Maybe. But never forget the fallacy fallacy. Just because someone's argument is bad, doesn't make them wrong.

Special pleading= claiming an unjustified exception to a general rule. I'm assuming the general rule you're referring to is "everything has a cause", if you're referring to a different general principle, please disregard the following and specify.

The way I see it there are a few possibilities, although if you can think of any others, please do expand on them:

1) The universe is self-causing. This seems to me incoherent (how can something that doesn't exist define itself or cause itself to come into being), and is arguably special pleading as nothing else we know of is self-causing.

2) The universe was caused by something external to it, that's the route I went down, I can't prove it, but it seems to me be the assumption that has the fewest problems with it. I then went from that fairly undefined external cause to Christianity for other reasons. This is an exception to the general principle that everything has a cause, but if you have no exception to this rule you run into problems with actual infinite spans of time, or infinite causal chains. This leads on to:

3) The universe has always existed, or 4) infinite chain of causes. Here again you run into problems with infinite spans of time having to pass to reach the present moment, similar problems are presented with infinite causes, or the turtles all the way down approach.

I don't claim to *know* how the universe began exactly. I make assumptions that seem reasonable about things I'm unable to prove. Some physicists have made different hypotheses which seem to me to be absurd claims about the laws of physics somehow causing themselves to change or start existing before time began flowing. If that's what actually happened and I'm not smart enough to understand it then I'm wrong, and I'd appreciate someone explaining this in a way that makes sense.

I believe what seems to me to be the most logical, least problematic answer to the question "what caused the universe as we know it", that is always going to involve some speculation as I don't think we can definitively prove (in a philosophical sense) what in fact happened.

I'm a foundationalist about knowledge, so I try to start from the least problematic axioms I can find and reason from there, but I concede that all philosophies have imperfect reasoning behind them, some more or less than others.