Fred Hoyle, Georges Lemaître, the Big Bang, Evolution and Boeing Aircraft

Naïve creationists often confuse - 

atheism with science,

cosmology with evolution,

and

creationism with Christianity.

They will often attempt to bait both scientists and atheists with simplistic conceptions of the Big Bang, considering it to be both atheistic, "evolutionary" and ridiculous.

As far as "atheistic" goes, it has to be pointed out that one of the first to propose the Big Bang was a theist - a Catholic priest, Georges Lemaître. It was welcomed by many theists as giving God "something to do".

The Big Bang, of course, has nothing to do with evolution. It is a cosmological theory, whereas evolution is about how and why the form of living organisms can change over generations. (Anything that falsifies creationism is "evolutionist" according to creationists, whether it is about evolution or not, but that's another story.)

Before the development of the Big Bang model, the prevailing model of cosmology was the Steady State. A leading proponent of the Steady State was the astronomer, Fred Hoyle. The Steady State hypothesis held that the universe was eternal and unchanging in many respects. Hoyle himself coined the term "Big Bang", some say as a pejorative term for the competing hypothesis, though Hoyle denied this intention.

The preponderance of evidence eventually led to the rejection of the Steady State and the acceptance of the Big Bang among researchers in the field, both theistic and atheistic. This evidence included Irwin Hubble's red shift observations, the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation, the distribution of young galaxies and quasars throughout the universe.

People ask, "How can something come from nothing?" "A vacuum fluctuation" is not a satisfying answer, but it certainly appeared to come from nothing, and the universe doesn't really owe it to us to conform to our parochial intuitions, which have often been proven unreliable in the past. See "What is True", https://barryhisblog.blogspot.com/p/a-little-learning-is-dangerous-thing.html. We must accept reality, whether or not we like and understand it.

Hoyle is often described by creationists as being an evolution skeptic. This is incorrect. He had some weird ideas about the origin of life, likening the idea of the natural emergence of the first life-forms to a tornado ripping through a junkyard and assembling a working Boeing aircraft, but he accepted evolution. He also accepted deep time, and contributed to the science of stellar nucleosynthesis (how stars and supernovae convert lighter elements into heavier ones). All these ideas are also incorrectly regarded by creationists as being "evolutionist".

Besides being a fan of the steady state, Hoyle believed in panspermia-the seeding of life from space. The idea of aliens seeding life on our planet is what Dawkins called "kicking the can up the road". Their origin would still need to be accounted for. He also thought that our nostrils pointed downwards to protect our respiratory systems from space-borne pathogens.

Anyway, here are some quotes from books by Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe -

 “The creationist is a sham religious person who, curiously, has no true sense of religion. In the language of religion, it is the facts we observe in the world around us that must be seen to constitute the words of God. Documents, whether the Bible, Qur’an or those writings that held such force for Velikovsky, are only the words of men. To prefer the words of men to those of God is what one can mean by blasphemy. This, we think, is the instinctive point of view of most scientists who, curiously again, have a deeper understanding of the real nature of religion than have the many who delude themselves into a frenzied belief in the words, often the meaningless words, of men. Indeed, the lesser the meaning, the greater the frenzy, in something like inverse proportion.”
–Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Our Place in the Cosmos (1993), p.14

“We are inescapably the result of a long heritage of learning, adaptation, mutation and evolution, the product of a history which predates our birth as a biological species and stretches back over many thousand millennia…. Going further back, we share a common ancestry with our fellow primates; and going still further back, we share a common ancestry with all other living creatures and plants down to the simplest microbe. The further back we go, the greater the difference from external appearances and behavior patterns which we observe today…. Darwin’s theory, which is now accepted without dissent, is the cornerstone of modern biology. Our own links with the simplest forms of microbial life are well-nigh proven.”
–Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Lifecloud: The Origin of Life in the Universe (1978), p.15-16