If you are not my wife, then perhaps you have been spared my Hubris-of-Scientists tirade. Let's fix that.
I enjoy science, but practitioners of science tend to love the certainty that mathematics can bring, and then love of certainty begins to occlude impartial judgment, and next stop is ridicule for not agreeing with everything that leaves their mouths, and hey, no thanks.
An unnerving number of scientists act as though what we know about science is carved in stone, and they are the various Moseses bringing it off the mount. The loudest priests of this religion would deny the metaphor, but that fitting shoe calls the kettle black and now they have to lie in it.
The reality is that science is written on a whiteboard, ready to be erased, revised, rewritten as soon as better data show up. At best, you can circle part of it and mark it DNE, but really, if someone else needs that space, they're gonna take it out.
I find this ignorant certainty especially galling in astronomy, where they make shit up on a regular basis, but seem to forget that many of their hypotheses are best guesses. (And frankly, not even I want to get started on anthropology and paleontology, so I won't.)
Which is the point of this American Scientist article, Modern Cosmology: Science or Folktale. I'd recommend you read the whole thing, but the chances of you being as interested in this as I am are comically small. So here's the summary, taken from the article:
...modern cosmology has at best very flimsy observational support.
I'm just glad somebody's saying it is all.
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