Nineteen paradigms purporting to explain the origin and evolution of the universe are compared to observation. It is concluded that not one has presented unequivocal evidence relating cosmological distance to redshift or time from the so-called formation of the universe. There are fully formed galaxies at a distance of 10 billion light years indicating an age of at least 20 billion years for the universe and it is probably old enough so that its age is irrelevant. The Big Bang theory, notwithstanding numerous fixes and arbitrarily chosen constants, has failed to predict the primordial abundance of elements and the large scale structure of the universe. It uses physics that have never been tested in any laboratory. The hypotheses of Dark Matter and Dark Energy appear to be artifacts of attempting to fit inappropriate models to the data. The supernovae data indicating acceleration of the expansion can be fit as well by a static model. Thus there is, as yet, no way to make a choice between an expanding universe and a static one. Space is 3-dimensional. It is senseless to appeal to multiverses and branes which can never, in principle, be observed. Quasars exhibit intrinsic redshift and many (perhaps all) of them are local which accounts for their luminosity. It is unlikely that the field of cosmology will advance in the foreseeable future given the sociological forces arrayed against the resources required to develop alternative theories.