Sean Carroll has been perusing arxiv and finds it instructive that denizens of the steady state theory are still publishing:
For those with any lingering doubts, the Big Bang model — the idea that the universe has evolved from a hot, dense, smooth initial state — is correct, and the Steady State model should have been put to bed a long time ago. Evidence for the Big Bang is overwhelming. It’s a model that keeps making predictions, which keep turning out to be correct, while the Steady State theory made many predictions that turned out to be wrong.
But it’s an interesting case study in how science works. Reading Burbidge’s paper, the parallels with anti-evolutionists are striking. In both cases, one is repeatedly told that the establishment’s supporter’s can’t prove that their theory is correct. Which is undeniably true, as science never proves anything; it just accumulates evidence, and in the case of the Big Bang and natural selection, the evidence puts the case beyond reasonable doubt. Which doesn’t imply that there are no interesting questions remaining to be addressed. For both the Big Bang and natural selection, many of the details concerning the way in which the broad framework is specifically implemented in the real world remain to be answered. And in both cases, the skeptics like to pretend that open questions about the details are the same as open questions about the framework. But they’re not.