I have been looking into the history of support and opposition to big bang theory.
From around 1950 to 1965, the support for these theories was evenly divided, with a slight imbalance arising from the fact that the Big Bang theory could explain both the formation and the observed abundances of hydrogen and helium, whereas the Steady State could explain how they were formed, but not why they should have the observed abundances. However, the observational evidence began to support the idea that the universe evolved from a hot dense state. Objects such as quasars and radio galaxies were observed to be much more common at large distances (therefore in the distant past) than in the nearby universe, whereas the Steady State predicted that the average properties of the universe should be unchanging with time. In addition, the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation in 1964 was considered the death knell of the Steady State, although this prediction was only qualitative, and failed to predict the exact temperature of the CMB. (The key big bang prediction is the black-body spectrum of the CMB, which was not measured with high accuracy until COBE in 1990).
Science goes with the evidence. Although by the time I came into the world the evidence for big bang was conclusive, and so the only opposition I saw came from religious people. It is well to mention it took time for this evidence to be found in the 37 years after it was proposed in 1927. The fabrication by Redford of this idea that science was opposed to the theory from this is just absurd. That the Catholic church supported the theory from 1951 (ahead of the conclusive evidence) when many Protestant groups did not, also doesn’t make Redford’s revision of history correct. The most we can say is that both the scientific community and Christianity were divided on the acceptance of the theory in the early days after it was proposed. But the fact remains that the scientific community followed where the evidence pointed while the Christian denominations were less reasonable in response to it.