Yeah, the free will point is the same problem from another angle.
Some straight up do the Dennett drift and deflate free will to whatever determinism leaves behind, which is where you end up when the only two options on the table for mind are an unsolved “hard problem” or “magic”. What you say is in fact on par with Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism, the one he laid out in his book “Where the Conflict Really Lies”. Thing is, when people stretch science to mean everything is the product of blind processes, they think they’re getting more rational or somewhat less dogmatic (or less superstitious). What they’re really doing instead is turning science from a method into an ideology (whether it’s positivism or physicalism) that becomes a counterintuitive useful fiction where we keep escalating into ever more counterintuitive hypotheses, further and further removed from reality. Say what you want about presuppositionalists but they saw that one coming before the rest of us did.
And underneath it all, science never rested on “rational minds” anyway, it rests on realism which is the presupposition or metaphysical claim that our minds can actually track the real in a world fine-tuned for discovery. Take away the metaphysical grounding for that fit between mind and world, and what’s left holding science up is just a new form of fideism. It only has a “sciency” gloss.
That’s fine, but I disagree that metaphysics leads to theism, so my ‘bottom turtle’ wouldn’t be a deity.
Ok, I retract that - it is incorrect in that unconfirmable ideas (either currently unconfirmable or entirely unconfirmable) are not completely useless - they can be used to spark discussion and formulate other concepts. But you actually said there was nothing that could be discovered that was inconsistent with the idea of the unmoved mover - and an idea that is consistent with any possible discovery is not much use.
That assumes the ‘unmoved mover’ is supernatural, which is not necessarily the case from the definition, even though Aristotle et al seem to assume it is. The real problem with confirming/disproving an unmoved mover is temporal - it wouldn’t necessarily still exist.
You said “We theists fare much better with our cosmological arguments and necessary being.” Theists, not metaphysicists.
If you want to change that to ‘metaphysicists fare much better’, feel free to do so.
But it won’t matter, because you have failed to go deeper into the trumpet-and-light scenario and show how either theism or metaphysics could provide answers that science could not. So if you are correct and (based on this fictional scenario) science doesn’t explain anything, then theism and metaphysics are no better.