This isn't really a physics forum, so I'm not going to embark on modeling a possible mechanics under the hood of our reality. This isn't really a physics forum I can generally describe a few models that I can personally think are viable in context of your questions.
Term "nothing" in most religious settings generally means "chaos". Even in genesis you have God organizing the world out of chaos.
So, the idea of "nothing out of something" is more like a concept of order out of chaos. Fundamentalists tend to look at these terms literally, but the literal term of "nothing" is, of course nonsensical, because it refers to non-existing things, or negation of something.
Hence, it's not a causal relationship where God would conjure something up out of absolute "nothingness". Of course, semantically it's absurd and self-negating concept.
Of course it fails across the board when it comes to the reductionist approach to science that you describe above in a sense that we are discussing the "fringe of reality" that's not even accessible to us. I'll go point by point here:
1) Predictions would align with what we currently observe in any case or model. That's why we still have a dozen explanations of quantum phenomenon. All of these predict quantum phenomenon retrospectively, but it doesn't really tell us which one is likely correct.
As such, as some may think, the embarrassing part of quantum physics is that there's a broad distribution of consensus over which one is correct. You would think that physicists would overwhelmingly agree on a few, but that's not the case, and I actually think it's a good thing. The moment we agree on everything will be the moment of the scientific dead-end in general.
2) Again, I'm not sure that the least amount of assumption is applicable in the case where all we have is assumptions. Such concept doesn't even work in examining known reality all the time. It's a good principle to follow, but it's not an absolute principle.
3) Of course, but neither are electrons or subatomic particles. All we ever "observe" is a projection of reality in our conscious experience. For example, if we didn't have an eye sight as humanity, our knowledge would be very different than it is today, and our concept of "obeservation" would be tremendously different.
We work with what we have. We can say "we don't know" and stop there, but that's the fun in that?
4) This is not really a scientific board. Christianity is more of a sociological concept than it is physics, etc. Physicists, for example, would discount sociology as a pseud-science for the same exact reasons... it's too broad in its observations, there are too many degrees of freedom, etc. It doesn't make sociology any less useful, and it doesn't stop sociologists one bit.
In short, you are attempting to jam religion through a reductionist meat grinder, but you can't even do that with most of theoretical physics, because reductionism is a scientific dead-end, and we have various "heros" of physics beginning to advocating loosing up the requirements, with falsifiability likely being trashed first.
In short all we have is a broader model, because that's all we can do at this point. I would have to agree with you that any specifics about various human stories that we see in religious narratives are questionable, and you can certainly reject these as you do. That's a different topic of discussion.
But on the broader question of God, the primary idea is that matter behaves "intelligently" in a scope of the properties of matter, no matter how far you chunk it. What science does is explain how in terms of consistent ratios. The problem with that approach is that it doesn't give a clear model as to how we arrived with a reality that's able to communicate complex meaning to a vast and statistically unlikely collection of atoms that are walking and talking about what to have for dinner tonight. By itself that's a miraculous concept before we even get to these entities building reality structures that quite impressive.
When we consider the added layer of conscious experience, and not mere robotic processing of our being, there is a completely different ballpark of existence that we are talking about than what we derive pragmatically from reductionist models of science.
There's a confusion that science is opposite of religion, and that atheism is opposite of theism, and that's simply not the case. Atheism is a reduction of theism, and theism is extension of atheism. That's all it is. You are simply unwilling to "extend" your model unless your are given evidence that would fit that reductionist model... but you are getting nowhere with that model apart from digging around in "visible spectrum". We began scientific enterprise with these assumptions, and we rapidly discovered quite a bit about our immediate reality, but it's beginning to drop off and plateu fairly fast when we are running out of things to examine.
There's an inherent "resolution limit" to such methodology, and then we are back to telling each other stories, because that's all we can do beyond that.
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. My mother has a graduate degree in physics, and she taught and did research at university level, granted that it was in former USSR, but I'd say educational standards there were much more stringent. So, I have plenty people in my immediate environment to pitch my stories about how the world could work. I don't think this discussion is on the level of physics, because you are describing philosophical axioms that underline our assumptions in physics.
