We've looked briefly at several alternatives that have been developed to the Big Bang model of cosmology that dominates the thinking of our culture at the present time. In many ways the alternatives seem better supported by the way reality is observed to work at both the laboratory and astronomical scale. Certainly, some of the alternatives might appear to be in conflict; yet in other ways they could turn out to be complementary. I don't pretend to have all the answers. I doubt if anyone has.
The Alfvén-Lerner plasma universe builds larger structures up from small, while Arp-Narlikar's cascade of "mini-bangs" produces enlarging, maturing objects from compact, energetic ones. Conceivably they could work together, the magnetic fields and currents of the former shaping and ordering into coherent forms the violently ejected materials that would otherwise disperse chaotically.
Paul Marmet's molecular hydrogen produces a redshift that increases with distance, preserving the conventional scale and structure without involving expansion velocities or a finite time. But this could be compatible with an age-related redshift too. Quasars appear to be enveloped in extremely fuzzy, gaseous clouds. If this comes with the matter-creation process, subsequent sweeping and "cleaning up" of the area by gravity could give an initially high absorption redshift that reduces with time. Nothing says that the redshift has to be the result of one single cause. It could be a composite effect, with several factors contributing.
Some critics assert that Lerner's electrical forces simply wouldn't be strong enough to confine stars in their orbits and hold galaxies together. Marmet points out that the existence of ten times as much virtually undetectable molecular hydrogen as the measured amount of atomic hydrogenreadily attainable by his estimationwould provide all the gravity that's needed, without resorting to exotic forms of "missing mass." And another possibility is that the law of gravitation assumed to be universal but which has only been verified locally could turn out to be just an approximation to something more complex that deviates more with increasing distance.
The point is that enormous opportunities surely exist for cross-fertilizations of ideas and a willingness to consider innovative answers that admit all the evidence, instead of a closed-minded adherence to sacred assumptions that heretics deny on pain of excommunication. Surely it's a time for eclecticism, not ecclesiasticism. Maybe the metaphor is more than superficial.
We noted at the outset that there seems to be a historical correlation between creation-type cosmologies being favored at times when things seem in decline and gods are in vogue, and unguided, evolutionary cosmologies when humanity feels in control and materialism prevails. Well, the philosophy dominating the age we currently live in is probably about as reductionist and materialist as it gets. It seems curious that at a time when an ageless plasma universe or a self-regenerating matter-creation universe should, one would think, be eagerly embraced, what has to be the ultimate of creation stories should be so fiercely defended. An age that has disposed of its creator God probably more thoroughly than any in history produces a cosmology that demands one. The throne is there, but there's nobody to sit on it.
Or is there?
Maybe there's some kind of a Freudian slip at work when the cardinals of the modern Church of Cosmology make repeated allusions to "glimpsing the mind of God" in their writings, and christen one of their exotic theoretical creations the "God Particle."
The servant, Mathematics, who was turned into a god, created the modern cosmos and reveals Truth in an arcane language of symbols accessible only to the chosen, promising ultimate fulfillment with the enlightenment to come with the promised day of the Theory of Everything.
To be told that if they looked through the telescope at what's really out there, they'd see that the creator they had deified really wasn't necessary, would make the professors very edgy and angry indeed.