Tier I
Is there a Mind behind nature?
Four lines of evidence bear on whether the universe, life and mind have a source beyond nature. They can only tell a Mind from no Mind; none of them says which God, if any.
The universe had a beginning
Our universe has a finite past as a hot, expanding system; a first state is a strong but unproven inference, a beginning of time is not established, and as evidence for a Creator it counts modestly, a likelihood ratio of about 1.3.
Is the universe fine-tuned for life?
In standard physics the energy of empty space has to cancel a drop about 1055 times its present value to within a few hundred times that value. For one universe with nothing linking the two, that is at most about 1 in 1051, so blind chance is out. But a law, a multiverse or a mind could each do the selecting, and this evidence alone does not choose between them: real, but only suggestive, evidence for a Mind.
The origin of life and information
Chemistry has shown many of the steps toward life but not the road. The hardest step, the birth of a coded translation system, is where a mind is the somewhat better explanation as far as we now know. It is a modest clue, not a proof.
Mind, reason and near-death experiences
Science has not shown that you are only your brain: felt experience resists physical explanation, and a few near-death cases are hard to explain. But the decisive test, a hit on a hidden target, has not come in. This is an open door, not a proof.
One line carries most of the weight, and only modestly: fine-tuning, chiefly the cosmological constant, which favours a Mind over naturalism by a factor of about 10 (range 0.5 to 1,000). Its famous odds, about 1 in 1051, rule out only one universe with blind, uncorrelated chance; a deeper law, a multiverse with selection or a Mind could each do the selecting, so the ratio is set by how much weight you give those options, not by the size of the tuning. The beginning of the universe, the origin of life and consciousness each tip the scales only slightly (about 1.2 to 1.3), and each can be read either way by a careful critic.
Together the four still matter: in the unified argument, removing this whole tier takes a Mind behind nature from 91.2% to 46.5% from even odds.
These four share a weakness: each could be answered by future science. So in the unified argument the three origins lines (beginning, fine-tuning, origin of life) are grouped and discounted rather than simply added, and consciousness forms a group of its own.
What this tier cannot tell you: which Mind. Deism, Judaism, Islam and Christianity all predict a universe like this equally, and the model gives other traditions partial credit for it. That question belongs to Tier II and Tier III.