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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026

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There must be an uncaused cause; this can be identified with God.

However, that's a long way from being a canonical Christian.

By including "canonical", you are papering over the distance in an egregious way - as if the way from that is not quite so long to being some sort of non-canonical, perhaps quite heretical, but still recognisable Christian.

In general, I noticed decades back that US Christians arguing with atheists often seemed to expend a great amount of effort to try and persuade the audience that some/any sort of supernatural force exists, but then took for entirely granted the leap from "something outside of physics" to "our version of Christianity is true". Your "uncaused cause" argument is that taken to an extreme: unlike, say, "intelligent design" or miracles, it does not even try to insinuate any sort of attributes of the supernatural thing that would give it a special connection to humans, but instead seems to be content with postulating the bone-barest of featureless mathematical artifacts. (I won't even go into how unpersuasive the argument itself is.)

This might have worked a little bit in a setting like rural parts US of 50 years ago, where Christianity was so dominant that people may not have had the meme pool to conceive of a supernatural "cause" that did not have the essential properties of the Christian god; but nowadays, when everyone is exposed to a dozen of world religions with their own creation myths and science fiction like Clarke's entropy-reverting VAC blending into science reality like AIs running convincing simulacra of humanity in fake environments, there is an infinitude of possible "uncaused causes" you would have to rule out that stand between you convincing a reader of a supernatural "uncaused cause" and you convincing them that the "uncaused cause" will punish them if they abort, fornicate or trans their kids.