Indeed, it's a very biblical notion that there was a 'beginning', and there will be an end. Perhaps big science funding needs this biblical underpinning to make donors and politicians comfortable. As long at it doesn't jeopardize real science its not really a problem.
However grand cosmological observations and the Big Bang have been diverging for quiet some time now. To keep the Big Bang theory alive theoretical physicists have had to patch together more and more elaborate fudge factor theories to bridge the growing divide between observations and theory. String theory, which has been recently heralded as the final answer to unifying magnetism, strong, weak force, and somehow gravity is a dubious concoction which suggest alternate universes and all sorts of other immeasurable phenomenon - indeed some have called it more philosophy and moving beyond theoretical physics.
But as some leading scientists are starting to question if string theory is really a science, it seems we are approaching the limits of what we can research and theorize while still maintaining consistency with big bang theory. Modified gravity and other related theories I think are starting to shed skepticism on our notions of grand cosmological forces, and I hope soon help rid big science of the quaint notion that everything is related to a big bang.
The Big Bang notion is handy to explain well established grand cosmological theory, and does provide a sort of 'periodical table of elements' story board for teaching the different types of energy and particles of matter. The common periodic table of elements doesn't include theoretical heavy radioactive elements and non-atomic matter, but for common chemistry its a wonderful model. The Big Bang should be just that, a nice way of organizing various aspect of energy and matter in a handy hierarchy, but it should not be used as a straight jacket to prevent out of the box thinking when we see real inconsistent data that universe is far older (and I like to think timeless) than our theories can explain.
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