There have been many subtle shifts in the ongoing debate of God's existence, but few that have shifted from one extreme to the other as subtly as the cosmological argument. The argument is straightforward, if there was nothing before the universe began, then how could the universe (something) have come from nothing? The very existence of the universe necessitates there to be something beyond the universe which brought it into being. If there is nothing beyond the natural universe, what could have possibly caused the universe to come about naturally?
For centuries the standard atheist rebuttal was that the universe was eternal, it has no beginning and therefore doesn't require a cause or a creator. This view of the universe (known as Aristotelian cosmology) was developed by Aristotle in the 4th century B.C. and was widely held by those who don't believe in a creator. It was only in the 20th century the big bang theory was proposed, initially by theists (especially Georges Lemaitre) and resisted by atheists because it meant that the universe had a beginning. Up until that time, atheists had argued against the creation account in Genesis 1 by claiming that the universe had always existed.
Recent decades has seen a subtle but dramatic shift among atheists about the big bang. Far from being something to defend against, some atheists are trying to use the big bang theory as a weapon against theists in the ongoing debate on God's existence. It's often assumed that Christians don't know anything about the big bang theory, and even that the big bang theory contradicts the creation account of Genesis 1, arguing that one has to choose between the scientific explanation of the big bang theory and the theological explanation of creation. However this is to confuse the agency of the origin of the universe with its mechanism. It's like asking “what created the Ford Galaxy, Henry Ford (the agent) or the Ford production line (the mechanism), CHOOSE!”
A recent attempt has been made to explain the origin of universe in purely naturalistic terms by Lawrence Krauss in “A universe from nothing: Why there is something rather than nothing”. He argues that since quantum fluctuations can bring about positive and negative charges that immediately cancel each out (which we can observe when one is pulled into a black hole before it can cancel the other one out), then quantum fluctuations could have brought about the critical mass required to trigger the big bang. His argument has been criticised for his use of the word nothing, he isn't really talking about a universe from nothing, but a universe from quantum fluctuations. His understanding of the big bang is not the beginning of space and time, but rather the beginning of matter within a space and time that has always existed. Though Krauss would deny it, there is a sense in which he is going back to the former atheist position of denying that the natural universe had an absolute beginning, for Krauss; space, time and quantum fluctuation have always existed.
Similar arguments have been mounted by atheists using speculations of what was before the big bang. To be fair, there is no real way around this, in order to develop a theory for what caused the big bang you cannot avoid making some assumptions about what, if anything, existed before the big bang. Physicists postulate that the universe as we know it has been expanding from a “point of singularity”, but no one knows with any degree of certainty what there was before this point. It's possible that a prior universe had a big crush to the point of singularity followed by the big bang of our universe. Unfortunately, as physicists unanimously declare, no information passes through the point of singularity: scientific inquiry doesn't have access to any information before the big bang. Krauss' assumption of quantum fluctuations before the big bang can only ever be a hypothetical speculation without any actual evidence.
Richard Dawkins often gives a different reply, but one that's equally destroyed by the fact that no information passes through the point of singularity. Dawkins suggests that Darwin has solved the more difficult problem of the complexity of biology, and it's only a matter of time before physics has its Darwin who solves the problem of the origin of the universe. However, if no information passes through the point of singularity, then there's no way that anyone can develop a scientific theory based on evidence about the origin of the universe. Scientific inquiry that's carried out from within the known universe cannot step outside the universe to observe its beginning. We cannot come to any real understanding about the origin of the universe by scientific observation, the only way we could ever come to such understanding is by special revelation.
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