"I will alter my viewpoint to accommodate the change, but in the meantime, I will act and operate under the assumption that fifteen is the blank. If this seems myopic to you, I would like to submit that perhaps the problem is people's overeagerness to scrap common sense and Occam's razor in favor of non sequitur, nonsensical answers that suit their biases and desires."
1) The problem is that "15" is still a specific, quantifiable number. It's a problem because:
a) Many definitions of "God" are nowhere near that specific. For instance, the pantheistic concept of God is not as specific as a Real Number.
b) If that definition fails we've simply disproved 1 definition of God. Many still remain.
2) I agree with you totally about Occam's Razor but often "common sense" is simply a euphemism for "my preexisting biases/presumptions". Occam's Razor can only be applied when terms have been defined and only after theories have been passed through reasonable scrutiny with supporting evidence. To apply it to soon and you risk the "Argument from Incredulity" fallacy. Don't apply it ever and you risk the "Argument from Ignorance" fallacy.
"If you're being honest with yourself, this makes you an agnostic theist."
If you notice, I said if one defines "God" in a certain way, and I said only at a weak intuitive level. Intellectually I'm still agnostic towards that position as well and have no definition opinion. Not everyone can be fit or shoehorned into a neat, tidy box or category.
I definitely wouldn't be a Christian because I don't believe Jesus was a special savior, or had any kind of special potential that any other human doesn't have. Not to mention there's no evidence he did anything from the stories in the Bible.
"But as for the answer itself... It just sounds like a bunch of quantum woo and warmed-over "God of the Gaps" arguments to me, no offense."
None taken, friend. ;) I would have thought so at one point but I don't think that way anymore when I thought of it this way: It's just a simple question of the origin or emergence of Consciousness. If consciousness arises on the level of organisms it also leads one to question just on what scale can consciousness emerge? If it's possible that consciousness can emerge on the level of something bigger than an organism or something that isn't flesh-and-blood it brings into question how big does consciousness get and how do we tie into it? To date consciousness remains a vague and not too-well-understood area of science, I think scientific theories that consciousness may be something that is partly external, an element of the universe itself (like the Orch-OR Theory), may be plausible. IMHO it would certainly make sense of a lot of unexplained phenomena of consciousness, perception, qualia and experience. If consciousness is a type of energy that kind of begs the question does the universe itself have consciousness of some sort.
I'm hardly alone in that line of thought, some scientists have the same or similar questions which they seriously investigate.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LKtiR3Y3SE
Of course, none of this is evidence it's a "God" but then it all gets into just what a "God" is. If consciousness is a field or a shared force that would meet some definitions of a "God".
"An overarching intelligence is not an integral or necessary part of any serious theory of quantum mechanics or string theory"
This leads me to ask a Dawkins-like question: Does there have to be a necessity? There is no need that we can discern for humans to exist, or any life at all to exist. Yet it does anyway, whether it has a purpose or not. A "God" doesn't necessarily need a purpose to exist, just like we humans don't. Overarching intelligence is not integral to Quantum Mechanics but it's a possibility that is introduced by some Quantum Mechanics theories of consciousness. Just like String Theory introduces the possibility of certain particles we didn't think of in Classical Mechanics.
