(January 8, 2016 at 12:56 pm)athrock Wrote: Was there ever a time when the Big Bang Theory was rejected by mainstream cosmology?
Yes; for the longest time.
Know what swayed the balance? Evidence. Evidence that withstood peer scrutiny and actually matched reality better than any other hypothesis. That's how it got to be a theory; the clue's in the name.
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'