Why would a phenomena that "is caused by itself" require any form of sentience, omnipotence or be anything even remotely approximating the idea of a god?
The normal argument is that something greater cannot come from something lesser, iirc, though I'm definitely mangling that and probably misremembering it to some degree. You have to have the potential for the consequence in the precedent for things to function, or something along those lines. So in order for the creation of all things, whatever creates it must have the capability to do so; i.e. must have sentience to create sentience, must have sufficient power to bring forth all that is, etc., etc., etc. There's significantly more to it, of course, because they've been talking about that stuff for
centuries, and pretty much every casual issue with the stance has been considered and addressed at
some point, but that's a rough sketch of one of the arguments as near as I can remember it at the moment.
Honestly, for a long,
long time, it made a fair amount of sense, and it still makes a relatively decent amount of sense (or at least about as much as anything else :V) if you believe in
YEC or whathaveyou. It's just that we have fairly conclusive experimental proof at this point (as in, the last handful of decades) that building up to sentience or whatev' from nonsentience is entirely possible, and several of the initial premises are just kinda'... flawed.