First cause

"How can you look at this world, at this universe and all its wonder and complexity and imagine that it came about 'by accident'?" Believers have been posing this question for ages, and it respresents the most essential trump card in the deck of dogma. The non-believer is asked, nay, dared to try to explain how something (especially something as big as the universe) can come from nothing. We know of no circumstance during which something spontaneously springs into being from nothingness, thus something must have made the universe.
Our response: we do not know how the universe came to be spontaneously. So we have lost, no? We have been thwarted by the most simple, fundamental argument for belief. Not exactly, for the believer has simply moved the argument for first cause back a step. If god made the universe, than what made god? The argument for first cause claims that something simply can not spring from nothing, and in claiming so, disproves the creator it's attempting to validate. Instead of delivering a definitive proof of divine creation, this argument leaves us with an infinite line of creation extending backwards in time: our universe was created by god, who was created by something else, which was created by something else, and so on and so forth. Further, in the process of looking backwards, we fail to see a solution to the original problem, we fail to find a first cause.
Further, where is the evidence for the first cause? Is the supposed necessity of a first cause to stand as evidence for its existence? When we look at the universe, we see no clearly expressed purpose for its myriad of parts; we see no signatures or "made by god" stamps; we certainly see no indication that all of this was made for us.
Are we to use the thousands of years old religious texts as evidence?; those texts which make no mention of the big bang or the billions of years during which the universe was made only of stars for the heavy elements necessary to form planets had not yet been fused? Any reasonable person looking at the timeline of events should clearly see what has happened: thousands of years ago, when men had no understanding of the universe or its origins, they came up with a story to explain things as best they could, "man makes things, thus something like man, but more powerful made everything else." Since then science has replaced speculation, and our understanding of the universe has increased exponentially. Yet, people are attempting to make the new information fit the original script; it's as though we're trying to fit a million new puzzle pieces into a puzzle which originally fit ten.
If we're talking evidence, then the Torah, Bible and Qu'ran have been disproven centuries ago. God supposedly revealed himself to a select few and told them how the universe was made. Yet, the story does not fit reality, and thus those books have been clearly debunked.
There are some who have attempted to resolve the inherent flaw of the first cause argument by claiming that the creator is infinite, and therefor exempt from the temporal necessity of first cause. There was a time when scientists appealed to this very argument in explaining the origins of the universe, however the advent of relativity physics revealed that the universe did in fact have a beginning. Unfortunately, general relativity failed to demonstrate that god too had a beginning (not surprising considering that, in the hundreds of years of modern science science has not found one shred of evidence for his existence). Thus proponents of the infinite god pat themselves on the back, happy to have solved the problem of first cause. Unfortunately, they haven't. First of all, we must refer back to the fact that an infinite creator responsible for the big bang is not described by any religious text. Not one creation story, outside of science, describes the big bang, and thus no religion has been validated by this argument.
Further one must admit that, since there is no evidence linking a creator of the big bang to the seven-days-creator of the bible, any infinite deity one could imagine would theoretically satisfy the first cause equation. How's this: Father Positive and Mother Negative existed infinitly prior to the inception of the universe. Eventually they decided to copulate, and in the final throws of their passion, the universe exploded forth and all the particles of the universe (all their wee children) were endowed with some variation of their respective charges. This story is clearly ridiculous as it doesn't explain anything about the creators of the universe or their intentions for it, nor does it provide any supporting evidence, but in terms of solving the issue of first cause it works.
Here's another story: the first law of thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but can change form. Further, another law of physics demonstrates that mass is itself a form of energy. Is it not possible that energy itself is infinite, at at some point in time interacted in such a way as to change form and produce matter? If we are going to speak in terms of infinity, why not apply the concept to something scientifically supported? Why instead must we appeal to a being which we have no direct reason to believe in? Here we are appealing to Occam's razor, the concept that, all things being equal, the simplest solution is the best. A divine creator is anything but the simplest solution. The idea raises a myriad of questions: where does the creator reside?; did he create that place too?; why did he create the universe? why create it the way it is? Appealing to the concept of an infinite creator simply creates more questions than it hopes to answer.