Thanks for considering these arguments, but your responses to them are incredibly weak. Dawkins is not someone we should take credibly on topics like these, considering he’s afraid to have his opinions challenged by real philosophers like William Lane Craig, who he was just afraid to debate.
Dawkins’ claim that God being immune to time is an unwarranted assumption is not true. See Ben Shapiro’s podcast with Edward Feser. The unchanged changer, by definition, is immune to change (otherwise He/it wouldn’t be unchanged). But existing inside of time makes you susceptible to change, since the passage of time itself qualifies as change. So the unchanged changer must be immune to time, this isn’t unwarranted in the least.
You also re-formulated the argument like this;
- Premise 1: physical things exist now
- Premise 2: there must have been something non-physical to bring them into existence
- Conclusion: therefore the universe’s is non-physical
But this isn’t the same as the argument for God’s existence at all. It’s a non-sequitur. So none of the three arguments have been addressed. I didn’t fully read your response to argument four because I don’t agree with it in the first place. However, argument five is definitely correct, and it’s not life that is designed — it’s clear that the constants of the universe are finely tuned for the existence of life. For example, if the gravitational constant was higher or lower by a minuscule amount, the universe would be so different that life couldn’t existed. The same is true for a host of other constants — if the Higgs boson mass was slightly different, space would either collapse in on itself or protons wouldn’t come together to form atoms. You can read more of these constants and the physicists who explain them from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
So Aquinas was right, and his fifth argument was validated by modern science in relation to cosmology. Some people propose the multiverse to get around this, but the multiverse doesn’t exist. Even if it did exist, it wouldn’t solve fine-tuning. The idea is that if you have an infinite number of universes with different constants, one of them would inevitably look like ours. But this makes two dubious assumptions. One, if the multiverse existed, why should we accept there are an infinite number of universes? Why not, say, 4 or 40 or 400? If there were anything short of an effectively infinite number of universes, fine-tuning can’t be solved. But the second — and even bigger problem — is that even if there was an infinite number of universes, there’s no reason to think they wouldn’t all have the same constants. So that also wouldn’t solve fine-tuning either.
Some people also suggest that under different constants, life could still evolve. But that’s not true. If the strong force were bigger or smaller by a small amount, only hydrogen would form, and there’s no possible way you can get life with only hydrogen — or anything, for that matter.
So Aquinas’s arguments certainly do indicate God’s existence. Richard Dawkins is a good biologist, bad philosopher.
