Page 26 - The Creation Of The Universe

24 THE CREATION OF THE UNIVERSE

steady state theory because if the universe had existed for eternity and nev-
er had a beginning, all of its hydrogen should have been burned into heli-
um.
Confronted by such evidence, the Big Bang gained the near-complete
approval of the scientific world. In an article in its October 1994 issue,
Scientific American noted that the Big Bang model was the only one that
could account for the constant expansion of the universe and for other ob-
servational results.
Defending the steady-state theory alongside Fred Hoyle for years,
Dennis Sciama described the final position they had reached after all the
evidence for the Big Bang theory was revealed:
There was at that time a somewhat acrimonious debate between some
of the proponents of the steady state theory and observers who were test-
ing it and, I think, hoping to disprove it. I played a very minor part at
that time because I was a supporter of the steady state theory, not in the
sense that I believed that it had to be true, but in that I found it so at-
tractive I wanted it to be true. When hostile observational evidence be-
came to come in, Fred Hoyle took a leading part in trying to counter
this evidence, and I played a small part at the side, also making sug-
gestions as to how the hostile evidence could be answered. But as that
evidence piled up, it became more and more evident that the game was
up, and that one had to abandon the steady state theory. 5

Who Created the Universe From Nothing?
With this triumph of the Big Bang, the thesis of an "infinite universe",
which forms the basis of materialist dogma, was tossed onto the scrap-heap
of history. But for materialists it also raised a couple of inconvenient ques-
tions: What existed before the Big Bang? And what force could have caused
the great explosion that resulted in a universe that did not exist before?
Materialists like Arthur Eddington recognized that the answers to these
questions could point to the "fact of Creation" and that they did not like.
Anthony Flew, a philosopher who used to be an atheist but later acknowl-