Well I would say that any property is the result of entities acting in accordance with their nature and in accordance with natural laws. The fact that science can’t explain, yet, some phenomenon does not give us permission to invoke a supernatural explanation. What is solved by doing that? It doesn’t explain anything. God by definition is unknowable and incomprehensible. That conception is an attack on reason itself. Far from clarifying anything it puts an end to any rational inquiry.
When looking for the “why” of anything you have to start someplace right? You can’t have an infinite regress of causes, that’s the first cause argument. As soon as you allow for a something that just is and needs no explanation there is no rational reason to exclude nature from that list of things that just are and always have been. So by invoking a supernatural cause you are saying “I know the universe exists with certain natural laws but I don’t like that answer so I am going to jump to some unknowable, undefinable, incomprehensible being instead as an explanation. Something that is unknowable and unexplainable can’t be an explanation for anything.
As for M theory, scientists are proposing it because the big bang theory is limited by the fact that relativity as a theory is incomplete and that is why scientists are looking for a unified theory or quantum theory of gravity. But here is the difference between a theory and a supernatural being as an explanation: Once science has a theory it does not stop there. In fact a theory is only the beginning of the inquiry. It has to be tested and verified and that process never stops. 300 years from now we will still be verifying the theory of relativity or whatever new theory encompasses it and goes further. When you say “God did it” that is the end of any further investigation.
I totally reject the dichotomy between matter and spirit (consciousness). I reject materialism. We know that both matter and spirit exist together in nature, that man is an integration of the two and there is no reason to separate them. All the evidence points to consciousness being a result of biology, of our brains, but even if we never understand where it comes from, an inquiry into the origins of anything can not go outside of existence (nature) to look because there is by definition nothing there.
I must however disagree that "God did it" alone halts the investigation. Either "God did it" or "Nature did it" is a cop-out. It is enough to say that a question cannot be answered by the scientific method at this time, e.g. "why this instead of something else or nothing at all?"
It was the most theological statement ever to come out of modern science (Jastrow.) Scripture begins, "In the beginning, God created..."
With the notable exception of Tegmark's theory, all other physical cosmologies known to me (multi-verse, multi-world, ekpyrotic, cyclic, imaginary time) all lead to the infinite regress with the presupposition that prior universes have the same physical laws/constants as this one.
The only closed physical cosmology known to me, Max Tegmark's Level IV Parallel Universe, posits that 4D space/time is a manifestation of mathematical structures which actually do exist outside of space and time.
Newer Geometric Physics theories also illuminate physical cosmologies, e.g. f-Theory (Vafa), 5D2T (Wesson.) Both of these theories call for additional dimensions of time. Vafa's continues the compactification (string theory) model of Kaluza/Klein whereas Wesson's is a higher dimensional dynamic.