In browsing the internet, I came across this quote from one of Stephen Hawking's books, rather presumptuously titled "A Brief History of Time":

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said:
"What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise."
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?"
"You're very clever, young man, very clever", said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"

This story is meant as a sort of wink-wink, nudge-nudge mocking jab among secularists at those ridiculous religious nuts. After all, science provides answers to such questions without resorting to fantasies.

I write this in a rather tongue-in-cheek manner. The secular scientific community has certainly tried to provide answers. One such attempt is the idea of abiogenesis, which states that life can rather spontaneously arise from nonliving matter. In a series of experiments, scientists showed (somewhat tenuously) that given the right set of specific circumstances (specifically, those modeled after some manufactured idea of an "earth before life", amino acids, the building blocks of DNA can form from nonliving materials.

This merely puts off the problem, not actually answering the question but promising an answer somewhere earlier along the chain. How did these circumstances arise? Where did these nonliving materials come from?

To provide an answer to this, many have suggested the Big Bang theory (yes, really!) This theory states that all matter in the universe (since matter can not be created or destroyed by natural means, but at best converted to energy ) once existed in a single highly-compressed, superheated point in space. This highly-compressed matter then began to expand (and cool down), forming the universe we know today.

But where did this highly-compressed matter come from? And why would it sit idle for the infinity before its decompression, only later to spring into motion?
In what sort of expanse did this matter exist? Space? A void?

It's turtles all the way down.

Here I take a more audacious stance: I believe in an causeless cause.
I believe in a God who existed before there was time, and will exist afterwards. I believe in an omnipotent, omniscient God, who designed and crafted everything past, present and future to exacting, intricate detail, long before there was anything.

I believe that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, that when the earth was formless and void, the Spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters

I believe in a Creator who was not and did not need to be created, a Designer who knew me specifically before He formed me in the womb

I believe that before Abraham was (the earliest patriarch the Hebrews could trace), that God is.

Anything else is, frankly, a fantasy.