Instead of questioning whether the Big Bang assumption is true, astrophysicists prefer to perform endless "gymnastics" to try to make the mounting contrary data fit their theory about how the universe began.
Are you kidding? An astrophysicist that could come up with a new model that explains the current data would win a Nobel prize and earth shattering levels of notoriety.
The data found doesn't contradict the big bang in any shape or form. It does challenge beliefs around black hole formation.
The reason for the big bang model is because based on all our measurements of all the visible universe, it appears that everything is spreading out. Any new model needs to explain why it is the universe appears to be spreading out.
There's not a scientist alive that wouldn't like to discover that "actually a fundamental principle about my field of study is completely wrong". But that takes hard work, evidence, and models which better fit than the previous ones did. You need to find something that can't be explained with the old model and can only be explained with the new model.
The Big Bang is an almost infinitely malleable story, contorted to comport with almost anything we observe. But how is this useful? The predictions of this theory continually fail. The farther we look, the more we see stars, galaxies, black holes, and other structures that shouldn't exist according to this model.
What if the universe doesn't have a naturalistic origin, but was created by God? How much greater would our understanding of the world be if more scientists focused on studying present phenomena rather than trying to fit stories about the past with observed data?
> The predictions of this theory continually fail.
No they don't. There are surprising and unexplained aspect (why is the expansion currently accelerating? That's an unknown afaik). But the baseline prediction and observation that the universe is expanding have yet to see any sort of contradicting evidence.
> The farther we look, the more we see stars, galaxies, black holes, and other structures that shouldn't exist according to this model.
That's just hogwash from answers in genesis. Name an example of a black hole that "shouldn't exist" according to the big bang theory.
> What if the universe doesn't have a naturalistic origin
The big bang says nothing about the origin of the universe. It is merely a description of the current observable universe. We don't know what caused the big bang, if this is the only big bang, or if the universe is actually infinite in size. We don't know if our current observable region is just one in a cosmos of regions.
> but was created by God?
God doesn't exist, so no. But even if I granted god does exist, it could be completely compatible with the big bang as being the ultimate cause of it or some earlier event which triggered it. Certainly god as envisioned through fundamentalist Christianity is incompatible with the big bang, there is a mountain of evidence against that god.
> How much greater would our understanding of the world be if more scientists focused on studying present phenomena rather than trying to fit stories about the past with observed data?
That's what they do. You have a completely false notion of what scientists and astrophysicists are doing. They aren't trying to "fit to the model" they are trying to expand understanding and change the model to match observations. There's no dogma in science and they get the most excited when something unexplained is observed.
The data found doesn't contradict the big bang in any shape or form. It does challenge beliefs around black hole formation.
The reason for the big bang model is because based on all our measurements of all the visible universe, it appears that everything is spreading out. Any new model needs to explain why it is the universe appears to be spreading out.
There's not a scientist alive that wouldn't like to discover that "actually a fundamental principle about my field of study is completely wrong". But that takes hard work, evidence, and models which better fit than the previous ones did. You need to find something that can't be explained with the old model and can only be explained with the new model.