Originally posted by food4thought
Some of the major evidences/arguments for the big bang have been:
1. The constancy of the speed of light.
2. The red shift of light from distant stars.
3. The great size (and by extension, apparent age) of the universe.
Not an all inclusive list,
Again, go to
www.reasons.org for Hugh Ross' certainty that the Big Bang happened. You seem to have some misconception that Big Bang is atheism.
Anyway, those are
not the major evidences for BB. The red shift was the first indication that the universe was not static. It led to the hypothesis of BB, since if you extrapolate backward from the expansion you end up with all the matter in one place eventually.
The two major pieces of evidence that led to universal acceptance of BB are the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) and the hydrogen/helium mix of the universe. Neither can be explained by a Steady State Universe or by instantaneous creation but are predictions of BB. In fact, BB predicted both before the data was found. An excellent example of how theories are supported: they make risky predictions of knowledge that should be found
if they are true. Some reading on evidence supporting the BB is:
http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/academy/universe/b_bang.html
http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_uni/uni_101bb1.html
http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/ask/acosmexp.html Questions about Big Bang
http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/ask/askmag.html#list General Ask the Space Scientist
2. PJE Peebles, DN Schramm, EL Turner, RG Kron, The case for the relativistic hot Big Bang cosmology. Nature, 352: 769-776, 29 Aug. 1991.
3. Barry Parker, The Vindication of the Big Bang, Breakthroughs and Barriers, Plenum Press, 1993.
12. MA Buchner and DN Spergel. Scientific American, 280: 62-71, Jan. 1999. Discusses changes in inflationary theory to account for new observations.
14. M Joy and JE Calrstrom Probing the early universe with the SZ effect. Science 291: 1715-1717, March 2, 2001. Interaction with the CMBR with free electrons in ionized gas produce the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect. Proposed in 1970, but not detected until recently. Is independent test of big bang and theories associated with it. So far, supportes big bang strongly.
15. RR Caldwell, M Kamionkowski, Echoes from the big bang. Scientific American 284: 38-43, Jan. 2001.