Okay Intelligent Designers, and out-in-the-open Creationists, here's a challenge. You say that science can't explain where the universe came from. You say it can't possibly have come from nothing. You say that God made everything. It's written in the Bible: God created the heavens and the earth and all life in six days, and rested on the seventh. We, as atheists, as so-called 'believers in the religion of science' cannot explain the origins of the universe, and therefore you look down on us and tell us that we are wrong. So my challenge to you is this:

You say that God did it. Fair enough. How did he do it?

That's right, not who, but how. You say that God made everything. So tell us how. Did he create each atom one by one and stick them all together? Did he get a big box of stars and suns and shake them out into space? At some point in time there was no universe. So if God made it, he must have started with nothing, and made it from nothing. How is that possible?

If scientists can't explain it, but the Bible can, then let anyone who is a Bible scholar, and who also knows his science, explain how God made the universe. Because if you can't, then you have as much knowledge of the origins of the universe as the rest of us.

Will the first Creationist ever to openly admit that he doesn't actually know please step forward. Then can we finally all agree, theists and atheists, that we simply do not know where the universe came from? Atheists are never afraid to say that we don't know. Only when you admit to not knowing the answers can you work to find the explanations, the answers that we all want to know.

But if you know it all already, if you know that God made everything we see around us, then all you need to do is share the information with us: how did he do it?

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Footnote: Don't think the universe can come from nothing? Welcome to Vacuum Fluctuations.

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Footnote: The idea for this question came from two sources. The first, and most obvious, is the relentless Christian insistence that scientists cannot explain where the original matter/energy came from which gave rise to the universe in the process we call the Big Bang Theory. The second was an interview of Richard Dawkins conducted by Bill O'Reilly, which I've blogged about before (15 June 2007). I've attached the interview video again, but here is the relevant part of the conversation:

O'Reilly: I'm throwing in with Jesus rather than throwing in with you guys, because you guys can't tell me how it all got here. You guys don't know.

Dawkins: We're working on it.

O'Reilly: When you get it, maybe I'll listen.

O'Reilly was so proud of that come-back that he related his 'victory' in other interviews, and wrote about it in his own blog column. But he is as clueless as anyone, and furthermore he completely misses the point.

Dawkins asserts that scientific principles are behind the origins of the universe, but we don't know how, hence 'we're working on it'. O'Reilly thinks that God/Jesus did it... but that is not how, that is who. Christians have no more knowledge than scientists, and God is no more an answer to 'how did the universe get here?' than it is to 'what is the capital city of Spain?'. It's the answer to an entirely different question. Putting it another way, I could pose the question 'how do you bake a loaf of bread?' But what kind of a non-answer is 'the baker did it'?

Science is not looking for a creator, it is looking for an explanation. In science these explanations are known as theories. We are, indeed, working on it.