A beginning to the universe implies a transcendent act of creation, which sounds too much like Genesis 1:1, and that sort of thing has no place in science, we've been told ad infinitum.
There were problems with the Big Bang to be sure, but as time wore on evidence accumulated that the universe was expanding which meant that if scientists extrapolated back in time they would come to a point at which all the universe was compressed into an infinitely dense point.
In other words, the universe arose out of nothing which is what theologians had been saying for thousands of years. Atheistic scientists were chagrined. After all, science was supposed to debunk religious beliefs, not confirm them.
Then, in the 1960s, two scientists working for Bell laboratories, looking for something else entirely, accidentally confirmed a prediction of the Big Bang theory. They discovered the remnant energy from the initial "Bang". This discovery of what's called the cosmic background radiation rocked the scientific world.
Pomeroy writes:
Today, the Big Bang model of cosmology is pretty much taken for Gospel, and for good reason. For more than fifty years, evidence gathered from all manner of sources has supported the notion that the Universe as we know it expanded from an infinitely dense singularity.When a man is dead set against the evidence that God exists there's not much that can persuade him to believe otherwise. Hoyle remained adamantly opposed to the Big Bang until his death in 2001. Many modern cosmologists are searching for a theory of cosmogenesis today that will allow them to avoid a cosmic beginning.
But things didn't always look so certain for the Big Bang. In its most nascent form, the idea was known as the hypothesis of the primeval atom, and it originated from an engineer turned soldier turned mathematician turned Catholic priest turned physicist by the name of Georges Lemaître. When Lemaître published his idea in the eminent journal Nature in 1931, a response to observational data suggesting that space was expanding, he ruffled a lot of feathers.
As UC-San Diego professor of physics Brian Keating wrote in his recent book Losing the Nobel Prize, "Lemaître's model... upset the millennia-old orthodoxy of an eternal, unchanging cosmos. It clearly implied that everything had been smaller and denser in the past, and that the universe must itself have had a birth at a finite time in the past."
Besides questioning the status quo, Lemaître's primeval atom also had some glaring problems. For starters, there were hardly any means of testing it, a must for any would-be scientific theory. Moreover, it essentially suggested that all the matter in the Universe came from nothing, a flabbergasting claim. It also violated an accepted notion known as the perfect cosmological principle, which suggested that the Universe looks the same from any given point in space and time.
For these reasons, English astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle gathered with a few colleagues to formulate the Steady State theory of the cosmos. The idea kept the observable universe essentially the same in space and time, and it accounted for evidence suggesting that the universe is expanding by hypothesizing that matter is instead being created out of the fabric of space in between distant galaxies.
Steady State didn't have the problems inherent to the notion of a primeval atom, and, as Keating wrote "it sure as hell didn't look like the creation narrative in Genesis 1:1."
As Keating continued, anti-religious sentiments provided underlying motivation to debunk Lemaître's theory.
Many atheist scientists were repulsed by the Big Bang's creationist overtones. According to Hoyle, it was cosmic chutzpah of the worst kind: "The reason why scientists like the 'big bang' is because they are overshadowed by the Book of Genesis."
Maybe they'll find one, but there seems to be something strange about people who insist that religious belief has no place in science being motivated by their own religious belief to spend their lives in search of a way to escape a theory just because that theory has religious implications.
