[PeteMo (Pete)]

I'm often surprised how science and the church often imply that there are only two camps ie Big Bang or Steady State when the truth could be a wierd blend of both. Is light a particle or a wave? Both camps appear contradictory yet each can claim that their model, either particle or wave is supported by their observations or equations.

One thing that puzzles me with Big Bang, the COBE probe detected Cosmic Background Radiation and this was taken as immediate proof of big bang, yet how do we know that this background radiation actually came from the big bang and not something else? If we came across what we thought was a driveby shooting the discovery of any gun would be taken as evidence that it was a shooting. As a tester I often perform negative testing as well a positive testing, to make sure that the incerse also applies, yet there seems to be a reluctance to look at other factors that could also account for background radiation. Sometimes it appears that some evidence is only circumstantial at best.

For all we know E=Mc^2 could be a modern day Zeno's Paradox, it looks right from a certain logical standpoint, but does not match what we are observing when galaxies are receding from us at greater than c. The explanation that space is expanding is the kind of thing I expect Mr Spock or Dr Who to say. It could be correct, but it sometimes seems more like an elastoplast job to plug the holes in Big Bang rather than state (Admit) that we need to modify Big Bang to account for the anomalies. Then again as Alex points out, there are holes in everything.

I seem to be leaning more towards Steady State but cannot overlook the main parts of Big Bang that do match what we see. When you consider that Cosmology is not very old, there's a lot more discovering and exploring to do before we get a better model to update Big Bang/Steady State.

Incidentally if anyone was interested in an approach to interpretting and understanding Genesis that does justice to the text and is compatible with modern day scientific views, I'm more than willing to share this, but maybe on another thread or as an article.