You must have missed the part about not “self-referential”...
The fact that models designed to predict a cooling and expanding universe do so, is not the same thing as evidence.
All of the items you’ve listed, bar none, have to be programmed into the mathematical models in order to arrive at the prediction... or could indicate other phenomena not predicted by the theory, or could be used to prove something entirely different.
What were the conditions in a “hot, dense early universe” except those hypothesized by working backward from current conditions?
What universe was used to create those models?
Has the universe always been expanding? could it be cyclic?
That’s why the authors of the letter published by Scientific American are questioning the validity of the model. Not ALL of the parameters were programmed to arrive at the foregone conclusion, and therefore they didn’t.
I don’t have a competing theory... But I have studied the “Big-Bang” theory enough to have noticed its dogmatic nature... I do not think it is beyond questioning by reasonable scientists.
Things like a cyclic universe are not really contradictions of the Big Bang, but more like modifications of it. And yes, that is how they arrive at conditions in the early universe—by going backward in time and extrapolating based on current conditions. But so far the results and predictions tend to agree that the universe was once small, hot, and dense. Nothing in science is a fact, however. It’s a theory.
OFC the theory was constructed to account for the available evidence. DUH. That is what a theory, by definition, does. There is nothing "self-referential" about that: the empirical evidence came from outside of the theory.
My God, the comments on this thread are absolutely the most laughable baloney I have ever read on FR, bar none.