Lemaître was a Catholic priest, and many people regarded his cosmological model as an attempt to smuggle God into modern cosmology, although he himself carefully distinguished creation in the religious sense, which is outside the reach of science, and the "natural beginning", which can be a subject-matter of scientific hypotheses. In 1948, Thomas Gold, Hermann Bondi and Fred Hoyle created the so-called steady state cosmology, doubtless with the aim of liberating cosmology from theological ingredients. In this model, the universe is expanding, but the receding galaxies are replaced by new ones formed by matter continuously created out of nothingness. This obviously contradicts the law of energy conservation, but the creation rate, indispensable to sustain the constant density of the universe, is so small that it cannot be experimentally detected. This hypothesis guarantees to the universe its "steady state" without any beginning.
It was Hoyle who coined the name Big Bang. It was intended to suggest that Lemaître's model owed its popularity to big propaganda rather than to solid scientific arguments. The dispute between defendants of the Big Bang model and the steady-state scenario dominated cosmology over a decade. In the last years of his life, Lemaître, deeply disappointed, turned from cosmology to his old passion - numerical calculations and calculating machines.
The controversy was settled in 1965 by the discovery of microwave background radiation by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, soon interpreted as a remnant of the Big Bang (as had been predicted by George Gamow and his group in 1948). In 1966, a few days before his death, Lemaître was informed by Odon Godart, his former assistant, about this discovery. He was glad that his ideas were winning the battle, although it was not cosmic rays that contributed to this success, but rather a new type of radiation.
Almost 50 years later, a stream of new data is still coming in. Their recent analysis indicates that the oldest clusters of galaxies exhibit deceleration, but about six billion years ago the trend was reversed and the universe started to accelerate. It has been asked: "Was the Abbé Lemaître guided by Divine Providence, by scientific prescience, or was he just lucky?" It might also be that old masters were simply cleverer than some of us.
