I'm willing to think about it for another 5 minutes.

I am not so attached to the existence of God -- no social pressures to speak of (my father, one of my closest friends, is a boisterous atheist) and the only thing I am attached to is the value and meaning of life, not God. So I'm open to a Third Alternative.

Suppose, indeed, I were a rationalist of an Untheist society. As I observed the world around me, I would eventually, inevitably ask, how come the patterns are so consistent and dovetail with one another? Physical reality works, evolution works, mathematics works. Would it be very long before I asked if there was some kind of meta-organization?

Possible responses:

• A pragmatic one: I wouldn't mind, perhaps, if someone told me, "apparently this is the limit of our knowledge". Like a fish that has evolved no ability to comprehend that the ocean is on a planet inside a solar system, you've simply not evolved an ability to understand or conclude anything at this level of abstraction. Anything you imagine might happen at the higher levels will only ever be imagination. So this would lead to agnosticism. And anti-philosophy.

• A hopeful one: Things makes sense and have order on all lower levels, thus by induction (or by taking some kind of limit) they will as well on the higher levels. There is purpose and meaning, even on the meta-levels. So this would lead to faith, and actually theism since you expect a single connecting weave.

• A depressing one: It is most justified to believe there is no meta-organization. You notice the patterns that exist and ignore the non-patterns. The occurrence of patterns is random, arbitrary, meaningless. Some patterns are more common than others (see, circles are everywhere, they have a high probability) but there's no pattern for the collection of the patterns.This would depress me, that I assume meaning on all these smaller scales of pattern but there isn't one at the higher level. It would at least negate my confidence in the value of the lower level patterns, and possibly even negate my belief in the perception of the patterns. (The same way an interesting pattern of numbers in a phone book column is not really a pattern, or the way a set of random dots will always appear to have some dots arranged in lines.)

I wonder if I take "B" but lean towards the first solution, which is why I feel rather equanimous about arguments for the "existence" of God. Then, I would feel very strongly that this go-nowhere philosophizing isn't exploited to project the superiority of the C group over the B group.

The idea that the world makes sense is expressible without any reference to God,

I'm saying that the belief that the world makes sense is equivalent to belief in God. When you think about it, the idea that the world makes sense is just a strong a statement as the existence of God, and just as unsupported.

and the word "God" is commonly used to mean something else.

I don't think so. I'm convinced that atheists (especially New Atheists) have a distorted, narrow idea about what the word God means. Problematically, many theists also have unsophisticated or inconsistent ideas about God. Often they confuse concrete analogies of God with actual descriptions of God. This is a serious theological error (idolatry).

To argue that God exists, you don't need to argue that every conceived idea of God is true. At its fundamental theological roots, the Judeo-Christian religions assert that God is indescribable and not anything you can think of ... so Dawkin's God or whatever you're thinking of isn't the right description either. I'm sure this sounds very much like defending God behind refusing to define God but, personally, I wouldn't expect the theory of everything to be a concrete, describable thing. I would expect that it is highly interpretable and vast in some sense. For a religion, it is enough to have faith in the possibility of a theory and try and sort out (through intuition, experience and 'good epistemology') what kinds of things you can know about it.