After giving your post a couple of reads, Norman, I can't help but think I've already sufficiently addressed your concerns and that now we are circling on the same propositions and starting to repeat ourselves.  Repeating the same questions is not the same as rebutting the answers.  But I will try to clarify a couple of things.

"Math Problem: If a turtle runs the length of an infinitely long racetrack in 7 days, how fast was he traveling?" or "The Devil is in the details."

Norman, you say my concentration on the chronology of turtles is a distraction.  However, I have to respectfully disagree.  We are comparing turtles to see which one provides the most logical explanation of our universe.  The chronology of the turtles is a major element to that explanation.  It would be a turtle of another color if God came into being, and especially if God came into being AFTER matter came into being.  You say that your first principle is 'God did it.'  If you think about that a little more carefully, I think you will see that your first principle is actually that 'God eternally is.'  THEN God 'did it,' apparently after an infinite sequence of other things.  So the chronology is a significant element to your presupposition, one that needs to be considered, not ignored.

Theists do not explicitly say that God performed an infinitely long list of acts prior to creating our universe.  But that is the implication of saying that God is and has existed forever, unless you mean that 'forever' to be a single, timeless moment prior to creating us.  And the latter option is not one that theists I have spoken with feel comfortable in asserting.  Although this infinite regression is a feature of theism, it is one that theists often ignore or quickly dismiss out of frustration when it is recognized by children in Sunday school.  It is a problem of infinite regression of serial 'moments,' not a regression of turtles or a shifting set of first principles.

There are ways to avoid the infinite regression of past, sequential events, both with a god and with material as the first principle or turtle.  If you need me to be clearer about that, I can.  If necessary, I can present a material explanation or turtle that avoids the regression, is more elegant, AND is more logical than a god turtle.  It would probably take one small post to do so.

You also mention that my first principle 'that's just how it is' is essenitally content-free, the Diet Coke of turtles.  That's because the statement 'that's just how it is' is itself simply an acknowledgment that ultimately some turtle does not require further explanation, and from a non-theist view it would be the material of this universe.  So the content of my turtle is some construction of material process.  Saying that 'material just is' would be no more vacuous than 'God just is.'  I have not yet actually described a particular turtle to compete with God.  There are many possibilities, and God seems to be the least workable of all of them.  I personally see no reason to promote any of the other turtles as the Truth since they are all constructed solely from human imagination, are not specifically required by anything humans experience, and so are not necessarily THE actual explanation.  So my turtle isn't exactly content-free.  I simply make room for a variety of contenders.

So not only is the chronology issue NOT a distraction, it is probably the biggest stumbling block your turtle could ever encounter, self-contradiction.  Infinities cannot be numbered, and the 'days' of the past are numbered, else we wouldn't have finished them to move on into the 'present.'  Another way to say it is that you can't finish a journey you don't actually start.  The God you propose, your first principle, cannot be infinitely old AND in the present.  Let me know if you need me to clarify this.

"I AM who I AM, uhm... who AM I?" or "God can do it anyway it likes"

The attributes often attributed to God by theists provide, at best, only a very WEAK explanation for the nature of our universe.  This is in part because those attributes are not well defined and are often presented in contradictory ways (God is immutable but has temporal experiences, God is loving but will kill most of humanity, God is logical/reasonable but is itself one and three at the same time, etc., etc., etc....mysteries, paradoxes, not clear first principles).  Theologians over the centuries have quibbled endlessly about the actual atributes of God and how those attributes play out together.  You object to shifting scientific notions as a basis for knowledge while cherry-picking a single definition for God from the many in a long line of shifting definitions. 

And you have to be careful about cherry-picking match-ups between God and the universe (correlating some attributes and not others as 'meaningful' or 'informative') because other people can do it too.  Is the universe a place of Justice or Injustice?  Is our universe a place of Love or Violence?  You see, this game can work both ways.  You can argue for or against God as the creator solely from its attributes.  You can even arrive at the conclusion that God is an evil monster because the universe seems cold and monstrous.

Not only are the attributes vague and contradictory, they are causally disconnected from the creation of the universe.  The attributes don't determine the shape of our universe, God's arbitrary preferences do that.  You could say that God's attributes influence its preferences, but that doesn't lead us to a particular universe prediction, much like the characteristics of our universe do not help us back-track to a particular God prediction (which is the point of using presuppositional models in the first place). There are many ways God could have chosen to make the universe.  This particular creation is not an identifiable 'signature' of a particular set of God attributes.  The claim that it is borders on being a full-blown non sequitur. Who knows the mind of God, eh?

You might say that a weak explanation is better than none at all.  For example, the Bible says that the reason we have female human beings is because God saw that Adam needed a companion.  What that actually means, I'll leave to the theologians.  But you could argue that God is the best explanation for our universe since the larger theory of God and creation provides an explanation for why there are women.  And that is supposedly better than having no theory at all, right?  It fills a hole in our worldview, so it should be accepted, right?  That sounds a little silly, especially considering the rather powerful explanation that has only come in recent times: humans evolved from other sexual reproducers, and sexual reproduction probably evolved and was selected because it allowed for more genetic variation and adaptation in a population.  Or will any old story do?

IMO it is a sloppy argument, not a cogent one, that says contradictory and vague definitions of a God of inscrutable will REQUIRE that a universe come in a particular form when it could have come in any form.  And a weak explanation is not necessarily 'good enough.'

"She's got her daddy's eyes" and "God is bigger than words"

Norman, you say that I misrepresent Theism by claiming that the theist's notion of God is anthropomorphic, but (surpise, surpise) I'm going to have to disagree with you.

I myself used to be a 'card-carrying' theist who held to such anthropomorphic notions.  Not only did I grow up in the Protestant tradition, I was a missionary for some time in Mexico.  My wife is from the Catholic tradition, and I have talked to Mormons and Muslims and Jews and Greek Orthodoxers, so I think I've been exposed to most of Christendom and even a broader range of theists and have listened to their thinking about God.

I do not propose anything so crude as to say that most theists today see God as the ancient Greeks did.  Nor am I saying that God is necessarily man's invention (though this is what I think).  The similarities between God and humans may be from God making man in its own image and not vice versa. But theists clearly describe God in terms of having a mind, personality, and motivations very similar to humans.  Statements to that effect litter the pages of the Bible, and sometimes God even literally takes human form. 

Typically theists, when pressed, will claim that these attributes are merely metaphors to explain an unexplainable God.  This is understandable, and it avoids a lot of the absurdities that come from truly trying to imagine God as literally described.  But remember that your argument for God being the best turtle assumes that these attributes are accurate descriptions of God, at least to the degree that you can make predictions from them.  Your arguments are based on anthropomorphic qualities of God.  The more they are metaphor, the less reliable they are as literal descriptions.  I personally would feel a little queasy making arguments about the origin of the universe from over-analyzed metaphors.

Anyway, I think that covers the important stuff.  If we need another round of posts to clarify other details, let me know.

Cheers and beers.

- L.Pig.