Wendy, I am a serious scientist and a serious Christian. Big Bang is a very good observation/ hypothesis/ theory, and in fact is consistent with everything that this fundamentalist sees in The Book. I’m not certain it is correct, but it is hard for this physicist to find fault with the general observations and points of the general hypothesis.
That's aside from Halton Arp's work and aside from the fact that the idea is so patently idiotic that it should be rejected on purely philosophical grounds before you even get to physics at all. Having all the mass of the universe collapsed to a point would be the ultimate black hole; nothing would ever "bang" its way out of that.
Likewise having a supposedly omniscient and omnipotent God suddenly 6K years ago or 17B years ago either one, doesn't matter, suddenly decide that creating a universe would be a cool thing to do while the idea had never occurred to him previously is basically against all logic.
Like I say the idea strikes me as bad physics and bad religion rolled into a package. The conclusion I come to is that the universe, like God, is basically eternal, the only evidence there has ever been for a "big bang" or expanding universe is, as Arp has demonstrated, nothing more than a misinterpretation of redshift data, and the creation stories we read in literature refer to the creation of our local environment and biosphere, and not to the universe itself.