A question about me.

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And depending on how he thinks the universe started, your rational materialist is still left with either an uncaused event, for which he must make an exception to his material view, or an infinite regress of causes, which does not provide an explanation for the universe.

Nope. I'm the wrong guy to try to give you a basic overview of why this isn't true, but if you happen to pick up a copy of <i>Brief History of Time</i>, chapter...8, I believe, contains the information you're looking for. Anyway, depending on how you look at it, the universe can really be the ultimate free lunch. God has no properties which can be logically solved this way.

[edit: Yes, Chapter 8. Seems my memory is good for something, after all.

And lest I make it sound as if the origin of the universe is some known quantity, let me assure you that's not what I mean. No one - yet - knows how the universe got its start. My point is only that the rationalist-materialist [like me] has no reason to fall back on divinity in order to explain the origin; there are solutions, well-known to rationalist-materialists, in which the universe has no boundary conditions, and needs no "origin" in the way we're discussing here. There are others in which the origin is completely explicable in rational, material terms, even if the universe /does/ have a boundary condition. (For instance, what meaning does the word "origin" have when time is a function of space, which did not begin {we think} until after the beginning of the universe?)]

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God has no properties which can be logically solved this way.

Gah. This is such a hard issue to speak properly about, and I want very badly to speak accurately in regards to it. Of course God has properties which can be solved in this way: if god exists outside of time - as one presumes he must - then the question of gods' origin is also moot; without time, what meaning has "begin?" But the rationalist-materialist has other reasons to suspect god isn't real, but rather a human creation.

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For instance, what meaning does the word "origin" have when time is a function of space, which did not begin {we think} until after the beginning of the universe?

This is wrong, too. As far as we currently know,* time is not a function of space any more than "depth" is a function of space. Time and space, we think, are intertwined, effectively the same thing.

*I actually suspect this isn't true, but I'm a special sort of rationalist-materialist: the kind who doubts Einstein. My views, as such, are not very popular within the scientific community.