By 1879, Robert Ingersoll, nicknamed the great Agnostic, could write the following after churchmen conceded to heluiocentrism and the evolution of its solar system from 1741.
‘The scientific Christians now admit that the bible is not inspired in its astronomy, geology, botany, zoology, or in any science. In other words, they admit that on these subjects, the bible cannot be depended upon… If the people of Europe had known as much of astronomy and geology when the Bible was introduced among them, as they do now, there never could have been one believer in the doctrine of inspiration. If the writers of the various parts of the Bible had known as much about the sciences as now known by every intelligent man, the Bible never could have been written. It was produced in ignorance and has been believed and defended by its author. It has lost power in the proportion that man has gained knowledge. A few years ago, this Bible was appealed to in the settlement of all scientific questions [of origins]; but now, even the clergy confess that in such matters, it has ceased to speak with the voice of authority. For the establishment of facts, the word of man is now considered far better than the word of God. In the world of science, Jehovah was superseded by Copernicus, Galileo [Lyell, Kant, Descartes, Darwin and Fr Lemaître’s Big Bang creation]. All that, God told Moses, admitting the entire account to be true, is dust and ashes compared to their scientific discoveries. In matters of fact, the Bible has ceased to be regarded as a standard. Science has succeeded in breaking the chains of theology. Some years ago, Science attempted to show that it was not inconsistent with Scripture. Now, Religion is endeavouring to prove that the Bible is not inconsistent with science. The standard has been changed.’--- Robert G. Ingersoll: Some Mistakes of Moses, 1879.
Get it, first churchmen changed sunrise in the Bible to a fixed sun, then churchmen began to adjust the meaning of the Bible according to 'advances in science.'
The following year, in 1880 and 1887 two tests produced evidence for geocentrism. Nevertheless,in 1820, having changed the meaning from the geocentrism defined as the true meaning of Scripture in 1616 , churchmen had to stick with the heresy they had endorsed rather than admit their terrible error of 1820. And that is how modernism progressed in the Catholic Church
In 1922, the Russian Alexander Friedmann (1888-1925) ‘made the simplifying assumption that the universe had to be uniformly filled with a thin soup of [dark] matter.’ He ‘found a mistake in Albert Einstein’s 1917 cosmology and established that general relativity predicted the universe is unstable and the slightest perturbation would cause it to expand or contract.’ Immediately others wanted in on the new cosmology, especially the Jesuit Monsignor Abbé Georges Lemaître (1894-1966) who ‘was the first to use Friedmann-type solutions to formulate a ‘scientific’ model for a possible expansion of what he called the Primordial Atom or Cosmic Egg.’ All that was needed now was for someone to come up with some evidence for Fr Lemaître’s idea of a ‘miraculous’ natural expanding cosmic-atom. That occurred when the American astronomer Edwin Hubble (1889-1953) in 1929, using a newly built 100-inch telescope, viewed faraway galaxies for the first time. Examining the spectral-light emitted by these stars he found a lengthening of the red end with ‘nearly all of them,’ claiming the further away the more they had expanded. On this basis, Hubble held that the stars and galaxies were flying outwards in every direction at enormous speed as seen from Earth, which, if extrapolated - put into reverse - suggested an initial beginning from a central point. In 1931 Fr Lemaître presented his ‘scientific’ paper known as the Big Bang. But this presented a problem for them. If all the stars as seen from Earth had red shifts interpreted as moving away from Earth, then the Earth had to be at the centre of the universe. But this was a conclusion they didn’t want, so another ad hoc had to be invented. If, as Einstein proposed, all cosmic bodies existed on the surface of an expanding balloon car-tube type universe, then Hubble’s theory need not point to the Earth at its centre.
(https://i.imgur.com/vIy4HyL.png)
Pope Pius XII’s Big Bang
The courtship between Catholic faith and scientism reached a further low point on November 22, 1951 when Pope Pius XII once again addressed the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. The title of the Pope’s address was ‘The Proofs for the Existence of God in the Light of Modern Natural Science.’ With the immediate creation of all in their whole substance by God, and St Thomas’s teaching that the creative act of God cannot be demonstrated by unaided reason now redundant, Pius XII tries to make the Big Bang a new creation doctrine in as holy a language like found the Scriptures, a modernist Genesis.
‘44. It is undeniable that when a mind enlightened and enriched with modern scientific knowledge weighs this problem calmly, it feels drawn to break through the circle of completely independent or autochthonous matter, whether uncreated or self-created, and to ascend to a creating Spirit. With the same clear and critical look with which it examines and passes judgment on facts, it perceives and recognizes the work of creative omnipotence, whose power, set in motion by the mighty “Fiat” pronounced billions of years ago by the Creating Spirit, spread out over the universe, calling into existence with a gesture of generous love matter bursting with energy. In fact, it would seem that present-day science, with one sweeping step back across millions of centuries, has succeeded in bearing witness to that primordial “Fiat lux” uttered at the moment when, along with matter, there burst forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation, while the particles of chemical elements split and formed into millions of galaxies.’ On the other hand, how different and much more faithful a reflection of limitless visions is the language of an outstanding modern scientist, Sir Edmund Whittaker (1873-1956), member of the Pontifical Academy of Science, when he speaks of the above-mentioned inquiries into the age of the world: “These different calculations point to the conclusion that there was a time, some nine or ten billion years ago, prior to which the cosmos, if it existed, existed in a form totally different from anything we know, and this form constitutes the very last limit of science. We refer to it not improperly as creation. It provides a unifying background, suggested by geological evidence, for that explanation of the world according to which every organism existing on the Earth had a beginning in time. Were this conclusion to be confirmed by future research, it might well be considered as the most outstanding discovery of our times, since it represents a fundamental change in the scientific conception of the universe, similar to the one brought about four centuries ago by Copernicus.” It has, besides, followed the course and the direction of cosmic developments, and, just as it was able to get a glimpse of the term toward which these developments were inexorably leading, so also has it pointed to their beginning in time some five billion years ago. Thus, with that concreteness which is characteristic of physical proofs, it has confirmed the contingency of the universe and also the well-founded deduction as to the epoch when the cosmos came forth from the hands of the Creator.’--- Pope Pius XII, 1951.
Yes, admits Pope Pius XII, the changes all began with Copernicus. Well, not really, had the pope studied Church history as well as their Big Bang evolution of the world he would have found in the secret archives records of these same heresies being condemned in the early centuries of the Catholic Church and at Bruno's trial, just as Professor A. A. Martinez found and recorded in his book Pythagoras or Christ. But there are other philosophical and theological consequences to placing the creative act of a Triune God at the mercy of science’s Big Bang.
A philosopher replies: ‘Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that we can refer “not improperly” to the initial singularity [the Big Bang] as an act of creation. What conclusions can we draw from it? That a Creator exists? Suppose still, for the sake of argument, that this, too, is conceded. The problem now is twofold. Is this creator theologically relevant? Can this creator serve the purpose of faith? My answer to the first question is decidedly negative. A creator proved by cosmology is a cosmological agent that has none of the properties a believer attributes to [the Triune] God. Even supposing one can consistently say the cosmological creator is beyond space and time, this creature cannot be understood as a person or as the Word made flesh or as the Son of God come down to the world in order to save mankind. Pascal rightly referred to this latter Creator as the “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” not of philosophers and scientists. To believe that cosmology proves the existence of a creator and then to attribute to this creator the properties of the Creation as a person is to make an illegitimate inference, to commit a category fallacy. My answer to the second question is also negative. Suppose we can grant what my answer to the first question intends to deny. That is, suppose we can understand the God of cosmologists as the God of theologians and believers. Such a God cannot (and should not) serve the purpose of faith, because, being a God proved by cosmology he should be at the mercy of cosmology. Like any other scientific discipline that, to use Pope John Paul II’s words, proceeds with “methodological seriousness,” cosmology is always revisable. It might then happen that a creator proved on the basis of a theory will be refuted when that theory is refuted. Can the God of believers be exposed to the risk of such an inconsistent enterprise as science?’--- Marcello Pera.
So, was there, is there, a cosmology to refute Pope Pius XII’s Big Bang theory as proof for a Big Bang God? Well, back in 1543, Copernicus had written the following in his most famous book On the Revolutions, that if the geocentric stars are revolving at great speed around the Earth as Scripture reveals, then wouldn’t they fly outwards like children on a rotating carnival swing-ride‘
But why didn’t Ptolemy feel anxiety about the [geocentric] world instead; whose movements must necessarily be of greater velocity, the greater the heavens are than the Earth? Or have the heavens become so immense, because a vehement motion has pulled them away from the centre, and because the heavens would fall if they came to rest anywhere else.’-- On the Revolutions, Book 1, par 8.?
So, it seems Copernicus had long stated an expansion of stars would result if the universe was geocentric, thus eliminating the Big Bang theory as proving God’s creative act as Marcello Pera predicted above.
Coincidentally, Kolbe Center posted this on Sunday;
This photograph has been used to indoctrinate generations of Catholics into the false notion that Fr. Georges Lemaitre was a great Catholic scientist who exemplified the way that Catholic intellectuals can reconcile the legitimate discoveries of modern science, like the origins of the cosmos in terms of the Big Bang hypothesis, with the essential elements of Catholic doctrine.
(https://i.imgur.com/XJUua02.png)
Pope Pius XII and Monsignor Georges Lemaitre
Christopher De Vos, a member of our leadership team, and the director of the Mary Michael Machabee Institute, has almost completed a video production which will explode the myth of Monsignor Lemaitre as an exemplary Catholic scientist. In the meantime, he has given me permission to quote from the first part of the video script which will hopefully help to destroy this false icon of evolution once and for all.
The Myth of Fr. Lemaitre, the Peacemaker between Religion and Science
Fr. Georges Lemaître is widely respected in both Catholic and secular circles. Born in 1894 and educated at the Catholic University of Louvain and later at Harvard, Lemaître engaged with some of the most prominent scientists of his time, including Einstein and Hubble. He has become a symbol of the idea that "religion and science are never in conflict." Many Catholics today see the "Big Bang"—a model developed by Lemaître—as evidence of Creation, offering a natural proof of a beginning and affirming the existence of a Creator. However, Lemaître himself firmly opposed this interpretation, emphasizing in his writings that the Big Bang was never intended to demonstrate Creation.
As we uncover these lesser-known aspects of Fr. Lemaître’s work, it becomes clear that assuming his conclusions align with the Catholic faith simply because he was a priest is a significant mistake. One should not presume that his theories are compatible with the Church’s perennial doctrines, as his continual violations of admonitions given in papal encyclicals and elsewhere will make clear.
Like the ancient atomists and the deists of recent centuries, Lemaître proposed ideas grounded in a naturalistic view of the universe.
Lemaître wrote:
'In Laplace’s determinism [that a solar-system evolved], everything is written, evolution is similar to the implacable rotation of a recorded magnetic tape or the engraved spiral of a phonograph disc. Everything that would be heard would have been read from the tape or the disc. It is quite another story with the advent of modern physics and, according to the present theory these concepts should also apply to the universe, at least to the beginning of its evolution. This beginning is perfectly simple, indivisible, undifferentiated, “atomic” in the Greek sense of this world. The world differentiates as it evolves; it does not consist in the spinning out, the decoding of a recording. Rather it consists in a song, each note of which is new and unpredictable. The world made itself and made itself randomly.'
Scientistically- liberated Catholics like Fr. Lemaître, often seek to shield their research from any intrusion by Church doctrine, avoiding alleged ecclesiastical interference hindering their false philosophies from posing as natural science. However, this liberal approach has led to ideas that subtly undermine Catholic doctrine and the Church’s interpretation of Revelation.
These dangerous ideas are promoted by modern media and educational institutions, which claim to base their philosophic positions in a natural scientific or empirically based reality. These influences often pressure the Church and her theology to conform to their errors. St. Pius X warned of this in his first encyclical:
We will use the greatest diligence to prevent members of the clergy from being drawn into the snares of a certain new and fallacious science, which savors not of Christ but, with masked and cunning arguments, seeks to open the door to rationalism and semi-rationalism.
Fr. Lemaitre Denies the Dogma of Scriptural Inerrancy
Our examination of Fr. Lemaître as a modernist thinker will challenge many, but it is vital for Catholics to understand why his writings and novel ideas conflict with traditional Church teachings. For example, in 1934, Lemaître stated:
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 ignorant as their generation. Hence it is utterly unimportant that errors in historic and scientific fact should be found in the Bible, especially if the errors related 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.
How does this compare to Pope St. Pius X’s critique of modernist interpretations in Pascendi Dominici Gregis?
In the Sacred Books there are many passages referring to science or history where, according to them, manifest errors are to be found. But, they say, the subject of these books is not science or history, but only religion and morals. In them history and science serve only as a species of covering to enable the religious and moral experiences wrapped up in them to penetrate more readily among the masses.
Pope Benedict XV also addressed these errors in his 1920 encyclical Spiritus Paraclitus:
Their notion is that only what concerns religion is intended and taught by God in Scripture, and that all the rest - things concerning "profane knowledge," the garments in which Divine truth is presented - God merely permits, and even leaves to the individual author's greater or less knowledge. Small wonder, then, that in their view a considerable number of things occur in the Bible touching physical science, history and the like, which cannot be reconciled with modern progress in science!
Decades earlier, Pope Leo XIII firmly condemned such errors, stating that they are “absolutely wrong and forbidden” and “cannot be tolerated.”
It is a lamentable fact that there are many who with great labour carry out and publish investigations on the monuments of antiquity [archaeology]… whose chief purpose in all this is too often to find mistakes in the sacred writings and so to shake and weaken their authority. Some of these writers display not only extreme hostility, but the greatest unfairness; in their eyes a profane book or ancient docuмent is accepted without hesitation, whilst the Scripture, if they only find in it a suspicion of error, is set down with the slightest possible discussion as quite untrustworthy… But it is absolutely wrong and forbidden, either to narrow inspiration to certain parts only of Holy Scripture, or to admit that the sacred writer has erred. For the system of those who, in order to rid themselves of these difficulties, do not hesitate to concede that divine inspiration regards the things of faith and morals, and nothing beyond… this system cannot be tolerated.
The father of the modernists, Fr. Loisy, before being excommunicated, ridiculed the historical reality of Genesis. Fr. Lemaitre, a staunch modernist, filled the void left by Fr. Loisy. Let Catholics today avoid the love of novelty and not overlook these papal condemnations regarding the interpretation of Holy Writ for the good of souls.
We will notify you as soon as Christopher’s video on Fr. Lemaitre is available for viewing on his website. In the meantime, please use the information in this newsletter to disabuse your Catholic friends and family of the notion that Fr. Lemaitre exemplified the ideal of a great Catholic scientist. Indeed, it would show much more charity to Fr. Lemaitre if we were to ask our fellow Catholics to enter into eternity in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and beg Our Lord to grant him the grace of true repentance and conversion in his last moments.
Through the prayers of the Holy Theotokos, may the Holy Ghost guide us into all the Truth!
Yours in Christ through the Holy Theotokos in union with St. Joseph,
Hugh Owen
Coincidentally, Kolbe Center posted this on Sunday;
This photograph has been used to indoctrinate generations of Catholics into the false notion that Fr. Georges Lemaitre was a great Catholic scientist who exemplified the way that Catholic intellectuals can reconcile the legitimate discoveries of modern science, like the origins of the cosmos in terms of the Big Bang hypothesis, with the essential elements of Catholic doctrine.
(https://i.imgur.com/XJUua02.png)
Pope Pius XII and Monsignor Georges Lemaitre
Lemaître wrote:
'The world made itself and made itself randomly.'
Our examination of Fr. Lemaître as a modernist thinker will challenge many, but it is vital for Catholics to understand why his writings and novel ideas conflict with traditional Church teachings.
Thank you Cassini for the information on this thread. It has been good to learn about Fr. Lemaitre and the history behind the Big Bang theory.