Nice summary. Good questions gracefully avoiding clumsy “answers”. The elephant in the lab of the physicalists as well as the quantum physicists is what we title “God”. “Oh God, don’t go there”. It is unavoidable. Cosmologists are growing in their agreement that the nature of the Universe is information exchange. Information arises from thought which arises from Mind. Therefore, the encounter with the Great “Mind” of the Universe reveals that Consciousness is the most basic event in the Universe, out of which everything, including the energy of the quantum void, originates from The fundamental Consciousness, the Universal Mind.
Interesting how extremely intelligent men like Hawkins foolishly attempt to put of the inevitable confrontation with the Great Mind (aka, God) by speculating about the idea of infinite universes out of which odds would produce one perfectly attuned mathematically to inevitably produce life without a plan or thought.
You can run, but you can’t hide. We all must eventually find ourselves exploring First Cause, and there can be only one, The Great Mind producing all Consciousness out of which springs information and All That Is.