Happy to help, Amy, but just to be clear, these are just my opinions -- carefully considered and (hopefully) at least internally consistent. There are others, and I'm no AI expert.
I too find the concept of the singularity intriguing but currently laughable simply because of the enormity of what it would require and the remarkable ignorance (or hubris?) of believing it's near. The more we learn, the further away the likelihood of that event gets in my opinion.
I love that you're mulling a measurable definition of intelligence, and I agree that it's key to making sense out of AI and claims about AI.
I'm not sure how to understand "spiritual question". To me, science vs creation is about one's chosen belief system, which (again to me) is an issue separate from a practical definition of intelligence, i.e. many scientists are also believers.
For me, it's a very simple question. There are a number of workable definitions of intelligence out there, e.g. "the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills" from the Oxford Languages dictionary used in Google search results. It's the "measurable" part that complicates things for me. What criteria do we use to determine whether and to what degree knowledge and skills have been acquired? The Turing test springs to mind, but I find it quite subjective.
Please feel free to private message me if you'd prefer to take this "offline". I have another AI-related Medium post almost complete, and it deals with some of this.
Oh, and you might also enjoy reading David Rodenas, Ph.D. also on Medium. He is grappling with many of these topics too, and I admire and have benefitted from a lot of what he writes.
