Who was the priest who supposedly invented the Big Bang, and does his opinion lend the Church's credence to it?
A viewer says his Catholic friends claim the Big Bang was invented by a Catholic priest and is therefore acknowledged by the Church as valid, and asks who this priest was, what authority he had, and whether his opinion lends the Church's credence to the Big Bang theory.
Answer
The priest was Father Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian astrophysicist and mathematician, and the claim is a half-truth that people misinterpret. What actually happened is that Edwin Hubble, with the new hundred-inch Mount Wilson telescope, first observed galaxies beyond the Milky Way and found their light shifted to the red end of the spectrum in every direction, which he admitted in 1937 implied the earth is at the center of the universe. To escape that, they modeled the universe as the surface of an expanding balloon with the galaxies on it, so there is no center, using a switch from Euclidean to Riemannian geometry; every galaxy on such a balloon would see every other galaxy's light red-shifted, just as Hubble saw. Lemaitre then took Einstein's general relativity and ran the expansion backward in time to a single original particle, the 'cosmic egg,' which is why he is confused with the originator of the Big Bang. But Lemaitre had no authority; he was a cog in the wheel, and a liberal priest who did not believe Genesis was inspired. He simply used math with no real proof. The Vatican's silence toward him is not an endorsement, so you need not believe anything Father Lemaitre said.