Atheists often take the view that "science has all the answers". Science indeed has many answers. But the answers depend on the questions! My favourite scientific article is in an edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica from the 1870's, describing in minute detail how malaria was the result of the vapours arising from swamps. The facts were all correct, the reasoning was completely logical, but nobody had realized the truth, that malaria was carried by mosquitoes!
We have also come to realize that the scientists who describe what they observe are not as objective as people once thought. Many of us would be dubious of the results of a "scientific" study into the relationship between smoking and cancer if it was commissioned by a tobacco company. And the same goes for a host of other "scientific" facts - the consequences of cutting down the Brazilian rainforest, the effect of legalizing marijuana, the relationship between televised violence and urban crime, between poverty and divorce, or wherever else people want to find a correlation.
This is not to say that science is useless. Far from it. The methods science uses - testing theory against experience - are essential tools in our walk through life. Science can tell us a lot about what is not true, even if it can tell us less about what really is true. And we do well to listen to scientific opinion about life and the universe around us, even if we feel that science cannot account for the full extent of our knowledge of the world, of God's love for us or of our own situation.
We sometimes sing a hymn which talks of God as "our maker, defender, redeemer and friend." Atheists tend to home in on the first of these, and to forget the other three. And they tend to forget the "our" - God is "our maker" and it is not part of our faith to speculate on where, when or how slugs, cockroaches, mosquitoes or disease bacteria originated. It is our own relationship with God which counts.
Even so, in the end we come back to the first chapter of Genesis. "In the beginning, God created heaven and earth." This was first and foremost an affirmation that God comes first, above all created objects. People were not to worship the sun or the stars or the objects around them. If we want to fit it in with our scientific outlook on life, we need to say that the whole machinery of creation, of cause and effect, depends on God. Cause and effect are linked in time, and time itself is God's creation. So the question of who made God is meaningless - before and after had no meaning without God, the Beginning and the End, the Alpha and the Omega.
The descriptions at the beginning of Genesis are not there to answer scientific questions, but theological ones - what is our relationship with the world around us, and, above all, with God? Science at most can only describe that world, and can tell us little about how we should behave in it. When we say it is God's world, perhaps we are better not to use the various images from Genesis, but to affirm with Paul that "there is one God and Father of us all, who is above all, and through all, and in all." (Eph 4:6)
It is our relationship with God which matters. This relationship is something here and now, not in the past. It is not like the relationship between a potter and the pots in the potter's shop, even though the image lies behind the story of the Garden of Eden in Genesis 2, and behind the tale of Esau and Jacob in Romans 9. We are still clay, and we can still allow ourselves to be formed, to be used in God's service. God is still our maker, now, and we can still offer ourselves to be made now, just as we need to accept God, now too, as our defender, our redeemer, and our friend.
HD