Both science and faith can go hand-in-hand. An astronomer can look through his/her telescope and see stars that have been around for millions of years. The vast scale of the universe shows how small we are in size compared to God’s Creation. A Catholic Christian named Gregor Mendel discovered genetics in the mid-1800s when he analyzed pea plant alleles (genes). Louis Pasteur, the French man who we can thank for making beverages safer by bringing the liquid to 60°C (145°F) whenever we buy milk and juice at the grocery store, was also a Christian. Pasteur had a Catholic background with humanitarian beliefs to serve the greater good, though he was not deep into his faith.
Georges Lemâitre, a Belgian Catholic priest and scientist, is considered the father of the Big Bang theory, along with Hubble and Alexander Friedmann*. In the 1920s, along with Edwin Hubble and Friedmann, he proposed that the universe began as a singularity – an infinitesimally small and dense point of pure energy – that expanded and gave birth to the universe as we know it. Lemaitre's theory was influenced by his religious beliefs and his understanding of Einstein's theory of general relativity.
*Friedmann was baptized into the
Russian Orthodox Church as an infant, and lived much of his life in
Saint Petersburg.
There are rare instances where bread at Catholic churches turn into physical flesh and blood, known as a Eucharistic miracle. But for most times, the bread does not turn into physical flesh or blood from our perspective, but instead transforms into flesh and blood invisibly, known as transubstantiation. I did not believe in transubstantiation, until learning about Eucharistic miracles in late 2021 or early 2022.
Eucharistic miracles have been studied by scientists, and in all of the confirmed miracles, the blood was type AB. In other Eucharistic miracles, the Catholic church has dismissed some, as red fungus sometimes grows on old bread. So, rigorous scientific testing is used to confirm these miracles.
