1. Your classification of the universe as a machine would allow anything to be classified as a machine, so it is not meaningful. - You are starting to get it. Even energies lever off other energies.
2. You have not shown that a machine must have a maker and cannot exist without one. You assume it based on your biased observations. Lack of observations of a black swan do not prove that one doesn't exist. - There is no example whatsoever of a machine existing without a maker. Yet there are countless examples of machines where we know who the maker is. Scientifically, when the odds are zero in one direction, and countless in the other direction... science considers that to be proof.
Your "countless examples" consist only of
man-made machines. What about machines that are not man-made? Can you show that they also have makers? There are certainly many more examples of machines that are not man-made than there are of man-made machines, so if it were actually true that you could use odds to prove something in this case, you would still be wrong.
3. You say that a god must be the creator of the universe because it is able to create it. That does not preclude something else from creating the universe. Perhaps your god found or inherited or even stole the universe after something else created it?
I didn't really say that. If something else created the universe, then the "something else" is God. Why? The nature of the universe is such that it would take a God by our dictionary and encyclopedia definition of "God" to create it. My god doesn't have anything to do with it. We are talking about God... He who is everybody's God... even the God of those who don't understand that God exists.[/quote]
You don't know that the universe was created by the entity that you call "God". The fact that "the nature of the universe is such that it would take a God
[to create it]" does not imply that God created it. You believe that God created it because you assume that there is and always has been exactly one god. I reject that assumption because there is no good reason to accept it.
Furthermore, you are begging the question. Your statement "If something else created the universe, then the 'something else' is God"
defines God as that which created the universe, and elsewhere you try to prove that God created the universe. In other words, you are trying to prove that God created the universe by using a definition of God as the creator of the universe.