[maurile]

[ QUOTE ]
1) My friend makes the common argument that science and religion are diametrically opposed.

[/ QUOTE ]
They're not.

[ QUOTE ]
2) My friend also likes to argue by asking the age old atheistic query, "Who created God?"

[/ QUOTE ]
Right. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If anything need not have a cause, then the universe is just as good a candidate as God. Positing a God, therefore, in order to answer the question, "Who caused the universe?" is just plain silly. Who caused God?

By the way, we don't know whether the universe had a beginning. Either possibility -- that it did, or that it didn't -- is consistent with Big Bang theory. Big Bang theory says that the universe has a finite age, but that's not the same thing. An infinite chain of causes and effects can be fit into a finite period of time in much the same way that an infinite series can have a finite sum (e.g., 2 = 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 ...).

Moreover, even if the universe did have a beginning, that does mean it was caused. At the quantum level, uncaused phenomena happen all the time. Perhaps the universe began as an uncaused quantum tunneling in a true vacuum.