The BBC, the Victoria Institute, and the Theological Context for the Big Bang – Steady State Debate

Craig Sean McConnell
S & CB 18 (2)
October 2006

Abstract

In the late 1940s, Fred Hoyle, Hermann Bondi and Tom Gold introduced a steady state model for the universe. Theirs was a universe without beginning or end, a model that neatly avoided the ex nihilo problem and bore little resemblance to Christian origin stories. Despite Hoyle’s early efforts to cast the big bang – steady state debate as a debate between a Christian cosmology and a more sober and scientific cosmology, the discussion of these models in many quarters quickly embraced both as potentially deistic visions of the universe.