Some people think that the Big Bang theory clashes with the Church’s teaching on God as Creator..
In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council affirmed creatio ex nihilo, which means that the universe was created out of nothing by a higher power. Some atheists think that the Big Bang replaces the role of a creator, since this mysterious explosion created everything out of nothing.
But they’re forgetting something. The Big Bang theory was actually first proposed by
a Catholic priest named Fr. Georges Lemaître. Fr. Georges suggested that God may have created the universe through a “Big Bang,” or what he called the “expansion of the universe.”
In his book Forty Anti-Catholic Lies, Dr. Verschuuren explains that there is a difference between “creating” and “producing.” The Big Bang theory helped produce the universe as we know it today, but producing is not the same as creating. In this context, to create is “to cause to exist, to create from nothing” while to produce is “to bring forth, to manufacture” using already-existing materials.
Furthermore, in order for the Big Bang to happen, something would have had to cause it. So we would have to ask what—or Who—caused the Big Bang?
The Big Bang theory does not contradict the role of a Creator because God’s role in creating the universe is different from the Big Bang Theory’s role in producing the universe. God created everything out of nothing, while the Big Bang Theory produced the universe using what God had already called into being. The Big Bang was a method for creating something—not the original source or cause of what was created.
To learn more about how the Big Bang theory does correlate with faith, check out Dr. Verschuuren’s Forty Anti-Catholic Lies, sold here.
