How did god create the universe?

[Tonus]

And, if I remember right, at some point he used his breath. What the fuck was he breathing?

That's Genesis 2:7 "Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being." It's not that god is breathing air, but that he infuses his clay doll with the breath of life and thus is man created.

Genesis is pretty vague on the creation. It reads like two separate accounts, each of which is incomplete and borrows from various sources. If we assume that the writer is basing his stories on what he can observe, then Genesis 1:1 can be seen to read "in the beginning, god created the ground and the sky." The first story explains that god created everything including the plants and animals, and then created man. The second story inverts this: god creates man first (2:7) then he creates the garden and causes plants to appear (2:8-9). Later on, he creates the animals (2:19) and finally he creates a woman (2:22).

The first writer seems more technically inclined: he wants to outline the steps carefully and is interested in the "how" of things. The second writer is concerned with the "why." His answer: the world was created for man, as was everything in it: plants, animals, and woman. It's probably typical of such ancient cultures to come up with a why/how that tells a good story, rather than a why/how that is accurate and can be tested.