[earglasses]

One explanation worth considering is that the Big Bang never happened, and that anything is possible given infinite time. For thirty reasons that a respected astrophysicist believes in an ageless cosmos, see... http://www.metaresearch.org/cosmology/top10BBproblems.asp
http://www.metaresearch.org/cosmology/BB-top-30.asp

[Robert A Cook PE]

True: One of my favorites is the idea of plasma currents gathering and stringing through the gas clouds that would create the vortices's and spirals we see - those have been created in the high-energy labs.

Also, if you allow for Hawking radiation at the quantum level FROM a black hole to exist at some very low probability, then a steady-state universe is possible: 1 atom per cubic meter appearing from a black hole's center is enough to create a steady-state universe and account for Einstein's "positive pressure" cosmological constant.

Of course, once you get a steady-state universe, then you have all the time in the world to form elements. (Creation of course, isn't constrained, it just moves the 7 days a bit further back a bit that's all. And the ancient shepherds couldn't count 10^40 years anyway - they didn't have a "zero" yet, much less powers-of-ten.)