I'd agree that the emergence of life in a mostly barren universe is a wonder. I'd even go as far as to say that that asymmetry makes life sacred. Whether that alienated life is convenient depends on whether most people who ever lived have been happy or instead put upon by a host of natural and social inconveniences, injustices, and absurdities.
As an expression of phenomenological or intuitive reactions, religious scriptures can certainly be meaningful, but that still makes them fictional. Fictional stories can be immensely meaningful and useful. The truths they uncover are psychological and subjective or cultural, not empirical.
Time wouldn't be a problem to a timeless being, but being a timeless person would be immensely problematic--for that person. Indeed, the most plausible theistic account of Creation seems to me the Hindu one, which is that the divine power creates a material universe to hide in, to escape what I interpret as the horror of being God (see the articles below).
Citing Genesis is a strawman? Really? When that account is paradigmatic for Western religions? I think not. The point is that the Genesis account is obviously poetic and shouldn't be taken literally. But if that's so, why take theism literally? Why think that God is literally a person? How could anyone possibly know that the universe's source or foundation is a person like us? What kind of primitive self-assertion is at the root of that mental projection?
