fantastic discovery in the 1920s. The faint nebulae he studied turned out to be not gas clouds within our own Milky Way, but entire galaxies located far away from us. And no matter in which direction he looked, those galaxies all appeared to be moving away from us. Moreover, the farther away they were, the faster they were receding. The scientific world was faced with a complete mystery.
The young Georges Lemaître, freshly graduated with a PhD in Mathematics and newly ordained as a priest, came up with a very bold idea. The reason all those galaxies are moving away from us is that space itself is expanding, like raisins in a rising loaf of bread that move farther apart. Not because the raisins themselves move, but because the dough expands. The brilliant Lemaître immediately took this idea a step further: the universe must once have had a beginning. For if the universe keeps growing larger, then it must have been much smaller in the past. So small that the entire universe was once far smaller than an atom, a starting point he called the “primeval atom.” Even space and time did not yet exist at that theoretical point zero, they came into being only when that “primeval atom” began to expand. There must once have been a “day without yesterday.” The theory that would later become known as the Big Bang was born.
When Lemaître published this hypothesis about the beginning of the universe in 1931, it was met with considerable skepticism in the scientific world, not least from Albert Einstein himself, whom Lemaître greatly admired. Many suspected him of trying, as a mathematically and physically trained priest, to use science to support the Christian creation story.
Lemaître made every effort to refute these allegations and to keep faith and science separate. He wanted his cosmological theory to be judged solely on its scientific merits. The fact that he was also a Catholic priest, he believed, should play no role in that evaluation. In the end, Einstein overcame his skepticism and supported Lemaître’s bold theory, even using his fame to introduce the then little-known young Lemaître at several lectures.
Whether the universe had a “natural beginning” or was truly a creation out of nothing was, according to Lemaître, a philosophical question to which science could not provide an answer. One cannot therefore say that God “pressed the button of the Big Bang”: scientifically speaking, that is a meaningless statement.
Yet Lemaître’s efforts to be taken seriously as a scientist did not always go smoothly. In 1951, Pope Pius XII unexpectedly gave a speech in which he proudly proclaimed Lemaître’s cosmological theory as a scientific confirmation of the Christian doctrine of creation. Lemaître was far from pleased with this, as he feared becoming the laughingstock of the scientific community. He even traveled to the Vatican to persuade the Pope to stop using his cosmological model as confirmation of the biblical creation stories.
For Lemaître, faith and science are “two paths to truth.” They operate on different levels and do not speak the same language. Science and faith are not competing explanations of reality battling within the same domain. They are two human activities, each with its own specific discourse and each operating within its own domain. To use a concept of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: faith and science are two different “language games” that resemble each other only superficially. Problems arise only when elements from both language games are mixed, for example, when the theological concept of “creation” is used within a physical model. “Creation” belongs to the religious language game and is not a scientific hypothesis that can be refuted on the basis of observational data.
For Lemaître himself, practicing science, by uncovering the structure of the universe, was a form of gratitude to God, the Creator. This attitude was beautifully expressed by the American physicist Charles Misner: “To say that God created the universe explains neither God nor the universe, but it keeps our awareness open to mysteries of awe-inspiring majesty that we might otherwise ignore, and which deserve our respect.”
Originally published as: van Biezen (2025). Ontmoeting met Georges Lemaître. In Kerk & Leven, edition 0485, 17 December 2025, p. 4.
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