The problem is that you do not know enough to understand what the world-renowned physicists/cosmologists are saying (or are quoted as saying). This isn’t your fault. You simply lack both the knowledge and the experience to see “behind” (as it were) the use of certain words like “predict” to realize what is meant by this term in these contexts, and overall are unfamiliar with the nature of the physical evidence, the nature of physical theory, and the physics literature in general. That is what I have been attempting to explain to you. I have not said that inflationary cosmologies are wrong, or that physicists like Guth, Linde, Weinberg, etc., have somehow made grave mistakes and ended up with grossly inaccurate conclusions, or even that that inflation in general is a failed enterprise.
Rather, I am trying to give you a picture freed from the inevitable sensationalism and drastic oversimplifications (combined with the “curse of knowledge”) one finds in popular physics. Thus, for example, what inflation is claimed to “predict” in the physics literature is couched in terms of equations and combinations of different theories (some of which we do not know beyond that e.g., we demand they be scalar QFTs with certain properties, and possibly more than one such field in the same model as a hybrid model of inflation, and so forth) and leave out all semblance of nuance in popular writings or in quotes found in science reporting.
Nor do I demand that my word be taken on anything. I have access to the relevant journals, conference proceedings, etc., and I have no problem with providing you whatever you wish so that you may see for yourself exactly what it is that is meant when proponents of inflationary and multiverse cosmologies speak of predictions and of evidence.
The point, after all, was and remains that the nature of this “evidence” rests on the metaphysical and philosophical assumptions that are in the main identical in nature to arguments from design. Cosmologists are aware of this. But as the presence of fine-tuning, the lack of naturalness, seemingly special initial conditions, and so forth have and continue to serve in physics in general as guideposts to better theories (more simply, they “cry out” for explanations), and as cosmology has since Einstein become a respected field of physics as opposed to philosophy, many if not most working on such problems make use of the same intuitions. This is particularly true of those I work more closely with of the specialists whose areas of expertise involve cosmological matters (namely, those coming out of particle physics and some of the more obscure areas in mathematical physics, quantum information, etc., such as the developing field of RQI as it relates to e.g., schemes for particle detectors or black holes).
Regardless, you are certainly inclined to believe whatever you wish based on what you perceive to be the claims made by famous physicists or quacks or anything in between. But because well-known physicists have the advantage of having published technical papers and monographs and so forth that state more clearly what it is they have and have not found and the evidence for their claims, in order to actually base your opinions on the views of famous physicists you would need to understand what it is they are referring to in the drastically over-simplified accounts you rely on. You don’t.
