The following is the first paragraph from this website:
Big Bang a Big Loser in 2005



For those who have a lot of confidence in the Big Bang theory please watch their video (which is 1 hr long) or at least read through some of their material before you try to shoot it down.

Fascinating stuff. Thank you.

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"Esse est percipii."

Well, I simply cannot say I'm impressed, which includes the fact that they appear to be very much a commercial enterprise.

The Big Bang is alive and well and, as a matter of fact, recent observations have continued to verify that the cosmologists appear to be on the right track. However, we're far from knowing exactly what caused the Big Bang or even whether it might actually be a Big Bounce, as the most recent article about it in Scientific American discusses. IOW, did our universe become "created" when our previous universe contracted and then re-expanded? There are some cosmologists who think we may be able to know that answer within the next ten years. Oh, if I only live long enough!

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"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."-- Einstein

Here is some more about this matter from this source:
cosmologystatement.org

You see now why some of these groups have to be a commercial enterprise as they receive no funding.
I thought the dark ages were over, but they seem to be quite alive and well in many parts of our world.

"The big bang today relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities, things that we have never observed-- inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent examples....In no other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation. It would, at the least, raise serious questions about the validity of the underlying theory."

I'd disagree with that statement, Mendel's works on plants showing hereditary traits wasn't known to Darwin but a big part of this Theory was the passing of hereditary traits through the generations, which we now know as the field of genetics. Both of them relied on hypothetical entities, at the time no one was able to demonstrate the existence of DNA and RNA but now this knowledge has bridged the gap between what these two people observed and the hypothesises and theories generated as a result.

I think they are using a logical fallacy, which is to point at gaps in our knowledge and claim this makes it all false. Really, pointing to the gaps in our knowledge isn't enough - what the writers really need to do is not claim the Big Bang theory is false but come up with a better theory that explains what we observe. It would be a very difficult thing to do given there are other competing theories out there (meaning there is robust debate by physicists on this) and the Big Bang theory is still the one at this stage that explains the data best but that's the challenge facing all scientists in the field.

If they can do this, there's a Nobel Prize waiting for them.

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Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood. Marie Curie

There is both mathematical evidence and evidence obtained from various space probes that indicate that there almost undoubtedly was a big bang or big bounce roughly 13.7 b. years ago, so it does indeed qualify as a scientific theory at this time.

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"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."-- Einstein

Maybe a big event of some kind, but we cannot take the red-shift and use that as proof of anything as there are discovered and logged anomalies regarding that being used as any kind of measuring stick.
Really, the point of this thread was not to be argumentative, but to bring up the fact that there are problems with the existing dominant theory and show that there are other ideas out there which are getting squashed by the ones in authority who say that, look, we have a theory already, now quit trying to derail it, support it or shut up.
This is indeed going on in so many fields.

Look at the climate change debate for example, there are differing points of view, but instead of being rational and open-minded, many are becoming quite hostile to those they are labeling as dissenters.
How is that rational?
It is political and is not rational whatsoever.

There are many scientists who are very rational who say that the sun is the driver of climate change, but how can you gain any political ground from that?
You can't, and so the debate becomes a circus and a mudslinging match as those who are blaming climate change on humans have a political agenda which hinges on that theory being dominant.

The same with the evolution vs. intelligent design, allopathic vs. wholistic medicine and many others.
All I see is political battles being fought here and scientists and scholars are the soldiers being manipulated with propaganda and coercion (ya want to keep your tenure, then toe the line)

Surely we learned the folly of that from studying science history and seeing all the authoritarian fools who tried to use their position of authority to squash the dissenting voices, which were later vindicated as being correct????
We are not so modern or progressive that we have overcome this fault as it is there in so many arenas.

Red-shift is only one tool that's been used to determine the BB theory.

Also, scientists are far less likely to be conformists than to criticize the concepts of those who they disagree with, as reading the letters to the editor shows in Scientific American or in scientific journals indicates. The groups of scientists who tend to feel the most pressure to conform are those who work for specific businesses and corporations, but the researchers who work through universities especially have a much freer hand.

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"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."-- Einstein