It is usually argued by theists that if you can explain how could everything in the universe be not created or that everything in the universe do not require a creator to come to existence the way it is, you still cannot explain how the universe itself came to existence. Everything had a previous cause and came from something else preceding it but what started all this? Why is there matter at all? Why is there a universe that kept developing until all the stars, planets, and galaxies within it were developed gradually on their own? From where did the matter that initially made all this up come from? Who created the universe? Who created any matter in the universe? And then Theists claim that God is responsible for all this. If you are going to assume that nothing was created in its current form from the start by a God, but has developed or evolved from something else preceding it gradually, whether this thing is biological or non-biological, you cannot explain the initial stuff that from which everything there is came from or started to deviate or develop from. But this criticism can be refuted by the understanding that matter need not be created to come to existence. That is aside from responding to the statement of “if everything has a cause, then who caused the universe and what’s in it?” If it is assumed to be God, then who created or caused this God?

Beautifully explained, the following is how the existence of matter is not proof of the existence of God and that matter does not require to be created by a God to come to existence.

 

“Until early in the twentieth century, there were strong indications that one or more miracles were required to create the universe. The universe currently contains a large amount of matter that is characterized by the physical quantity we define as mass. Prior to the twentieth century, it was believed that matter could neither be created nor destroyed, just changed from one type to another. So the very existence of matter seemed to be a miracle, a violation of the assumed law of conservation of mass that occurred just once—at the creation.
However, in his special theory of relativity published in 1905, Albert Einstein showed that matter can be created out of energy and can disappear into energy. What all science writers call “Einstein’s famous equation,” E = mc2, relates the mass m of a body to an equivalent rest energy, E, where c is a universal constant, the speed of light in a vacuum. That is, a body at rest still contains energy.
When a body is moving, it carries an additional energy of motion called kinetic energy. In chemical and nuclear interactions, kinetic energy can be converted into rest energy, which is equivalent to generating mass.3 Also, the reverse happens; mass or rest energy can be converted into kinetic energy. In that way, chemical and nuclear interactions can generate kinetic energy, which then can be used to run engines or blow things up.
So, the existence of mass in the universe violates no law of nature. Mass can come from energy. But, then, where does the energy come from? The law of conservation of energy, also known as the first law of thermodynamics, requires that energy come from somewhere. In principle, the creation hypothesis could be confirmed by the direct observation or theoretical requirement that conservation of energy was violated 13.7 billion years ago at the start of the big bang.
However, neither observations nor theory indicates this to have been the case. The first law allows energy to convert from one type to another as long as the total for a closed system remains fixed. Remarkably, the total energy of the universe appears to be zero. As famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking said in his 1988 best seller, A Brief History of Time, “In the case of a universe that is approximately uniform in space, one can show that the negative gravitational energy exactly cancels the positive energy represented by the matter. So the total energy of the universe is zero.4 Specifically, within small measurement errors, the mean energy density of the universe is exactly what it should be for a universe that appeared from an initial state of zero energy, within a small quantum uncertainty.5
A close balance between positive and negative energy is predicted by the modern extension of the big bang theory called the inflationary big bang, according to which the universe underwent a period of rapid, exponential inflation during a tiny fraction of its first second.6 The inflationary theory has recently undergone a number of stringent observational tests that would have been sufficient to prove it false. So far, it has successfully passed all these tests.
In short, the existence of matter and energy in the universe did not require the violation of energy conservation at the assumed creation. In fact, the data strongly support the hypothesis that no such miracle occurred. If we regard such a miracle as predicted by the creator hypothesis, then that prediction is not confirmed.
This example also serves to once more refute the assertion that science has nothing to say about God. Suppose our measurement of the mass density of the universe had not turned out to be exactly the value required for a universe to have begun from a state of zero energy. Then we would have had a legitimate, scientific reason to conclude that a miracle, namely, a violation of energy conservation, was needed to bring the universe into being. While this might not conclusively prove the existence of a creator to everyone’s satisfaction, it would certainly be a strong mark in his favor.” ~ Victor J. Stenger.

It is commonly argued that it is too unconvincing that the entire universe and all that is in it arrived to existence through mere chance. It is mistakenly believed by a lot of theists that natural selection is a theory of chance although in fact it is the opposite. Everything that exists in the universe and even the universe itself is statistically impossible to be the way it is or to come to existence through chance. Regardless of how impossible the thing that you are trying to explain through it being created by an intelligent designer or intelligent creator, the creator or designer himself will be just as impossible to come to existence by chance or without having been designed by an intelligent designer or intelligent creator as well. There is nothing more improbable to not have been created without a creator or a designer more than God himself. Design is not the only alternative to chance. If chance is improbable then so is design, because in case of design, it would always be returning back to chance to explain the designer, which is deemed improbable by theists, and so the other alternative to the designer or creator coming to existence by chance is that the creator or designer was in turn created or designed by another entity or creator or designer. This is why invoking an intelligent creator or intelligent designer regresses us back to the original problem of all there is having come to existence through chance, as long as you deny that the original creator or God or designer didn’t come to existence through being created or designed by another entity or intelligent creator or intelligent designer as well. Aside from Natural Selection having been proven to be what has actually occurred in our real world, theoretically it can explain how something that is too improbable to have emerged by chance came to be or came to exist. Natural selection works. Or at least it would work if it were real. Unlike creationism or chance or design as alternative explanations to something that is statistically almost impossible to occur or be the way it is now. Something could have existed without being impossible to exist through chance. But if this probability is too low, because it is too complex, or very complex to emerge through coincidence, then an alternate explanation is sought. One cannot explain how something that is too complex to have come to existence through chance came to existence by stating that it was created or designed by a creator or designer because this attempts to explain it through a way that leads to chance being the end explanation of it (which is the case of design or creation). On the other hand there is another explanation or theory that can explain that very great improbability without resorting to something that would end up explaining that problem through chance. Natural Selection succeeds at this attempt. Through chunking or dividing, the collective impossible becomes a series of tiny improbabilities that are not too impossible to occur in the real world. Evolution happened gradually through some countless tiny steps that took place through a very long time interval the total of which has led to what seems to be impossible to occur in one step, and this is how the end result we have today concerning the universe and any entity or anything inside the universe managed to make it to being that complex without having been created or designed. It is now not too improbable to reach those huge results. Because it didn’t happen all in one giant step or jump, but through a large number of small steps that each of which isn’t impossible to take place separately or alone in the real world. Just as this was possible with Biological Evolution, this could also be possible with the physical world that is outside the realm of Biology.

“Once again, intelligent design is not the proper alternative to chance. Natural selection is not only a parsimonious, plausible, and elegant solution; it is the only workable alternative to chance that has ever been suggested. Intelligent design suffers from exactly the same objection as chance. It is simply not a plausible solution to the riddle of statistical improbability. And the higher the improbability, the more implausible intelligent design becomes. Seen clearly, intelligent design will turn out to be a redoubling of the problem. Once again, this is because the designer himself (/herself/itself) immediately raises the bigger problem of his own origin. Any entity capable of intelligently designing something as improbable as a Dutchman’s Pipe (or a universe) would have to be even more improbable than a Dutchman’s Pipe. Far from terminating the vicious regress, God aggravates it with a vengeance.

Creationist “logic” is always the same. Some natural phenomenon is too statistically improbable, too complex, too beautiful, too awe-inspiring to have come into existence by chance. Design is the only alternative to chance that the authors can imagine. Therefore a designer must have done it. And science’s answer to this faulty logic is also always the same. Design is not the only alternative to chance. Natural selection is a better alternative. Indeed, design is not a real alternative at all because it raises an even bigger problem than it solves: who designed the designer? Chance and design both fail as solutions to the problem of statistical improbability, because one of them is the problem, and the other one regresses to it. Natural selection is a real solution. It is the only workable solution that has ever been suggested. And it is not only a workable solution, it is a solution of stunning elegance and power.

What is it that makes natural selection succeed as a solution to the problem of improbability, where chance and design both fail at the starting gate? The answer is that natural selection is a cumulative process, which breaks the problem of improbability up into small pieces. Each of the small pieces is slightly improbable, but not prohibitively so. When large numbers of these slightly improbable events are stacked up in series, the end product of the accumulation is very very improbable indeed, improbable enough to be far beyond the reach of chance. It is these end products that form the subjects of the creationist’s wearisomely recycled argument. The creationist completely misses the point, because he (women should for once not mind being excluded by the pronoun) insists on treating the genesis of statistical improbability as a single, one-off event. He doesn’t understand the power of accumulation.

Do not just declare things to be irreducibly complex; the chances are that you haven’t looked carefully enough at the details, or thought carefully enough about them. The creationists are right that, if genuinely irreducible complexity could be properly demonstrated, it would wreck Darwin’s theory. Darwin himself said as much: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.” Darwin could find no such case, and nor has anybody since Darwin’s time, despite strenuous, indeed desperate, efforts. Many candidates for this holy grail of creationism have been proposed. None has stood up to analysis.
In any case, even though genuinely irreducible complexity would wreck Darwin’s theory if it were ever found, who is to say that it wouldn’t wreck the intelligent design theory as well? Indeed, it already has wrecked the intelligent design theory, for, as I keep saying and will say again, however little we know about God, the one thing we can be sure of is that he would have to be very very complex and presumably irreducibly so!” ~ Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion.