Idealism is more Rational than Materialism

[Rational AKD]

So it's fine to postulate an unverifiable God that is responsible for your consciousness, but not an unverifiable material substance?

it's epistemologically unverifiable. but with the necessity of an external source to explain our experience of lack of control, a mind makes less assumptions. you already know mind exists, so to postulate another mind to explain your experience doesn't take that huge a step. a substance we are unfamiliar with (as it is not directly part of our experience) is a bigger step.

You are making more than one assumption. You are assuming that a God exists, it is a being and has a consciousness like you do, but this consciousness is somehow different to yours in that it can control yours, and that this consciousness is the reason that you have a consciousness.

lets see... exists. check. conscious? well minds are conscious aren't they? just because there are defined attributes of a mind doesn't make those attributes separate assumptions from 'a mind exists.' different in that it has control? well, the extra mind was postulated to explain the problem of solipsism, so it would have to be different from mine or else it wouldn't solve this problem... which is again, a definitional attribute. not a separate assumption. lastly causality? in order for this mind to be connected to mine it would either be emergent from my mind or mine emergent from its. since this mind has control I lack, mine would have to be emergent. if my mind is emergent from this mind, then it had to emerge at some point. for once this is not a definitional attribute, but it is still a logical implication from the first assumption.

All you have experienced is your own consciousness - this has few of the properties of what you call a "grand consciousness"/God.

except that God is conscious like me, he has information like me, he has the ability to make choices like me, etc.

I could play the what-if game out too but I can't imagine talking myself into idealism as a viable alternative. Nothing wrong with it as an exercise of course but why would you want to live there, or do you?

glad you could join the party. why would you want to live there? i'm afraid what we want of reality has no impact on the nature of reality. I don't chose beliefs because I like them, but because they seem most reasonably true. it seems quite a shame your ability to accept something is impaired by your subjective liking of it.