I certainly didn’t start out questioning the cosmological model, but in reading Hawking’s; A Brief History of Time, when it first came out, he made a point about cosmological theory which stood out to me, as not supporting an expanding universe.

Mathematically referred to as “Omega=1,” it is that the cumulative expansion and the cumulative gravity balance out, resulting in what amounts to overall “flat space.” How this is interpreted is the rate of expansion is stable, neither increasing, or decreasing, yet the only way it made sense to me, is that if the space between galaxies is expanding in inverse proportion to the rate it is collapsing into them, why would the overall universe expand? Think of the ball on a rubber sheet analogy of gravity; Now place the sheet over water, such that while the sheet sinks under the ball, it is consequently pushed up where there is minimal mass and gravity. Such that they balance out. Now if we can observe a galaxy from very far away, necessarily the light can only have traveled the spaces between galaxies, so it is “stretched” by this effect.

I could go on and having debated it for 25 years over the internet, I’ve only become more convinced and the argument has further solidified. Though I’m not asking you to believe me, versus the entire cosmological community, but just putting it out there.

If you want a few links, here is one observing that “packets” of light do redshift over distance;

https://fqxi.org/data/forum-attachments/2008CChristov_WaveMotion_45_154_EvolutionWavePackets.pdf

Here is a collection of anomalies I’d added to over the years;

The Quasar Cluster that Kills the Cosmological Principle?

I would also point out that if redshift is an optical effect, than what is called “background radiation,” presumably the leftover radiation of the initial event, or shortly after the Inflation stage, would actually be the light of ever further sources shifted entirely off the visible spectrum and down into black body radiation. Since the James Webb Space Telescope has been designed to study this energy, I am predicting that on further examination it proves to be coming from diverse sources, not an initial event.

Here is an essay I wrote on it;

The Confessions of a Cosmic Heretic

Not that you have to go through all this, just that it’s something which I’ve put a bit of thought into. There was a fairly broad community of Big Bang non-believers, but it’s faded over the years.