RE: The Priest Who Discovered The Big Bang
Catholics don't tend to be literal about religious texts. They usually say "what is the story telling us?"
That is why they say the world wasn't "literally" created in 7 days, the world isn't "literally" 6,000 years old. Noah didn't "literally" put two of every animal on an ark for 40 long days, daring them all to eat each other.
They are also pretty proud of their scientists, like rabies vaccine inventor, and famous milkman, Louis Pasteur. And they also teach that Galileo was a always a Catholic, despite disagreeing that the Earth was the big daddy of the Sun.
This I learned at Catholic school, as well as the fact that the Pope is the guardian of great secrets the world isn't yet ready to know. Don't ask!
We never learned about Lemaitre, but I know exactly what my old teachers would say about the Big Bang theory. They would say it looks an awful lot like God clicking his fingers. :)
This is true of a lot of Catholics, however I met one once who said that finding a feather on his pillow in the morning wasn't evidence of a leaky pillow, but rather the arkangel Gabriel coming to visit him in the night.
I can believe that Pasteur was Catholic, I'm not so sure on Galileo, simply because he lived in a time whereby not believing in God was seriously hazardous to liberty and possibly life. I'm not saying he wasn't, I'm just saying it's impossible to tell whether he was lying or not.
I like this, and back in my childhood in my pre-atheist days, I wondered why religion couldn't simply adapt the laws of science in this way... I later realised it was because religion doesn't like the words 'chance' or 'coincidence'...
C'est la vie
Cg
C'est La Vie indeed lol.
Of course, if life were a horse race, you could be seen as a betting man who swapped his bet from an outsider to the favourite.
This still means you are a man of faith, since it takes unprovable faith to assert that God does not exist.
And religious people would argue that faith in an outsider might be a better bet, since the payout on an atheist bet is zero, and the payout on an outsider bet is heaven.
I could be wrong, but it seems to me only the agnostic position avoids faith, by refusing to place a bet. :)