There is no conflict between religion and science

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth


«'A Day Without Yesterday': Georges Lemaitre & the Big Bang
 
In January 1933, the Belgian mathematician and Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre traveled with Albert Einstein to California for a series of seminars. After the Belgian detailed his Big Bang theory, Einstein stood up applauded, and said, "This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened."





In the winter of 1998, two separate teams of astronomers in Berkeley, California, made a similar, startling discovery. They were both observing supernovae — exploding stars visible over great distances — to see how fast the universe is expanding. In accordance with prevailing scientific wisdom, the astronomers expected to find the rate of expansion to be decreasing, Instead they found it to be increasing — a discovery which has since "shaken astronomy to its core" (Astronomy, October 1999).
This discovery would have come as no surprise to Georges Lemaïtre (1894-1966), a Belgian mathematician and Catholic priest who developed the theory of the Big Bang. Lemaitre described the beginning of the universe as a burst of fireworks, comparing galaxies to the burning embers spreading out in a growing sphere from the center of the burst. He believed this burst of fireworks was the beginning of time, taking place on "a day without yesterday."
But the phrase "theoretical prejudices" makes one think of the attitudes that hampered scientists seventy years ago. It took a mathematician who also happened to be a Catholic priest to look at the evidence with an open mind and create a model that worked. Is there a paradox in this situation? Lemaitre did not think so. Duncan Aikman of the New York Times spotlighted Lemaitre's view in 1933: "'There is no conflict between religion and science,' Lemaïtre has been telling audiences over and over again in this country .... His view is interesting and important not because he is a Catholic priest, not because he is one of the leading mathematical physicists of our time, but because he is both."»

(Mark Midbon
Midbon, Mark. "'A Day Without Yesterday': Georges Lemaitre & the Big Bang." Commonweal Magazine Vol. 127 No. 6 (March 24, 2000) 18-19.
Catholique Education Resource Centre
(Mark Midbon is a senior programmer/analyst at the University of Wisconsin.)
(Taken from article dated 08/12/2017)




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