Does Georges Lemaître's Big Bang Imply Creation out of Nothing?

If we go to a planetarium in just about any part of the world, we will be given a spectacular show of the night sky, and there is a good chance that we will be told about the “early universe”, and how it arose from some cataclysmic event called the Big Bang.

But we are rarely told what exactly this Big Bang supposedly entailed. As a result, it is often conflated with the Genesis story at the beginning of the Old Testament, and in particular with the Christian dogma of creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing). But is this confusion between the two warranted? In this post, I will focus on this question.

First, let us examine what the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo implies: supposedly the entire Universe was created, literally out of nothing. Prior to that instant of creation, there was nothing. The opposite doctrine is, of course, creatio ex materia (creation out of matter): the Universe was created—or, rather, formed—out of already existing matter.

Among the early Christian authors, two stand out in their support for the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo: Tertullian of Carthage (160-240) and Augustine of Hippo (354-430).

Tertullian is considered to be the first Latin-language Christian scholar. He wrote an essay against Hermogenes (150-210), also of Carthage, who claimed that God could not have created evil, so must have worked with pre-existing matter, the latter itself containing evil. The overall theme of Tertullian’s response is found in the final paragraph. Therein he states that what is at stake is the liberty of God¹:

This being the case, I cannot tell how Hermogenes is to escape from my conclusion; for he supposes that God cannot be the author of evil, in what way soever He created evil out of Matter, whether it was of His own will, or of necessity, or from the reason (of the case). If, however, He is the author of evil, who was the actual Creator, Matter being simply associated with Him by reason of its furnishing Him with substance, you now do away with the cause of your introducing Matter. For it is not the less true, that it is by means of Matter that God shows Himself the author of evil, although Matter has been assumed by you expressly to prevent God’s seeming to be the author of evil. Matter being therefore excluded, since the cause of it is excluded, it remains that God without doubt, must have made all things out of nothing. Whether evil things were amongst them we shall see, when it shall be made clear what are evil things, and whether those things are evil which you at present deem to be so. For it is more worthy of God that He produced even these of His own will, by producing them out of nothing, than from the predetermination of another, (which must have been the case) if He had produced them out of Matter. It is liberty, not necessity, which suits the character of God. I would much rather that He should have even willed to create evil of Himself, than that He should have lacked ability to hinder its creation. [my emphasis]

As for Augustine, he was the scholar who provided the reasoning for transforming Christianity into the state religion of the Roman Empire. His reasoning was entirely different. If God had not made the Universe out of nothing, he would have had to make it out of Himself²:

Whatever it is, where did it come from but from Thee, from whom all things are, in so far as they are? But, the more distant a thing is from Thee, the more it is unlike Thee; nor does this have reference to place.

Thus it was Thou, O Lord, who art not different at different times, but the Selfsame, the Selfsame, the Selfsame—‘Holy, holy, holy, the Lord God Almighty,’ who in the beginning which is from Thee, in Thy wisdom born of Thy Substance, didst make something and from nothing.

For, Thou didst not make heaven and earth out of Thyself; otherwise, it would have been equal to Thy Only-begotten Son, and in this way to Thee. It would not be at all right for a thing to be equal to Thee which was not out of Thyself. And, apart from Thee, there was nothing else from which Thou mightest make them, O God, One Trinity and Threefold Unity. Therefore, Thou hast made heaven and earth out of nothing—something great, yet something small. For, Thou art almighty and good to make all good things, the great heaven and the small earth. Thou wert, and there was nothing else from which Thou didst make heaven and earth—these two, one near to Thee, the other near to nothing; one, in regard to which Thou wert the only higher being; the other, in regard to which nothing was lower. [my emphasis]

So now that we have some background about creatio ex nihilo, let us move on to the 20th century, with the invention of the Big Bang. Both the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedmann (Александр Александрович Фридман, 1888-1925) and the Belgian theoretical physicist Georges Lemaître (1894-1966) worked with the equations of general relativity and postulated a universe expanding towards the future and which had been much smaller in the past.

Georges Lemaître

But it was Lemaître, responding in 1931 to Arthur Eddington (1882-1944) in a four-paragraph letter to the journal Nature, who proposed a single quantum from which arose the present Universe³:

Sir Arthur Eddington states that, philosophically, the notion of a beginning of the present order of Nature is repugnant to him. I would rather be inclined to think that the present state of quantum theory suggests a beginning of the world very different from the present order of Nature. Thermodynamical principles from the point of view of quantum theory may be stated as follows: (1) Energy of constant total amount is distributed in discrete quanta. (2) The number of distinct quanta is ever increasing. If we go back in the course of time we must find fewer and fewer quanta, until we find all the energy of the universe packed in a few or even in a unique quantum.

Now, in atomic processes, the notions of space and time are no more than statistical notions; they fade out when applied to individual phenomena involving but a small number of quanta. If the world has begun with a single quantum, the notions of space and time would altogether fail to have any meaning at the beginning; they would only begin to have a sensible meaning when the original quantum had been divided into a sufficient number of quanta. If this suggestion is correct, the beginning of the world happened a little before the beginning of space and time. I think that such a beginning of the world is far enough from the present order of Nature to be not at all repugnant.

It may be difficult to follow up the idea in detail as we are not yet able to count the quantum packets in every case. For example, it may be that an atomic nucleus must be counted as a unique quantum, the atomic number acting as a kind of quantum number. If the future development of quantum theory happens to turn in that direction, we could conceive the beginning of the universe in the form of a unique atom, the atomic weight of which is the total mass of the universe. This highly unstable atom would divide in smaller and smaller atoms by a kind of super-radioactive process. Some remnant of this process might, according to Sir James Jeans’s idea, foster the heat of the stars until our low atomic number atoms allowed life to be possible.

Clearly the initial quantum could not conceal in itself the whole course of evolution; but, according to the principle of indeterminacy, that is not necessary. Our world is now understood to be a world where something really happens; the whole story of the world need not have been written down in the first quantum like a song on the disc of a phonograph. The whole matter of the world must have been present at the beginning, but the story it has to tell may be written step by step. [my emphasis]

Lemaître was a priest in addition to being a successful theoretical physicist. His initial studies were conducted at the Jesuit Collège du Sacré-Cœur in Charleroi. His university studies at the Catholic University of Louvain were not just in mathematics, but also in Thomist studies (Saint Thomas of Aquinas). And then after completing his doctorate in mathematics in 1920, he completed, in only three years, the six-year curriculum to become a priest at the Séminaire des Malines (now Mechelen). He would ultimately become the President of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences from 1960 until 1966. Despite this rigorous religious education, he was careful his entire life to not publicly mix scientific thought and religious thought.

Although the single quantum, later known as the primeval atom, was supposedly of the same mass as the existing Universe, Lemaître’s contemporaries still felt that his theory reflected a belief in creatio ex nihilo. [It would be Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) who would mockingly introduce the term “Big Bang”.]

With respect to Albert Einstein (1879-1955), Jean-Pierre Luminet, author of L’invention du Big Bang⁴ (The Invention of the Big Bang), wrote:

Einstein accepted the reality of expansion as a consequence of general relativity, through Lemaître’s cosmological model, which was able to predict Hubble’s law. Einstein preferred not to discuss the primitive atom hypothesis, suspecting that the Belgian priest was not scientifically objective on this issue. He judged it “inspired by the Christian dogma of creation, and unjustified in terms of physics.”⁵ [my emphasis]

With respect to Hannes Alfvén (1908-1995), Eric Lerner, author of The Big Bang Never Happened⁶, wrote:

Alfvén had been skeptical of the Big Bang from the first time he heard of it, back in 1939. Lemaitre, the theory’s originator, had come to a Stockholm astrophysics conference to expound his controversial idea of the primeval atom. “I felt at the time that the motivation for his theory was Lemaitre’s need to reconcile his physics with the Church’s doctrine of creation ex nihilo,” Alfvén recalled years later. His skepticism was deepened by his general approach of closely linking theory to experiment. Lemaitre’s method of deriving a history of the universe from the predictions of general relativity resembled the elegant mathematics of Chapman: more importance was given to the equations than to the physical plausibility of the theory or to its agreement with observation. [Lerner, p.214, my emphasis]

It was not simply Lemaître’s scientific contemporaries who made this assumption. In 1951, five years after Lemaître published his book L’Hypothèse de l’atome primitif. Essai de cosmogonie⁷, and one year after the English translation The Primeval Atom: An Essay on Cosmogony⁸ appeared, Pope Pius XII (1876-1958) gave an address to the Pontifical Academy of Science entitled «Un’ora» (An hour)⁹. Here is the key paragraph:

It is undeniable that a mind enlightened and enriched by modern scientific knowledge, which serenely assesses this problem, is inclined to break the circle of an entirely independent and autochthonous matter, either because it is uncreated, or because it is self-created, and to trace it back to a Creator Spirit. With the same limpid and critical gaze with which it examines and judges facts, it glimpses and recognizes therein the work of creative omnipotence, whose virtue, stirred by the powerful «fiat» uttered billions of years ago by the Creator Spirit, unfolded itself in the universe, calling into existence with a gesture of generous love the matter exuberant with energy. It really seems that today's science, going back millions of centuries at a stroke, has succeeded in witnessing that primordial «Fiat lux» [Let there be light], when out of nothingness burst with matter a sea of light and radiation, as the particles of chemical elements split and came together in millions of galaxies.¹⁰ [my emphasis]

But the story does not end there. This conflation of scientific and religious thought by Pius XII, called concordism, was opposed by Lemaître. Gabriele Gionti¹¹ writes:

Lemaitre was always suspected his theory of the Primeval Atom wanted to support creation narratives in the Bible. He felt that Pius XII’s speech was a further and very dangerous threat for his Big-Bang theory. There was also another probable problem looming on the horizon because the following year the meeting of the International Union of Astronomy (IAU) was to be held in Rome and Pius XII had been invited to deliver the inaugural speech. Lemaitre then flew from South Africa, where he was, to Rome where, with the help of P. O’Connell, S.J. director of the Vatican Observatory and quite close to the pontiff, met Pius XII. Of course, it is not known what the topic of the discussion was during their meeting. The fact is that Pius XII on 7 September 1952 gave the inaugural address to the IAU but made no mention of the Concordism.

So it appears that the Big Bang, as introduced by Georges Lemaître, did not support creatio ex nihilo. It is quite possible that he himself believed therein. Nevertheless, throughout his life, he was consistently discordist, and never mixed scientific and religious discourse.

Viewed from another angle, it should be remembered that Lemaître’s discordism is important for science. The Big Bang can be discussed and criticized from a scientific perspective without touching people’s religious beliefs.

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1. Tertullian. Against Hermogenes: Containing an Argument Against His Opinion that Matter is Eternal. Translated by Dr. Holmes. Chapter XVI, p.3189. In The Church Fathers. The Complete Antenicene Church Fathers Collection. Edited by Philip Schaff. Catholic Way Publishing, 2015.

2. Saint Augustine. Confessions. Translated by Vernon J. Bourke. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1953. Book Twelve, Chapter 7, pp.372-373.

3. G. Lemaître. The Beginning of the World from the Point of View of Quantum Theory. Nature 127(3210):706, 1931.

4. Jean-Pierre Luminet. L’invention du Big Bang. Nouvelle édition mise à jour. Éditions du Seuil.

5. Einstein admet la réalité de l’expansion comme conséquence de la relativité générale, à travers le modèle cosmologique de Lemaître qui est en mesure de prédire la loi de Hubble. Einstein préfère ne pas discuter de l’hypothèse de l’atome primitif, car il soupçonne le prêtre belge de ne pas être scientifiquement objectif sur cette question. Il la juge « inspirée par le dogme chrétien de la création, et injustifiée sur le plan de la physique. » [Luminet, p.95]

6. Eric Lerner. The Big Bang Never Happened: A Startling Refutation of the Dominant Theory of the Origin of the Universe. Times Books, 1991.

7. Georges Lemaître. L’Hypothèse de l’atome primitif. Essai de cosmogonie. Préface de Ferdinand Gonseth. Neuchâtel: Éd. du Griffon; Bruxelles: Éd. Hermès,1946.

8. Georges Lemaître. The Primeval Atom: An Essay on Cosmogony. Translated by B.H. and S.A. Korff. New York, London: Van Nostrand Company, 1950.

9. Discorso di Sua Santità Pio XII ai Cardinali, ai Legati delle Nazioni Esteri e ai Soci della Pontificia Accademia delle Scienze. Giovedì, 22 novembre 1951. https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/it/speeches/1951/documents/hf_p-xii_spe_19511122_di-serena.html

10. È innegabile che una mente illuminata ed arricchita dalle moderne conoscenze scientifiche, la quale valuti serenamente questo problema, è portata a rompere il cerchio di una materia del tutto indipendente e autoctona, o perché increata, o perché creatasi da sé, e a risalire ad uno Spirito creatore. Col medesimo sguardo limpido e critico, con cui esamina e giudica i fatti, vi intravede e riconosce l’opera della onnipotenza creatrice, la cui virtù, agitata dal potente « fiat » pronunziato miliardi di anni fa dallo Spirito creatore, si dispiegò nell’universo, chiamando all’esistenza con un gesto d’amore generoso la materia esuberante di energia. Pare davvero che la scienza odierna, risalendo d’un tratto milioni di secoli, sia riuscita a farsi testimone di quel primordiale « Fiat lux », allorché dal nulla proruppe con la materia un mare di luce e di radiazioni, mentre le particelle degli elementi chimici si scissero e si riunirono in milioni di galassie.

11. Gabriele Gionti, S.J. Contemporary Cosmology and “Creatio ex nihilo”. 2019. https://www.vaticanobservatory.org/education/contemporary-cosmology-and-creatio-ex-nihilo/