Now evolution and Big Bag are the big dogmas. They are the status quo today. They are not teached as theories that could be improved or even replaced in the future with something better, but as what already happened, no doubt about them. You see people talking about the first femtoseconds of the Universe with absolute confidence.
How did cosmologists acquire the confidence to speculate about the first moments of the Universe? By spending a century developing theories that were continously improved and replaced.
Nobody came down the mountain bearing stone tablets inscribed with the concepts of red shift, cosmic background radiation or cosmological inflation. These concepts were radically anti-dogmatic in their time. Today's theories will probably be overthrown by something similarly radical eventually.
How did cosmologists acquire the confidence to speculate about the first moments of the Universe? By spending a century developing theories that were continously improved and replaced.
Nobody came down the mountain bearing stone tablets inscribed with the concepts of red shift, cosmic background radiation or cosmological inflation. These concepts were radically anti-dogmatic in their time. Today's theories will probably be overthrown by something similarly radical eventually.