I did not change my question. I changed the wording of my question to better convey what I meant. Steady-state cosmology was not "accepted" it had at least one very significant competitor and there was much debate over the issue.
The point is that not all of scientific knowledge is equal, and there are more options open to us than simply "belief" or "nonbelief". We don't have to accept or reject things, but rather we can have degrees of confidence in them. sandy, you could make a very strong argument that we should have little confidence in, say, the RNA world hypothesis (concerning abiogenesis) or string theory (a.k.a. M-theory). There is much debate amongst the scientific community regarding these ideas.
However, your suggestion that, because many scientific hypotheses are proved wrong, we can't have any confidence in any scientific hypothesis/theory/law, is absurd. Evolution, germ theory, Newton's laws, Kepler's laws, the ideal gas laws, Maxwell's laws of electromagnetism, the conservation of energy, thermodynamics, Einstein's mass-energy equivalence and special and general relativity, quantum electrodynamics....these are things that have been subjected to rigorous testing for many years and have passed the test time and again, things that have been consistently supported by independent research from all different fields. It would be silly to interpret the failure of steady-state cosmology as good reason to suspect germ theory or thermodynamics, because steady-state cosmology was not nearly as well-supported and widely accepted as germ theory or thermodynamics.
For goodness' sake, automobiles, bridges, skyscrapers, satellites, cellular phones, computers, aircraft, laser-guided missiles, nuclear power, the mapping of the human genome....it's hard to believe that all this stuff would work if the knowledge on which it was based weren't at least somewhat close to the reality it models. :help:
