Prior to the 1920's, scientists had always assumed that the universe was stationary and eternal.  Tremors of the impending earthquake that would topple this traditional cosmology were first felt in 1917, when Albert Einstein made a comological application of his newly discovered gravitational theory, the General Theory of Relativity (GR).  To his chagrin, Enstein found that GR would not permit an eternal, static model of the universe unless he fudged the equations in order to offset the gravitational effect of matter. ...  By taking this feature of Einstein's model seriously, the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedman and the Belgian astornomer Georges Lamaître were able to formulate independently in the 1920s solutions to his equations which predicted an expanding universe. ...

In 1929 the American astronomer Edwin Hubble showed that the light from distant galaxies is systematically shifted toward the red end of the spectrum.  This red-shift was taken to be a Doppler effect indicating that the light sources were receding in the line of sight.  Incredibly, what Hubble had discovered was the expansion of the universe predicted by Friedman and Lamaître on the basis of Einstein's GR. ...

The standard Big Bang model, as the Friedman-Lamaître model came to be called, thus describes a universe which is not eternal in the past, but which came into being a finite time ago.  Moreover — and this deserves underscoring — the origin it posits is an absolute origin out of nothing.  For not only all matter and energy, but space and time themselves come into being at the initial cosmological singularity. ...

The Standard Model's prediction of an absolute beginning has persisted through a century of astonishing progress in theoretical and observational cosmology and survived an onslaught of alternative theories.  With each successive failure of alternate cosmogonic theories to avoid the absolute beginning of the universe predicted by the Standard Model, that prediction has been corroborated.  It can be confidently said that no comogonic model has been as repeatedly verified in its predictions and as corroborated by attempts at its falsification, as the Standard Big Bang Model.