I won’t retract the article, as it serves as just one marker in my intellectual development.

Brilliant! I’d never thought of it this way before Thanks for sharing!

Plato conjectured some independent, magical realm of ideas, but I am pointing at actual, material, physical reality. I was just going with a traditional definition of God that I favored when I was a Bible-believing supernaturalist.

Strangely, although the “omni” attributes of God break down and become contradictory when we posit “God” as existing within reality, they do apply, (but in non-anthropomorphic ways), to nature or reality as a whole …

Omnipresent – check. Present at all times and at all places.
Omnipotent – check.
Omniscient – check. Reality/nature contains (is) all information and entropy, all wisdom and intelligence.
Omnibenevolent – check.

Omnibenevolent?! Yes, if seen as “good” from different points of view including that of a face-eating virus. If something were omnibenevolent it wouldn’t favor one entity over another. (If something were omni-malevolent it would destroy itself instantly).
Of course, this view of omnibenevolence is identical to utter, impersonal indifference, which is what we observe.
But a pessimistic take would not be quite correct. It is nature which gives us the drive and the means to live and to procreate. It is nature which gives us the drive to form societies and practice compassion. It is nature which stuns us with her beauty and overawes us with her power. And it is the knowledge of nature which gives us all the good things that we enjoy in the modern world. The “knowledge of gods” has never given us anything.

There’s no such thing as “Spirit” by definition. As for God, God is “that than which none greater can be conceived”. That description can only apply to Reality.

While we may assign “intelligence” to reality, the whole certainly isn’t personal in any human sense of the word. Nevertheless, reality/nature is a beautiful and terrible mystery that becomes increasingly fulfilling the more we learn of her.

So anything someone makes up may be considered true?

If you’re not completely relying on Physical Evidence And Reasoned Logic (PEARL) then you’ll quickly become a victim of potentially deadly FISHes (Fantasy, Intuition, Superstition and Hearsay).
Out of the infinite sea of possibilities keep the PEARLs, but kill and dispose of the FISHes. It’s immoral to keep and share them, because they’re extremely poisonous and too often deadly.

[Thanks to “Thunderf00t” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0zSCpsOSSw&feature=channel_page and “Deacon Duncan” http://blog.evangelicalrealism.com/2008/02/21/disproving-the-existence-of-god/

Anyway, what are the chances of someone’s baseless, (usually highly improbable and immaterial), conjecture being The One™?
There are a potentially infinite amount of wild conjectures, so the chance of their baseless and unnecessary conjecture being true is 1/infinity which is zero, (or more properly: the limit of 1/x as x approaches infinity = 0).