How did little old us ever take the measure of unimaginably stupendous God?

[Redbeard The Pink]

As I recall, you would argue that certain prior conditions would be necessary for what we know as the universe today to exist.  Only God could provide those prior conditions.  Therefore God.

Those are arguments for a Creator, for example an argument for a creator is that consciousness if solely materially created is so complicated that to get there you would need many complex steps, yet there has to be a step from non-consciousness to consciousness because of how vastly different it is between the two states (ie. it's not like white to black with shades of grey). This put's a paradox where many steps are needed at the same time one step has to happen (ie. the shift from one state to the other).

Ummm...you do realize that there are organisms alive right now who exhibit vastly differing levels of conscious development, right? There is no need for consciousness to suddenly happen in one step.

Organisms have generally evolved (at minimum) enough consciousness to process whatever level of information they can sense. Humans have senses that are limited in range, yes, but in many ways our sensory equipment is a good bit more sophisticated than virtually all of our animal cousins, allowing us to take in remarkably copious and detailed levels of environmental information, hence the large brains. Without those, the sensory information we take in would be much less useful.

Anyway, my point is that consciousness can and does develop in steps as organisms evolve to sense and process increasingly complex information. There is never a need for a great leap of any kind to get from non-conscious critters to conscious ones; like everything in life, thought most likely evolved slowly through a series of small steps.