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To: WilliamWallace1999
Most of my friends are evangelicals and it just flabbergasts me the differences in train of thought between Catholicism and Protestantism. My experience is the Protestants have more Bible verses memorized, but the Catholics have better knowledge of philosophy and actual church history to actually give a better reinterpretation of what it means. One of the main flaws of sola scriptura is many don't seem to have an understanding of what underlying idea the Author was getting at, only the literal actual words they said.
31 posted on 11/14/2005 7:09:20 AM PST by DarkSavant (I touch myself at thoughts of flames)
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To: DarkSavant; All

It took me bit to track it down again, but here is the story of who "BIG BANGED" first. A Jesuit scholar......

Georges-Henri Lemaître (July 17, 1894 – June 20, 1966) was a Belgian Roman Catholic priest and astronomer.

Lemaître is credited with proposing the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe, although he called it his 'hypothesis of the primeval atom'. He based his theory, published between 1927 and 1933, on the work of Einstein, among others, as well as ancient cosmological-philosophical traditions. Einstein, however, believed in a steady-state model of the universe.

Lemaître took cosmic rays to be the remnants of the event, although it is now known that they originate within the local galaxy.

He estimated the age of the universe to be between 10 and 20 billion years ago, which agrees with modern opinion.



Not very concerned with honors, Lemaître did not think it desirable to become famous, nor to publicize his article. In fact, he was already concentrating on a new challenge: to solve the problem of the origin of the Universe. The same year, he returned to MIT to present his doctoral thesis on The gravitational field in a fluid sphere of uniform invariant density according to the theory of relativity. He obtained a PhD and was then named ordinary Professor at the University of Leuven.

In 1931, Eddington published an English translation of the 1927 article with a long commentary. Lemaître was then invited in London in order to take part in a meeting of the British Association on the relation between the physical universe and spirituality. It is there that he proposed an expanding universe which started with an initial singularity, and the idea of the Primeval Atom which he developed in a report published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Lemaître himself liked to describe his theory as "the Cosmic Egg exploding at the moment of the creation", which was later to be coined by his critics as the Big Bang theory.

This proposal caused a sharp reaction from the scientific community of the time. Eddington found Lemaitre's notion unpleasant. As for Einstein, he found it suspect, because, according to him, it was too strongly reminiscent of the Christian dogma of creation and was unjustifiable from a physical point of view. The debate between cosmology and religion took the form of a polemic that would last several decades. In this debate, Lemaître would be a fundamental actor who unceasingly tried to separate science from faith.

However, in January 1933, Lemaitre and Einstein, who had met on several occasions - in 1927 in Brussels, at the time of a Solvay congress, in 1932 in Belgium, at the time of a cycle of conferences in Brussels and lastly in 1935 at Princeton - traveled together to California for a series of seminars. After the Belgian detailed his theory, Einstein stood up, applauded, and said, "This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened".

In 1933, when he resumed his theory of the expanding universe and published a more detailed version in the Annals of the Scientific Society of Brussels, Lemaître would achieve his greatest glory. The American newspapers called him a famous Belgian scientist and described him as the leader of the new cosmological physics.

On March 17, 1934, Lemaître received the Francqui Prize, the highest Belgian scientific distinction, from King Léopold III. His proposers were Albert Einstein, Charles de la Vallée-Poussin and Alexandre de Hemptinne. The members of the international jury were Eddington, Langevin and Théophile de Donder. Another distinction that the Belgian government reserves for exceptional scientists was allotted to him in 1950: the decennial prize for applied sciences for the period 1933-1942.


93 posted on 11/14/2005 8:20:40 AM PST by WilliamWallace1999
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To: DarkSavant

>One of the main flaws of sola scriptura is many don't seem to have an understanding of what underlying idea the Author was getting at, only the literal actual words they said.<

Based on this statement I would say Catholics have a hard time understanding who is the Author of scripture.


117 posted on 11/14/2005 8:39:50 AM PST by Blessed
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