The god of the gaps argument keeps reasserting itself (just like the climate change denial argument) in odd ways. With the discovery of the Big Bang, people who want to believe in the god who is interested in the outcome of football games, or in which sexual organs consenting adults rub together, or how the Huckabees celebrate Christmas, claim that the thing which "caused" the big bang 15 billion years ago is that god. Another variant of this is to suggest that because the conditions in the universe are "just right" for the existence of life on Earth, this means that the same god who smites the residents of New Orleans was also the one who, 15 billion years ago, set up the universe for the purpose of, eventually, having residents in New Orleans who could be smited (smote?).
Their arguments imply that there is some essence of humanness, or, to go further back, life itself, that is a given. And for THAT life to exist the universe has to have certain properties. You could respond to this proposition in two non god-given ways. One is some concept of multiverse - that is there is an infinite number of universes corresponding to every possible combination of physical properties of matter, and this is the one we are in. But this isn't my understanding of the true "anthropic principle". I think that humans themselves, life itself, only exists in the form it does, this particular form, because of the way the universe is. Had some of the physical properties been different then a different universe would exist which may or may not have evolved some different manifestation of self-reproducing things, and even more remotely, might have evolved some self aware part of that manifestation that might have tried to answer the question "why are we here?". So the multiverse isn't a set of parallel universes, but a set of potentialities, none of which were, by chance, in fact taken, except the one which led to the kind of "life" that we think of as life. The fact that we are here to ask the question is the answer to the question. Or, perhaps, on a cosmic scale, we think therefore we are.
And, as a footnote, evolutionary processes would operate in any possible version of the universe, both in the non-living precursors to life and in whatever turned up as "life" itself. There is inevitability in the process, but none in the outcomes, just as, even within our version of the universe, there was absolutely no inevitability in the process that eventually split off one of the great apes into a creature that would contribute to Huffington Post. I, you, could have been, say, an octopus, or a large amphibian, or a brainy dinosaur, or a pig or a bear. We would then be arguing about why the universe had been just right for the evolution of the octopus, and what this meant about the great eight-legged god in the sky who had been looking out for our interests.
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Einstein clearly meaning, if the universe had a designer, as such, that designer would not have created it using random chance, with infinite, possibilities/possible outcomes, especially to create beings in His image.
Your first paragraph sets up a straw man here. No doubt there are people with silly ideas about God. Unfortunately, you are one of them! ;-)
At least you appear to admit that we don't know the cause of the big bang, because all conventional knowledge and reasoning has arisen subsequent to it. To call that prior cause "God" is merely to proffer a word. But whatever it is or whatever we call it, people have disagreed forever about its nature.
Is it interested or disinterested? Involved or aloof? Wrathful or compassionate? With form or without form, and so on and on. Low jokes about Huckabee and evangelicals and such (which no doubt have their place) don't really begin to address these questions.
But there are other approaches to take as well, like an investigation into the nature of causation itself, such as Buddhism undertakes, or into the nature of time and change.
Evolutionary theory depends upon a hearty handful of unexamined assumptions about these things which, if we would examine them, make nonsense out of it.
For instance, does a thing really change? We say so conventionally, but what do we actually observe? There is first a thing and later there is another thing. Based on some criteria we associate these two things and say, "Oh, the first has changed and become the second." Hence, evolution. But that explanation is merely an elaboration of the largely unexamined mental habit of associating similar things. The reality is not at all so easy to comprehend.
You are not the same as the baby once born. You say, "I have changed." The mysterious "I" remains constant in this expression, but everything else changes. Therefore, you must show us this constant "I" first, the content of your unexamined assumption, so that we can go on to comprehend how it is that you have "evolved" and that one thing has thus become another thing.
Also, human consciousness might well be temporary evolutionary experiment brought about by the large-scale ingestion of B vitamin-rich grains beginning several thousand years ago. The improved nutrition caused rapid development of the brain and a level of consciousness higher than that of other animals or earlier humans. Could well be a fluke, though, especially if nuclear war brings about an early end to nature's experiment.