Evidence for God from Physics and Philosophy – Extending the Legacy of Monsignor George Lemaitre and St. Thomas Aquinas

n this book – an expanded version of his 2014 University of Dallas Aquinas Lecture – Father Robert Spitzer audaciously combines the intellectual legacies of two Catholic priests, St. Thomas Aquinas and Monsignor Georges Lemaître. Living in the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas ardently believed that, as he wrote in the Summa contra gentiles, “truth which human reason is naturally endowed to know cannot be opposed to the truth of the Christian faith.” But human reason has made many advances since Thomas’s days. One of them is the Big Bang theory, which Georges Lemaître, professor of physics at the Catholic University of Louvain, discovered in 1927. According to this theory, the universe as we know it began billions of years ago with an unimaginably powerful explosion. Is Thomas’s metaphysical vision of the universe, which includes the existence of a Creator who made and ordered the cosmos, compatible with contemporary cosmology? That is the question which Father Spitzer addresses in this book.