Gravity in question

Erik Verlinde, professor of Theoretical Physics, and dabbler in String Theory, in a recent book, On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton, challenged the prevailing consensus opinion on gravity – see www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/11/gravity-doesnt-exist-is-gravity-an…. In fact, can gravity, and even the Big Bang, be an illusion, and Verlinde struggles, it seems, with dark matter, dark energy, and space within space. Likewise, he says it is illogical to think there was nothing and then it exploded, and we had lots of everything. In addition, if you think something grows, such as the universe, then something else might become smaller. Here, he is immersed in String Theory, and that kind of thinking, and a different perspective on the universe. According to one of the commenters Verlinde is not spouting gibberish, as another commenter suggested, he is saying the models used to understand the universe do not match 'modern' observations (in the space age). We have had economic models that catastrophically failed, climate models that have promised doom and catastrophe yet to come although over the last few years they have proved to be a penny banger with no oomph, so is the Big Bang model a damp squib? Is it a model that is experiencing similar problems to the other two – inventing dark matter and dark energy to plug the holes because gravity by itself doesn't have the punch.