J>14 VINCENT E, SMITH 



to the logic usually employed by science as the hypothesis 

 of a " beginning." 



A third theory of the origin of the world, based upon the 

 notion of a " pulsating universe," may be in the offing.** But 

 the two leading cosmologies actually in vogue are the ones 

 briefly sketched above, and our concern in this paper will be 

 confined to them. Our interest, of course, is their bearing upon 

 evolution. 



Despite the comparison by Munitz, the steady-state theory 

 has the ring of the gratuitous about it and seems to require 

 ad hoc amendments to the usual formulation of the laws of 

 thermodynamics. Gamow even believes that there is experi- 

 mental argument against the steady-state theory in the evidence 

 of Stebbins and Whitford ^^ showing at least some of the 

 galaxies to have such a long red shift that their color cannot 

 be accounted for by the Doppler effect previously described. 

 The reddening is so pronounced that it might seem necessary 

 to explain it by inter-galactic dust which scatters light in much 

 the same way that the sunset is reddened by our terrestrial 

 atmosphere. But this hypothesis would require more dust 

 than can be admitted on other grounds. A tenable hypothesis 

 seems to be that observed galaxies, in their youth by com- 

 parison to their mature period, contained a greater abundance 

 of a special type of star (Red Giants) , and if this is the case, 

 it is necessary either to accept a developmental view or to patch 

 another ad hoc assumption on the steady-state theory to make 

 it tenable. 



But even if the steady-state cosmology be entertained as a 

 possibility in the light of all the evidence which our unaided 

 reason can marshal,**^ it still bears witness to evolution. The 

 steady-state cosmologists accept the view that the universe is 



** Finley-Fieundlich, op. eit., p. 56; Shapley, art. cit., p. 33. 



^^ Gamow, op. cit., pp. 33-34. 



*" This conditional acceptance is made in the same spirit that St. Thomas attaches 

 to Aristotle's view of an eternal world. As a starting point for the proof for a 

 Prime Mover it is the "more difficult" assumption (De Pot., q. Ill, a. 17), and if 

 within it, the proof can stand up, it can certainly stand up on a beginning theory. 



