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Oops, I was in such a hurry to answer your last challenge (post 143) - I forgot to address the first ones (which were actually challenges to Ronzo’s statements):

To believe naturalism as a correct worldview, you must embrace three logical absurdities:

1) The universe created itself out of nothing.

It's absurd to make this claim about 'naturalists'.

We got into this subject at some length on another thread concerning a sidebar discussion of the 1948 Russell debate Here are some of my views from that thread:

In 1948, it was still strongly believed by most that the universe had no beginning (steady state). Although the Big Bang (inflationary model) had been predicted in the 40's, it wasn't established as the most accepted theory until confirmed by the cosmic background radiation observations in the 60's. Big Bang I wonder what Bertrand Russell's response would have been, had he known... LOL!

There is always a beginning - whether the cosmology is the inflationary theory, imaginary time, many worlds, multi verse, ekpyrotic cosmology, other higher dimensional dynamics or cyclic cosmology.

Without a steady state - infinite opportunity - the plenitude argument (everything that can happen, did) fails. The anthropic principle does not dismiss the fact of a beginning.

Thus, I aver that to believe that "all that there is" arose without causation takes great faith.

A Freeper responded that a large number is as good as infinity (to support the metaphysical naturalist worldview) I responded:

A large number does not infinity make. And none of the cosmologies – including cyclic cosmology – have been able to rationalize infinite “hypertime” (emphasis mine):

In new theory, time never ends

While existing theory states that galaxies and large clusters of galaxies developed from lumps and filaments that formed in the otherwise smooth fabric of space and time shortly after the Big Bang, Steinhardt thinks the seeds of galaxy formation were created by instabilities that arose during the last contraction, before the crunch that led to "our" bang. The new model "turns the conventional picture topsy-turvy," he says.

The cyclic universe has roots in even more complex thoughts like so-called superstring theory, which suggests there are as many as 10 spatial dimensions, not just the three we know of. The seemingly inexplicable physics of a big crunch and a big bang might be explained with the aid of these extra dimensions, which are otherwise invisible to us, several theorists believe.

In fact, Steinhardt, Turok and others proposed last year that our universe might have sprung from the collapse of an extra dimension, an idea they called the Ekpyrotic Universe. The cyclic universe builds on this former work but, Steinhardt says, does a better job explaining observations of our present universe.

Other theorists are not quick to give up their standard model, so the concept of a cyclic universe faces an uphill battle for prominence. Even Steinhardt acknowledges that the prospect of unseating a well established cosmological theory "would seem extremely dim." Meanwhile, the new concept is not free of cracks, either: Even the cyclic universe does not address when the cycles began, so "the problem of explaining the ‘beginning of time’ remains," the researchers say.

My point of course is that a beginning rules out infinity and thus the plenitude argument, that everything that can happen, has. You said:

First, a finite-but-sufficiently-enormous time can contain enough time for practically anything you name, no matter how unlikely, to occur, even if it's not actually infinite.

Time - no matter how great the length of it – as long as it is finite - cannot explain its own cause. That is the point.

Second, I don't see how you get from Russell's comment to "the plenitude argument". His comment does not seem based up on it.

The steady state universe – which was the accepted cosmology at the time Russell made his comments – said that time (and thus, space) was infinite. Thus any scientist or philosopher of that day could effectively appeal to the anthropic principle (“it just is”) because of the plenitude argument (“anything that can happen, has”).

The fact of a beginning, first confirmed by the observations of the cosmic background radiation in the 60’s, destroyed this argument.

Interview with Jastrow

JASTROW: Oh yes, the metaphor there was that we know now that the universe had a beginning, and that all things that exist in this universe-life, planets, stars-can be traced back to that beginning, and it's a curiously theological result to come out of science. The image that I had in my mind as I wrote about this was a group of scientists and astronomers who are climbing up a range of mountain peaks and they come to the highest peak and the very top, and there they meet a band of theologians who have been sitting for centuries waiting for them.

You continue:

And I'm not sure why one can not believe that "all that there is" (which is not the same as "all that there could be") could not arise from natural causation of some sort without needing to invoke the plenitude argument.

The point is that natural causation requires the pre-existence of a nature, at the very least, space/time. Infinite pre-existence (plenitude) is required to appeal to the anthropic principle. But, hey, believe whatever you wish – it’s your life. The conversation continued, but this is the gist of my response to him and here, to you.

Your challenge to Ronzo continued:

2) Organic matter created itself out of inorganic matter.

Organic matter is made up of inorganic matter. Where is the 'ghost within'?

It is not that simple. That which separates life from non-life is information. H.H. Pattee

But there is another type of subjective feeling about understanding life that motivated Pearson's question, the same, I think, that motivated Lucretius' and von Neumann's questions. It is a feeling of paradox, the same feeling that motivated Bohr, Wigner, Polanyi, the skeptics, and somewhat ironically, the founders of what is now reductionist molecular biology, like Delbrück. They all believed that life follows laws, but from their concept of law, they could not understand why life was so strikingly different from non-life. So I find another way of asking this type of question: What exactly does our view of universal dynamical laws abstract away from life, so that the striking distinctions between the living and the lifeless become obscure and apparently paradoxical?

My first answer is that dynamical language abstracts away the subject side of the epistemic cut. The necessary separation of laws and initial conditions is an explicit principle in physics and has become the basis (and bias) of objectivity in all the sciences. The ideal of physics is to eliminate the subjective observer completely. It turned out that at the quantum level this is a fundamental impossibility, but that has not changed the ideal. Physics largely ignores the exceptional effects of individual (subjective) constraints and boundary conditions and focusses on the general dynamics of laws. This is because constraints are assumed to be reducible to laws (although we know they are not reducible across epistemic cuts) and also because the mathematics of complex constraints is often unmanageable. Philosophers have presented innumerable undecidable metaphysical models about the mind-brain cut, and physicists have presented more precise but still undecidable mathematical models about quantum measurement. But at the primeval level, where it all began, the genotype-phenotype cut is now taken for granted as ordinary chemistry.

My second answer is that if you abstract away the details of how subject and object interact, the "very peculiar range" of sizes and behaviors of the allosteric polymers that connect subject and object, the memory controlled construction of polypeptides, the folding into highly specific enzymes and other functional macromolecules, the many-to-many map of sequences to structures, the self-assembly, and the many conformation dependent controls - in other words, if you ignore the actual physics involved in these molecules that bridge the epistemic cut, then it seems unlikely that you will ever be able to distinguish living organisms by the dynamic laws of "inorganic corpuscles" or from any number of coarse-grained artificial simulations and simulacra of life. Is it not plausible that life was first distinguished from non-living matter, not by some modification of physics, some intricate nonlinear dynamics, or some universal laws of complexity, but by local and unique heteropolymer constraints that exhibit detailed behavior unlike the behavior of any other known forms of matter in the universe?

The question is, where did the information come from or how did it arise from inorganic materials?

Your final challenge to Ronzo:

3) A rational being, man, was created from of a series of non-rational causes

Begging the question. Once #2 is acknowledged as being possible, #3 is rational.

And conversely, once #2 is acknowledged as impossible, #3 fails.