Fred Hoyle

Herschel made mistakes.

Fred Hoyle made mistakes.

Lord Kellwood made mistakes.

Heck, even Einstein made mistakes.

The argument actually goes back to not a creationist, but to a famous astronomer.

His name is Sir Fred Hoyle, who was also sort of an iconoclast, and he was arguing that the, the odds of assembling the complexity of molecular biology by, uh, by random chance is the same to the odds of, say, assembling a, a complicated item like a Boeing 747 out of a, a tornado in a junkyard, something along those lines.

And that, of course, was picked up by Duane Gish for many years in his debates, and a lot of creationists use it still.

And it's a completely false analogy because it takes a completely false idea about evolution.

The public didn't really understand what he was talking about, but it felt like Britain was leading the way in something again.

And we've got another guy called Fred Hoyle.

who's an astronomer, BBC radio regular from the early 50s.

He's the one who coins the phrase the Big Bang, dismissively in a conversation as it happens.

That's coming from an agnostic.

Or take Fred Hoyle.

He's a British astrophysicist.

He's an atheist.

He went back to Belgium and continued his teaching and continued his priestly duties and continued in the small hours of his long life.

To think, and a few years later, after Hubble's paper had appeared, and after other astronomers had begun to confirm that the universe was in fact expanding einstein reversed himself publicly and gracefully he is reported to have visited the mount wilson observatory in california in nineteen thirty three in le matre's company and to have said before an audience there that le matre's theory of an expanding universe was the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which he had ever listened le matre went further still he reasoned that if the universe is expanding today then yesterday it was smaller and the day before that smaller still and if one traced the mathematics all the way back one arrived at a moment when all of the matter of the present universe had been gathered into a single extraordinarily dense point a state he called with a poet's touch rather than an astronomer's the primeval atom or in other writings the cosmic egg from that unimaginable seed he suggested the entire history of galaxies and stars and planets and eventually human beings in bedrooms had unfolded it is in essence the picture we now call the Big Bang, though that particular phrase was coined much later and originally, with a certain amount of mockery, by the English astronomer Fred Hoyle.

Lemaître, throughout it all, kept his two vocations gently separate.

He warned more than once that his cosmic egg was a scientific hypothesis, not a theological claim.

a whisper of warmth, but a warmth all the same, threaded through the space between every star.

It was a magnificent prediction, and it was, for a time, almost entirely ignored.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the debate, the great British astronomer Fred Hoyle held firmly to a rival view, the steady-state universe, in which matter is continuously and gently created to keep the average density unchanged even as space expands hoyle was a man of enormous intellectual force and he had no patience for the idea of a sudden beginning And so in March of 1949, on a BBC radio broadcast, he referred, somewhat dismissively, to the rival theory as this Big Bang idea.

He meant it as a wave of the hand.