Has Cosmology Advanced in Recent Years?

Cosmologists are astronomers who study the universe as
a whole. The idea of the universe as a whole presents
some difficulty both to science and philosophy. In science,
because we can only study parts of a system unknown in
its totality. Moreover there are features of scientific cosmology
which set it apart from other sciences: we cannot
in cosmology speak of experiments or verifiable predictions
(Cosmologists are prophets of the past!). We can
only check astronomical observations with theories and
models. Philosophically, the connection between models
of the universe and reality, the intelligibility of an universe
as an independently existing entity and the perennial
questions about the origin of the universe remain unsolved.