The Great Debate: Theism vs. Naturalism. Where Does the Evidence Point?

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naturalism Christianity theism debateLet’s conduct an experiment to find the better of two alternate worldviews. First is Christianity/theism. Opposing that is naturalism, the belief that natural explanations are sufficient to explain the world we see.
Each worldview makes predictions about how our world should look. We’ll consider those predictions and compare them against the evidence from reality to see which worldview does the better job.
God’s hiddenness
Theism, by the definition that I’m using, proposes supernatural deit(ies) that engage with humanity. (Contrast that with deism, in which a deity could’ve started up the universe and then walked away.)
Our example of theism is Christianity, which tells us that God should be obvious: “God’s invisible qualities … have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse” (Romans 1:20). It makes the same claim when it says that God is anxious to have a relationship with us, since understanding God’s plan and putting our faith in Jesus is mandatory for us to escape hell.
God should be obvious, and his message to us should be unambiguous. But when we look around, there is no good evidence for God, just as naturalism predicts. (I discuss this Problem of Divine Hiddenness in detail here.)
Fragmentation into sects
Even if humans invent religions, theism predicts that clear evidence for the one correct religion would outshine all the rest. Invented religions might always be background noise in the religious environment, but the correct religion—the only one actually supported by evidence of real god(s)—would quickly spread from its introduction thousands of years ago to become and remain the biggest religion by far. There would be no contest to any unbiased observer which religion was correct (more here).
That’s not what the evidence shows. For all of human existence, the majority of people at any moment have always had the bad fortune to not believe in the one correct religion (assuming there is one). Religion is a cultural phenomenon. Christianity is the largest religion at the moment, though it might not be in fifty years when Islam is expected to become number one. Christianity is not the oldest religion, it didn’t become largest until centuries after its founding, and it’s never held the majority of the world’s people.
A single, unambiguous message doesn’t exist even within Christianity. There are 45,000 Christian denominations, a number that is growing rapidly.
The Bible itself documents how God’s fundamental properties have evolved.

  • God was initially just a guy who walked in the Garden to chat with Adam and Eve, but later he said, “No one may see my face and live” (Exodus 33:20).
  • God had to send out agents to get intelligence about Sodom and Gomorrah, but ask Christians now, and they’ll say that he’s omniscient (“New and improved God 2.0—now with 1020 times more omniscience!”).
  • God was initially part of a pantheon, and only later do we get a clear statement of monotheism (Isaiah 43:10, for example).
  • God was initially merely powerful, and he had limitations. Now we hear he’s invulnerable.

The map of world religions shows that religious belief doesn’t change with evidence like science does. Instead, it’s part of culture.
Relationship to science
Theism predicts that sacred texts would be useful in the real world. They wouldn’t be full of just-trust-me-on-this demands. Instead, they would be grounded in the real world so that we could see that their claims are both surprising (far beyond what was known in that society at the time) and reliable. We wouldn’t need faith to accept the supernatural; it would be obvious that this wisdom didn’t come from any human society.
Christianity is again a counterexample. Any scientific statement within the Bible that’s true was known by the culture that produced that part of the Bible, and all other scientific claims within the Bible are false. Mining the Bible to find verses that vaguely anticipate modern scientific discoveries is a popular hobby, but science has learned nothing about reality from the Bible.
You’d think that the Bible would at least have room for simple science that would greatly benefit people. For example, how about a recipe for soap plus basic hygiene rules? It would only take a paragraph, but we find nothing. Even Jesus’s healing miracles are just superstitions of the time.
In the competition between science and religion, “God did it” was the answer for famine, plague, drought, disease, and even war in centuries past. Dogma rather than evidence pointed to God, and science has steadily produced reliable answers to replace God for countless scientific puzzles. The reverse has never happened. Shoehorning God into the remaining puzzles makes him a “god of the gaps,” a pitiful rearguard action that makes a joke of the all-powerful Creator of the Universe.
At best, apologists can say, “Well, science hasn’t answered this question,” unconcerned that Christianity hasn’t answered any question. Yes, science does have unanswered questions on its to-do list—that’s how science works. These aren’t questions that theologians have pointed out but are mostly obtuse questions that only science could raise.
Life
Theism predicts that life is designed and that life is the purpose of the universe.
Neither is true. A Rube Goldberg machine and a Swiss watch are both complicated but in different ways. Cells are complicated, but they’re more like the redundant and inefficient Rube Goldberg machine than the elegant watch. Designer-less evolution is sufficient to explain why life looks the way it does.
DNA is often cited as being so software-like that it must have come from a mind, but I argue that the sloppiness in DNA alone is enough to defeat the Design Hypothesis (the argument that life must’ve been designed).
The theist will say that software invariably comes from minds, but they forget that minds invariably come from brains. So where is the brain that houses God’s mind? And, no, software doesn’t invariably come from minds. Software can be evolved in a computer where it is randomly changed and tested for fitness, analogous to what happens in the real world to DNA.
The theist must look at the hundred billion galaxies in the universe, each with a hundred billion stars, and say that all of that is there because of humans on one planet in an insignificant backwater of one galaxy. Naturalism gets it right when it predicts no design and sees life as just something that happens now and then.
We’ll conclude this worldview comparison in part 2.

We can’t observe quarks or black holes, 
but we should see their effects. 
We do. 
We can’t observe the Christian God, 
but we should see his effects. 
We don’t. 
— Victor Stenger, “Faith in Anything is Unreasonable”

Image credit: Image Catalog, flickr, CC

Frank Turek’s Criminally Bad C.R.I.M.E.S. Argument: Reason

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This is a continuation of a critique of Frank Turek’s arguments in favor of Christianity made in his latest book. See the beginning of the discussion here.
The R in CRIMES is Reason
Turek said, “If you’re an atheist, you can’t justify reason.” He said that Darwin knew this, referring to this statement from Darwin: “Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?” If our minds are just the end result of a long series of evolutionary steps, why trust them?
First, who cares what Darwin said? If the subject is History of Science, that’s interesting. If it’s simply what evolution or physiology say today, we’re not bound by what Darwin says. No one consults Darwin’s writings to ensure that the latest findings don’t contradict the great man.
The fallible human brain
Second, I agree that our brains are quite fallible. Who would disagree? This passage from my book Future Hype (2006) summarizes some of our blind spots.

Ongoing risks with a track record (such as the number of deaths per year) are easy to compare with each other. Nevertheless, most people weigh risks poorly. The average American is much likelier to die in a car accident than a plane crash, much likelier to die from lightning than fireworks, and much likelier to die from influenza than anthrax. You’re less likely to win the jackpot in a major lottery than to die in an accident while driving to buy the ticket. The likeliest calamity that could happen to a traveler to another country is not terrorism or kidnapping, but a car accident. Tornadoes and hurricanes combined aren’t as deadly as heat waves; heroin and cocaine combined aren’t as deadly as alcohol. Risk experts say that nuclear power is quite safe and swimming is not, while most people feel the opposite. Money spent on disease research is only vaguely proportional to each disease’s impact. We worry about cell phones and brain cancer when we should be worried about cell phones and driving. The public’s ranking of fears doesn’t match up with the real risks, and a technology with the same death rate as a natural risk is perceived as more dangerous.

Here are more examples of the fallibility of our brains.

  • Our brains play tricks on us: consider placebos, psychosomatic illnesses, and phantom limb pain.
  • We can be fooled by optical and auditory illusions. Pareidolia is seeing patterns where none exist—a message in a song played backwards or the face of Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich, for example. Coincidences can seem meaningful even when random.
  • We confuse confidence with accuracy when we overestimate how reliable our memories are. Richard Wiseman’s awesome color-changing card trick shows that your skills at observation may not be as good as you might think.
  • We’re poor at weighing harm. The Discovery television channel had a Shark Week, but based on how many people are actually killed, Cow Week would make more sense. That’s right—cows kill more people than sharks. Psychic numbing is a related problem. This is the observation, “One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.”
  • A popular misconception in South Korea is that electric fans in closed rooms can be deadly, but we Americans shouldn’t get too cocky, because we have our own blind spots. In a 2013 poll of Americans, 21% say a UFO crashed in Roswell, 28% believe Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 terrorist attack, 20% believe there is a link between childhood vaccines and autism, 7% think the moon landing was faked, 13% think Barack Obama is the anti-Christ, 14% say the CIA created the crack epidemic, 9% think the government adds fluoride to our water supply for sinister reasons, 4% believe lizard people control our societies, and 11% believe the US government allowed 9/11 to happen.
  • We know how crop circles are made, and yet some people are determined to see them as the work of extraterrestrials. Most of us have probably used Snopes to investigate a suspicious story passed along by email, and yet urban legends continue to deceive.
  • We’re surrounded by simple instances of probability, and yet we’re terrible at it. If you want to see how good your instincts are, give the Monty Hall problem a try.
  • We have cognitive biases such as confirmation bias, where we focus on evidence that confirms our thinking and ignore evidence that refutes it. The backfire effect is what happens when you correct an error in someone’s mind, but they retrench and believe the misinformation more strongly.
  • The weighty Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) lists hundreds of kinds of mental illness.

Now that we’re on the same page that the human brain is imperfect, how do the atheist and theist proceed from here? Let’s return to Turek’s claim, “If you’re an atheist, you can’t justify reason.” So therefore the Christian can?
This is just another argument of the form “Ooh! Ooh! I know! It was God!” No—your unsupported dogma isn’t even in the running. Show us the evidence, or remain at the children’s table.
And yes, actually atheists can justify reason. Evolution selected for animals that had a good understanding of reality. Those that didn’t—those whose senses gave unreliable information or whose brains evaluated the information poorly—became lunch. (I respond to Alvin Plantinga’s similar Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism here.)
The human mind is indeed unreliable for finding absolute truth. The best we can hope for are good approximations. If Turek can access absolute and immutable truth, he needs to share that marvelous fact with the rest of us.
If we agree that the human brain is imperfect, why does the Christian trust it when it makes the incredibly outrageous claim that God exists? Apparently Turek thinks that atheists can’t rely on God’s imperfect gift but Christians can.
Continue to I = Information.

Men never commit evil so fully and joyfully 
as when they do it for religious convictions. 
— Blaise Pascal

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 08/05/13.)
Image credit: Ryan Cadby, flickr, CC
 

Frank Turek’s Criminally Bad C.R.I.M.E.S. Argument: Fine Tuning

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fine tuning frank turekThis is a continuation of a critique of Frank Turek’s arguments in favor of Christianity from his book Stealing from God. See the beginning of the discussion here.
Let’s conclude the critique of Turek’s first argument, Cosmos.
Fine tuning of the universe
Turek says that if the expansion rate from the Big Bang were different by 10–15, the universe would have either collapsed or never developed galaxies. What explains this fine tuning?
Good question. Why does the universe look finely tuned? This is a scientific question, not incontrovertible evidence of the hand of God. Replacing “Science doesn’t know” with “Well, if you don’t, I do—it was God!” doesn’t help. Advancing a god as the cause of the universe simply moves the question back one level: if we assume that a deity did it, where did it come from? How did it create the universe out of nothing? What laws of nature did it break, and what as-yet-undiscovered laws did it use? We’ve resolved nothing. It is merely one more supernatural claim that science must set aside on its way to finding the truth.
And what is the universe finely tuned for? There is life on earth, a tiny speck in an inhospitable and inconceivably vast sea of space. Most of the mass in the universe isn’t ordinary matter, and almost all of that isn’t part of a habitable world. It’s hard to call the harsh wasteland that is the universe “tuned for life,” so why imagine that life was what it was finely tuned for? There are probably trillions of black holes in the universe—you could more logically say that it was fine tuned for them.
Turek argues that we have two possibilities: (1) that our universe just got really lucky with its constants or (2) a supernatural being created it. He concludes: (1) is really improbable, so therefore (2). But what is the probability of (2)?? How can we compare these two options when we haven’t even analyzed one of them? He doesn’t even acknowledge the problem.
Multiverse
Of course, the in-your-face response to the fine tuning argument sidesteps the question of whether the universe was finely tuned by arguing for a multiverse—uncountably many universes with varying cosmic constants, of which ours is just one. A very unlikely universe will pop up eventually if you have enough of them. In fact, Alexander Vilenkin, the cosmologist that Turek praised earlier, makes clear his view on the multiverse question in an article titled, “The Case for Parallel Universes: Why the multiverse, crazy as it sounds, is a solid scientific idea.”
(Does Turek still want to cite Vilenkin as a reliable source?)
Just to hit this a little harder, Jerry Coyne wrote a post subtitled with the very question that I had been asking: “Is the multiverse a Hail Mary pass by godless physicists?” No, the multiverse is not just a “well, it’s possible” gambit for which atheists admit they have no evidence for but which they toss out simply to annoy apologists. He quotes physicist Sean Carroll, who makes clear that the multiverse is a prediction made by other well-accepted theories. It wasn’t pulled out of a hat; it is a consequence of accepted physics.
(I discuss the related Kalam Cosmological Argument here and here.)
Cause and causelessness
Turek says, “If the universe had a beginning, it must’ve had a Beginner.” Does everything have a cause? When an electron comes out of a decaying nucleus or a photon comes out of an electron dropping to a lower energy level, what was the cause? Nothing. Quantum events (like the Big Bang presumably was) don’t necessarily need causes. “Everything has a cause” sounds right coming from our experience, but common sense isn’t a reliable tool at the edge of science.
Turek has one final salvo for this argument: “Either no one created something out of nothing or someone created something out of nothing.” Huh? So we’ve already established that the universe came from nothing? That’s possible, but there is no consensus. Why imagine that nothing was more likely before the Big Bang than something?
Lacking evidence but not confidence, Turek picks the latter option, as if it makes more sense that someone created something out of nothing. But how does anyone make something out of nothing? Turek falls back on an uncaused god, without evidence.
And even if we grant fine tuning, a supernatural agent creating the universe is just one of lots of explanations. Maybe our universe was created by powerful but limited aliens. We could be in the Matrix of a computer designed by an alien race. And so on. No need to imagine an unlimited god.
Unless there’s evidence, of course.
I’ve written more about the fine-tuning argument here and here.
Continue with the discussion of R = Reason.

“In God We Trust.” 
I don’t believe it would sound any better if it were true. 
— Mark Twain

There’s a phrase we live by in America: “In God We Trust.”
It’s right there where Jesus would want it: on our money. 
— Bill Maher

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 8/1/13.)
Image credit: Seigner, CC
 

Revisiting the Kalam Cosmological Argument (3 of 3)

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Here is the Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA):

1: Whatever begins to exist had a cause
2: The universe began to exist
3: Therefore, the universe had a cause

This post is the conclusion of a three-part series responding to a Christian defense of the KCA. Part 1 here.
Below, the skeptical argument is shown in bold and the Christian response in italics.
“8. There are non-theistic explanations that remain live possibilities.” Even if the universe has a beginning, there are possibilities besides God. If you’re thinking of aliens or the multiverse, that just pushes the problem back a step.
What is it with this obsession for an immediate answer? Can’t we just say, “I don’t know”? That approach has done well for science, because it puts the spotlight on interesting questions, which then tend to get answered.
Of course, it’s clear why apologists demand an answer right now. They know that science regularly replaces supernatural explanation with evidence-based explanations. Their time window is brief, and they want to score some points for “God did it!” before they have to move on to another unanswered scientific question and hope that everyone forgets the last one they embraced.
Some have argued that a computer simulation like the Matrix will eventually be no more difficult than a homework assignment. Given that, is it likelier that we’re in a simulation or reality? (I don’t know what I think of this option, but I wanted to throw it out there as yet another non-God alternative.)
The multiverse would indeed demand an explanation, but why imagine that God is it? God has never been the answer to anything. If God is the explanation, show that he exists first and then infer that he created the universe/multiverse. The Christian god who loves us and desires a relationship would be obvious, and the obtuse KCA wouldn’t be a way to find him. Every clue points to naturalism as the explanation for this and other unknown puzzles.
“9. Popular-level science teaches the universe had a beginning, but someone says the real science shows it doesn’t. We aren’t given any argument as to why it’s really the case that a potentially-successful model for the beginning of the universe shows no finite beginning. We’re simply to take someone’s word for it, when we actually have physicists and scientists admitting these theories don’t work.”
There’s not much to respond to here, but I include it for completeness. I’ll just note that cosmologist Sean Carroll’s list of proposed models for the universe (there are many) includes a beginning-less universe (more).
“10. The KCA relies entirely on current science, and science can change.” “First, simply because some claim remains open to change does not mean that claim cannot be accepted as true…. Of course we can claim it is true!”
As long as we remember that science can change (and overturn a previously held conclusion), I’m fine with science being used in an argument to support the KCA.
“Second, the KCA does not rely entirely on science. In fact, the second premise (“the universe began to exist”) can be defended solely on rational argumentation.”
I think we’ve found your problem: thinking that “rational argumentation” (can I call this “common sense”?) is reliable at the frontiers of physics (see claim #3 above). The origin of the universe is within the domain of quantum mechanics, remember? You check your common sense at the door.
QM has already defeated the first premise, “whatever begins to exist had a cause” (see claim #1 above).
11. Your first cause falls to the infinite regress problem. If God is your first cause, what created God? God didn’t begin to exist. The First Cause must logically precede all else. There simply can’t be, by definition, anything that came before.
Be cautious when a definition brings something into existence. Like the Ontological Argument, which just thinks God into existence, that may be too good to be true.
You didn’t say this, but let me just add the caution that apologists shouldn’t respond to a scientific question with a theological claim. “My religion says that God was uncreated” is no answer in the real world.
You say that God didn’t have a cause … just because? That’s magic, and I need evidence. Why does God not need a cause if everything else does? Why is God eternal, but nothing else is? How did God create something out of nothing? How can he create the universe when he was outside of time—doesn’t deciding and acting require time?
The most charitable view is that you’ve resolved “What caused the universe?” with God, but you now have these new questions about God. You’ve simply repackaged the question, not answered it.
And if God can exist eternally, maybe that’s true for the universe (or the multiverse).
Conclusion
The author concludes:

Each objection has been dealt with by providing an answer. This means that each Christian, and each person, is rationally justified in accepting the KCA. If that is true, then it seems that the KCA’s truth implies God–not just any God, but the God of the Bible!

Nope. My original post is intact. I leveled five attacks on the first premise and three on the second. None of those were addressed in this article. No, rational people are not justified in accepting the Kalam Kosmological Argument.
You’ve probably seen the famous Sidney Harris cartoon where one scientist points to an involved equation on the blackboard and says to his colleague, “I think you should be more explicit here in step two,” where step two says, “Then a miracle occurs.” God is the step two—the implausible savior of Christians’ apologetic arguments.

The universe that we observe
has precisely the properties we should expect
if there is, at bottom,
no design, no purpose,
no evil, and no good,
nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
— Richard Dawkins

I feel like I’m diagonally parked
in a parallel universe.
— seen on the internet

Image credit: NASA

Frank Turek’s C.R.I.M.E.S. Argument for Theism is Criminal

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galaxyI’ve responded to Frank Turek and Norm Geisler’s 2004 book I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist here and here. Turek has a new book, Stealing from God: Why Atheists Need God to Make Their Case. I haven’t read it, though I have listened to Turek’s outline of the book. His argument for theism uses the acronym CRIMES for his six points. I’ll respond over several posts.
The C in CRIMES is Cosmos
Turek wants a beginning for the universe, so he likes the Big Bang. “I believe in the Big Bang,” he says. “I just know who banged it.”
A Big Banger? Can you likewise not have a sand dune without a sand duner? Or a mountain without a mountain maker? Or river meanders without a meanderer? Causes can be natural, and Turek must show that his favorite cause is supernatural.
And Turek believes in the Big Bang? Turek comes at science with a religious mindset. In religion, you can believe some things (the Trinity, Noah’s flood, Jesus died for our sins) and not believe in other things (reincarnation, golden plates, Mohammed visited heaven on a winged horse). Some claims are contradictory, and you can’t believe them all. But in science, the consensus view about an issue is the best approximation to the truth that we have at the moment (more here and here). These consensus views aren’t incompatible, so you can accept them all. Turek has no science degrees, and laymen like Turek and I have no choice but to accept the scientific consensus on all topics.
By what logic would we reject them?
Turek quote mines famous scientists to make his points, and yet he has little respect for science. He picks and chooses the bits that he likes as if science were a salad bar. That cosmology looks nice, so I’ll have some of that. The theologically unpalatable bits like evolution he discards as if they’re wilted lettuce.
One of quotes he gives is from cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin. Here, Vilenkin refers to the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem (2003):

With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.

Yes! Let’s see the atheists wriggle out of that one. The universe had a beginning, which demands an explanation for the cause.
(I respond to the Kalam Cosmological Argument here. Physicist Sean M. Carroll makes clear that Vilenkin’s theorem must make assumptions; change those assumptions, and the beginning is no longer mandatory here.)
But the problem with quote mining is that you often miss the context. On the very … next … page we find Vilenkin saying this:

Theologians have often welcomed any evidence for the beginning of the universe, regarding it as evidence for the existence of God … So what do we make of a proof that the beginning is unavoidable? Is it a proof of the existence of God? This view would be far too simplistic. … The theorem that I proved with my colleagues does not give much of an advantage to the theologian over the scientist.

Oops.
If Vilenkin’s work is compelling evidence, as Turek imagines, surely it is convincing to the originator himself. So then is Vilenkin a theist? I don’t think so.
Continued in part 2, Fine Tuning.

It is wrong, always, everywhere, and for everyone,
to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
— W. K. Clifford (1879)

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/30/13.)
Photo credit: Wikimedia

Revisiting the Kalam Cosmological Argument (2 of 3)

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Here is the Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA):

1: Whatever begins to exist had a cause
2: The universe began to exist
3: Therefore, the universe had a cause

This post is #2 in a three-part series responding to a Christian defense of the KCA. Part 1 here.
Below, the skeptical argument is shown in bold and the Christian response in italics.
“5. The first cause is logically incoherent because it existed ‘before’ time.” This isn’t an objection to either premise.
This is indeed an objection to premise 1. It questions whether there can be a cause of any sort given that time didn’t exist before the universe did.
The First Cause didn’t precede the universe, because it acted in the first moment—that is, the First Cause and the first moment were simultaneous. “So what we have is a timeless, unchanging (because it is timeless) First Cause whose first act is bringing the world into existence.”
This is metaphysical bullshit. The simple solution is to drop the idea of any cause (First or otherwise) for the universe. The God hypothesis is jammed in as the answer despite its not fitting into this puzzle at all. The naturalistic explanation doesn’t need one, and the KCA vanishes without one.
How could a god outside of time decide anything, such as that the universe should be created? “Timeless and unchanging” means frozen and inert. No conclusions, no changing of his mind, no initiation of any creative act.
“What could cause the universe if there were no time beforehand?” is like “How could a frozen and inert god do anything, like create a universe?” And they’re both neatly dismissed by hypothesizing no cause for the universe, as allowed by quantum mechanics. God becomes a solution looking for a problem. Apologists spend more effort keeping the God card relevant than using it to show that it explains things better than naturalistic solutions.
Cosmologist Sean M. Carroll debated Craig on cosmology (more on that debate here), and Carroll ticked off several models of the universe with no place for a First Cause such as a universe with a beginning but no cause and one that is eternal without a beginning.
And let me step back to marvel that this godly First Cause is advanced by apologists with no evidence whatsoever. Carroll noted that cosmology textbooks don’t appeal to “transcendent cause” or “First Cause” or God, they use differential equations!
“6. If some metaphysical truth is not well-established, one is unjustified in saying it is true.” Does “not well established” mean that philosophical truth is discovered by a poll? And now can new truth bubble to the surface if no one accepts it until a majority do?
When metaphysicians have a track record like scientists, where they give us reliable new knowledge, then yes, polls would be useful. We laypeople could rely on them to know where they’ve reached a solid consensus, and we could treat that as provisional truth. But metaphysics has no such track record. (I argue that laypeople must accept the scientific consensus here.)
As for his concern about “a new idea is fine as long as it’s not new,” we must separate the experts from laypeople. In an evidence-guided meritocracy with a high bar for entry like science, the experts can dream up, advocate, and accept whatever they feel the evidence demands. While we lay outsiders can critique, we have no standing for accepting anything but the consensus (where it exists).
That describes science, not philosophy or metaphysics.
“7. There could be other deities besides the Christian God.” This doesn’t object to either premise of the KCA. Let’s be clear that the KCA is used as natural theology (understanding God through nature), never revealed theology (understanding God from his personal revelations).
Nevertheless, the properties of the cause of the universe—timeless, spaceless, changeless, powerful, creator—do sound like the Christian god.
“Imagine, if you will, a timeless, spaceless, all-powerful Creator of the universe. Sounds like God, doesn’t it?” Well, it sounds like what Christians today think of God, but consider God before he hit the big time—back in the Old Testament when he was still doing vaudeville. He had to personally investigate Sodom and Gomorrah to see if the gossip he’d heard was correct (Genesis 18:21), he regretted having made mankind (Gen. 6:6), he spoke to Moses “face to face, as one speaks to a friend” (Exodus 33:11), he was beaten by the Moabite god Chemosh and couldn’t defeat tribes with iron chariots (more), and he was just one of many gods in a pantheon.
He was more super than the rest of us, but certainly not the omni-everything god of today. God has evolved.
Concluded in part 3.

Astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace presented his
5-volume work on the solar system to Napoleon.
Napoleon wanted to know why it contained no mention of the Creator.
 Laplace replied, “I had no need of that hypothesis.”

Image credit: NASA