I enjoyed your writing, but disagree with your premise that creationism and the steady-state model are at odds. In fact, Lemaître was opposed to mixing science with religion and insisted the two were never in conflict. Whether the universe originated from a primeval atom (Lemaître's words) or is a Poincaré recurrence is completely orthogonal to Voltaire's question of the watchmaker - regardless whether time is cyclic or not still leaves open the question of why there is a clock to begin with, instead of nothing at all? The mechanics of the clock are mostly immaterial.