What is your personal opinion about big bang cosmology?

I think it's an astonishingly good theory!

I consider myself very supportive of the general framework of the theory and its 'Inflationary' extension. I have seen many many challenges come and go; they come with great fanfare and are heralded in the newspapers, but when they vanish, they do so in silence. The Steady State Theory is one such example. Chronometric Cosmology is another. Only big bang cosmology remains the best idea we have that satisfies the observational constraints with out violating what we understand about physics...which is considerable!

I think that 21st century cosmology will fill in the details very rapidly, and there are many exciting findings just around the corner in the next decade or so. If you define the essential message of big bang cosmology as

1) The origin of our universe occurred a finite number of years ago;

2) Its current expansion issues from a much smaller, hotter and denser state in the past;

3) Hydrogen, helium, deuterium and lithium were created from this primeval fireball;

4)The cosmic background radiation is the fireball light from this event.

Only the big bang theory seems capable of explaining these 'cosmological' features.

I think it will be a very long time before we find a better theory that doesn't look a lot like big bang cosmology. We should not be embarrassed that we landed upon this comprehensive theory so quickly after telescope technology let us see the distant galaxies more clearly. Newton had even less to work from, but we still use his basic 'mechanics' 300 years later because they work...and nothing else seems to!