You don’t need to invoke any cause if you don’t have evidence for that cause. “I don’t know” works just fine. What you are using is called a “God of the Gaps”.
Apparently, you don’t either. Otherwise, you could present this supposed evidence.
Aha, we’ve come full circle! Maybe you should go back to near the beginning of this thread to where the god of the gaps objection was first brought up, and responded to; perhaps you’ll find something we’ve missed.
But to address what you’ve said specifically, the cosmological argument itself is evidence - not in the empirical sense, but in the more general sense of rational justification to believe something. To deny that you either need to show that the argument is invalid, or show that the premises are not justified, or deny that logical arguments can provide knowledge. (I recommend the second course of action. Or, you could accept the argument’s conclusion, and move a step closer to theism!) In any case, it is not “god of the gaps”.
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With a dead person in the room it sure is.
Unless it was a suicide. Or an accidental discharge. Or the person died of a heart attack while cleaning the gun. Thank goodness Bill you aren’t a real detective. 
I didn’t miss this:
That is a classic example of the “God of the Gaps” argument.
It isn’t up to me to invalidate an argument that lacks validation. How does the cosmological argument justify the conclusion that God created the Universe?
My grandmother died a year back. She died at home peacefully with family around her. To make it easier for people to visit we had the bed set up in the family room. Around one of the walls was my grandfather’s gun cabinet. So, in the same room we had a dead body and a gun. Is the gun evidence of murder?
Boy, what baffling forensics! 
If you find three bullet holes in her back. Sure. You need to put the evidence together to reach a conclusion as a single piece does not solve the puzzle. The big bang is one piece of evidence just like a gun.
BTW sorry about your grandmother.
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There was a Big Bang. That is evidence, or at least it should be an allowable inference, that someone pulled the metaphorical trigger.
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You finally got there. So what is the equivalent with respect to the universe?
How is the Big Bang evidence that someone pulled the trigger?
It’s not, for someone with your worldview and confirmation bias cast in concrete and that refuses to allow it. For lots of people, it has been, however, and a factor in their renunciation of atheism and embrace of the God of Christianity. I have posted one such above… evidence, if you will (but apparently probably won’t).
If you have to already believe that God triggered the Big Bang in order for the Big Bang to be evidence, then it would seem the confirmation bias exists with you. I think you are projecting your own faults onto other people.
There are people who convert from believing in a round earth to a flat earth. That doesn’t convince me that the earth is flat.
We all have confirmation bias. Not everyone’s is correct, but it doesn’t have to stay that way. But if you a priori disallow the existence of the immaterial then you a priori disallow big bang cosmology (and anything else) as evidence. It’s as simple as that.
Paraphrasing, “If you a priori disallow the existence of the immaterial, neither will you be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.”
Luke 16 ESV (verse 31)
What? Can you elaborate on this? What’s “immaterial” about big bang cosmology?
Big Bang is the gun
Hydrogen Atoms are the bullets
Life’s critical requirement for hydrogen and its characteristics is the body with bullet holes
DNA with its hydrogen bonds is the gun smoking at the scene.
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It’s easy to say “the universe began… I believe my God created the universe from the beginning… that the universe began is evidence of that.” But you haven’t demonstrated that there’s any causal link. Sure, it fits nicely into your story. But until you can demonstrate that causation, accusing me of “denial” for example for not believing it is an absurdity. Not to mention, from what I’ve seen, cosmologists have different interpretations of events at the very beginning of the universe and their implications.
You’ll have to allow me to clarify. There’s been a couple overlapping discussions in this thread, so the intended context of my statement was probably unclear (and may even have just been in my head).
One question we can ask and try to answer is “does the universe have a cause?” The cosmological argument is a logical argument for the affirmative. But the comment of mine you quoted here is not actually trying to answer that question: I intended it, rather, as part of an answer to a distinct but related question: “if the universe has a cause, what is that cause like?” (That is where I thought the discussion was at when the cloud analogy was brought in: not whether we can infer the universe has a cause, but what we can infer about that cause if indeed it does exist.)
That being said, even if I was at that point trying to argue that the universe does have a cause, that still wouldn’t make it a “god of the gaps”, and if you want to keep saying it is, I’m hoping you’ll back that assertion up. “God of the gaps” is assuming a conclusion out of ignorance. The cosmological argument, on the other hand, is reasoning to a conclusion based on premises we have good reason to believe.
By “valid” here I mean logically valid: the conclusion follows deductively from the premises. But whether the cosmological argument (at least, the one with the premises and conclusion that I posted earlier in this thread) is valid is not actually in question; it is easy to verify that it is. The question is whether the premises are true.
It would make this long thread far longer if I actually tried to make that case here. But if you’re interested, you can check out what I’ve written on that topic on my blog.