Here is a link to an article titled "Modern Cosmology: Science or Folktale?" by Michael J. Disney who is emeritus professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy at Cardiff University...
http://www.americanscientist.org/tem...d/55839/page/1

The article is highly critical of the way cosmology has been practiced arguing that the number of theoretical entities has outstripped the number of observations supporting them, as the author points out:

"Cosmological theories have grown increasingly complex.... The number of independent observations relevant to cosmology has also grown over time, but it has always been less than the number of free parameters in the reigning theory."

The author uses dark energy, dark matter, and inflation as examples of these folktale-like theoretical entities upon which the concordance model is based. This article, in my opinion, illustrates the fragility of certain aspects of modern cosmology. The longer these entities continue to exist without direct evidence for their existence the less scientists should continue to accept them as taken for granted and established. My unofficial thesis, however, is that the discovery of dark matter particles, if they are found, will go a long way, longer then the discovery of the CMB, toward debunking skeptics such as the author of this article. Cosmologists will be able to say, hey, this was not a folktale-like theoretical entity afterall, it has more or less the properties we were inferring using a variety of observations and it provided the seeds for galaxy formation.

In any case, the tone and content of the article bear an uncanny resemblence to the tone and content of Jerry's arguments. The parameters in theory versus independent observation graph sums up Jerry's argument quite well. So, I thought he would like the article and I thought I'd put it out here for he and others to comment on criticize, etc.