The big bang and the Enlightenment: we are lucky to be alive at the time we learned how the universe began

After last night's Paralympic ceremony, everyone seems to be talking about the big bang and the Enlightenment. M'colleague Peter Mullen thinks the former is an "unproven scientistic conjecture". Is he right? Let's have a look at the strands of evidence that support the hypothesis that the universe arose from a singularity. In the 19th century, [...]