Getting to the bottom, or the beginning, or the whatever

Having kids exposes you to all sorts of things, germs for one, but also the sort of virulent question that sets aside everything you think you know and forces you to actually think.  I was actually thinking about the lines of questioning that kids can get you on when they start thinking about really big ideas.  Questions like, "what was before the earth?"  I can kind of answer that, because I've watched those shows on the discovery channel that talk about how planets are formed, or at least the theory attached to the process.  But since I'm a pastor, I have exposed my children to all sorts of God stuff, and I am also a sort of authority on God stuff, meaning that I've done enough theological explorations that I have essentially stopped asking the really good questions, and contented myself with knowing what people like Karl Barth or John Calvin or Thomas Aquinas thought about things.
Kids mess with that.
"What was before God?"  And you need to know that you can't start giving lectures about the Nicene Creed and the pre-existence of the Trinity.  It's not going to answer their question.  It doesn't really answer that question, it simply states something that we have come to accept as fact, but what if we don't just accept it?
In reading things written by Atheists, I have come to the conclusion that no one has really debunked the notion of God.  Some have, rather compellingly, skewered religion.   They have held up our anthropomorphic idea of God to a certain amount of ridicule, but then again, perhaps the vision that most of us have of God as some sort of cosmic grandfather, who hands out treats if you're good and whuppins if you're bad, is rather laughable.
God runs away from us when we investigate with our scientific tool kits.  When we discover that the world is much older than Genesis would indicate, God can still say, "of course it is, that's just a story."  When we plumb the mysteries of the creation of the universe and think we understand something like the big bang, God can still say, as Wendell Berry has so nicely put it: "What banged, and before it banged where was it?"
That is an inescapable barrier to our knowledge, because even without the ever expanding (and perhaps someday contracting) collection of matter and energy that we know as the universe, there had to be something.  If time had a beginning (and maybe an end), there is still something that we still, rather imprecisely, call infinity, or even less precisely, eternity.
This is stuff you really can't think about too long without your brain telling you to knock it off.  It's not something that can be investigated scientifically, because the only thing we have that qualifies as evidence exists in time and is made up of matter and energy, they are observable, measurable and they make up what we call our experience of the universe.  To claim, as many religions do, there is something outside of that experience is heresy to scientific dogmatism in the same way that saying there is no God is to those who believe.
When we retreat into dogma, our questions go bye-bye, which is bad for religion, but it is fatal for science.  Every time I hear Richard Dawkins or even Stephen Hawking, triumphantly proclaim that they have proven God does not exist, it makes me sad.  Not because I want them to believe the way I believe, but because, in claiming such a thing they have failed as scientists. They have stopped asking questions, and asking questions is what they are always supposed to do.
We religious types need to ask more questions as well.  Certainty is death to a living relationship with our Creator.  There are questions that need to be asked, whether you believe in God or not.  There is a reality to be dealt with, no matter what approach you choose to use.  I like a universe with God in it, better than I like the alternative, therefore I find belief preferable to non-belief.  I feel no tension between believing that we can learn things about reality from Genesis and from Darwin.  Unless you are insisting t hat you absolutely know the answer, asking new question never hurt anyone.