Earlier quoted context omitted.
> who is to say with certainty whether that's the result of schizophrenia and auditory hallucinations, or an actual interdimensional communication from the architect of this virtual reality simulation we're all (okay, perhaps) living in? Russel's Teapot. Also, Occam's Razor.
Yet those are probabilistic heuristics, not things which grant certitude. (Also, Russell's Teapot is not at all a fair comparison. A vast, incomprehensible, inconceivably simple unitary consciousness as the fundamental substrate of reality is much closer to most religious conceptions of God than is a teapot in orbit.) (...and, of course, a single entity which underlies reality is ultimately simple. Push it pantheist…
The corollary between the teapot and the idea of "god" is that both of them are extraordinary claims and therefore the burden of proof rests on the people trying to argue that they're true. That property remains holds for your first definition of god as well. That doesn't mean it _can't_ be true, but it does imply that it should be held to the same standard as any other unfalsifiable claim.
Of course, the converse is true as well, which I think is the point the article is trying to make; believing in ghosts or hauntings isn't any more incompatible with the worldview of the cold, rational technologist that the article describes than religion is. If believing in ghosts or hauntings makes someone happier, as long as they don't use it as a rationale to harm anyone else, all the more power to them!