By EDWARD T. OAKES, S.J. [First Things] – The British cosmologist Fred Hoyle coined the term “the Big Bang” as a term of derision, but it quickly caught on with the public. He had handed his opponents the most vivid (if somewhat misleading) image for the theory that our universe began as an infinitely small and infinitely dense “singularity,” which then “exploded” into the ever-expanding and ever-thinning cosmic matrix in which all of us pathetic earthlings now find ourselves.
Although by 1965 Hoyle found himself in the distinct minority among cosmologists, he never abandoned his criticism of the Big Bang theory or his advocacy of his steady-state” theory of a universe that was without beginning and will never end. He agreed with the Belgian priest-physicist Msgr. Georges Lemaître that the universe was expanding. But he rejected Lemaître’s interpretation of that fact.
This Catholic priest held that if the universe is expanding, it must have begun as a “primeval atom.” Hoyle frankly admitted that his refusal to accept this obvious-seeming conclusion stemmed from his own personal philosophical/theological reasons: A beginning implies a cause of that beginning, which then ineluctably leads to a notion of a Creator-Cause, something he rejected on a priori grounds.
Continued at First Things | More Chronicle & Notices.
