I am incline to agree with Steve here, we don't really know how the universe came to exist, maybe one day we will, but I doubt it, but I am sure we will form a more accurate view of what happened back then as our knowledge and understanding of the universe increase.
Now then, to claim that a god or gods caused this is nothing more than idle speculation with no basis in evidence, the only intelecually honest position, in my opinion, is to accept that we do not know. There is no need or purpouse to fill that void in our knowledge with a fictitious entity, actually, it could be argued that it can be detrimental to advancing our understanding. In just one example if you atribute a particular phenomenon to the supernatural causing it there is no need to investigate further as you have an answer though that phenomenon more than likely has a perfectly good naturalistic explanation behind it. Lightning was though to be caused by some god or another, now we have discovered that it is not.
As to the intelligent design argument for living beings (not that anyone has really used it here as far as I can tell, just geting this off my chest), it fails rather miserably, becuse if we were all engineeredd by an intelligent being, that was one bloody inept engineer. Take the human eye for instance, something requently used by the proponents of hte design argument as something that could not arrise on its own due to natural selection, there is a blind spot where the optical nerve attaches to the retina and because of how the retian is placed it can become detatched causing blindness, either temporary or permanent. I don't know about you but that is a pretty poor design. Oddly ennough cephalopod eyes do not suffer from those same problems and in some cases have the added advantage of being able to see the polarization of light.
I have probably gone off track a bit with my nonsensical rant. Oh well.
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