Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with me.
It's actually simple, as basic things tend to be. The most foundationally honest and stable way to look at anything is in God's light. No matter the subject, this is the case. If it is the science of chemistry, astrophysics, quantum physics, meteorology, or the study of G.W. Carver's peanut, the question should be, "God, how is it that Your (peanut) is the way it is and functions as you have made it?" Quarks and consciousnesses too.
It gets said over and over that science is science and to consider God, it ceases to be science and becomes tainted with something people call "theology." Nothing is further from the truth. There is no such thing as proper science that does not include God, just as there is no such thing as the study of anything else that does not include God. (Remember the false dichotomy of dualism?)
Is there any truth, any fact anywhere, that is not God's truth and God's fact? We are told the answer to this question -- by God.
Trading materialism in for ideas of collective consciousness doesn't bring about the proper understanding for how things are and how they function. It may provide more conceptual gem stones for us, but it does not make jewelry. To understand even the most mundane technology aptly, it must be seen in its setting.
Whatever field is being studied, it is God's field and it is for His pleasure and He is there and involved with utter intentness and purpose, utter power and utter subtlety, sowing and reaping in that field. I'll let you finish the quote, "...for from Him and through Him and to Him are ___ ______."
There is no such thing as the divorce of the whats and the hows from the Utterly Personal whys. Attempts to make this separation are fundamentally and effectively insane.
Scientific speculation is laudatory, but like all our observations and conceptualizations, it is dark and our job is to shed light upon it, not to call it light.