Originally posted by Urgot

Do I accept that science (in all its chaos) has more value than religion (in all its diversity) in making sense of the world, our place in it, and how we may affect that place?

Yes, I do.

Do I accept that science is an enormous improvement on relgion (and its historical persecutions of science) in expanding knowledge for the development of human history?

Yes, I do.
These would be the two assertions I see most often from atheists that are most like a religious belief to me. The idea that science, with its rather narrow focus, can take the place of religion, frankly boggles me.

This is about the time that the conversation usually devolves into an argument that our own conscious existence is really just an illusion brought on by our brain functions in an attempt to invalidate that part of universal human experience that I tend to think makes religion more attractive than science when discussing issues of morality and social values.

Where is the text?

When I spell, "tree", is the very essence of "treeness" physically vibrating through the air to impact your eyeballs, finding its home in some formation of neurons in your brain? Is the meaning of "tree" really an entirely physical phenomenon? I'm sorry, but I don't see one single ounce of evidence that this is so. What's more, even if it were so, why would I be aware of it at all?

About the time you assert that consciousness is a naturally occuring phenomenon, you have just undone all the centuries of work secularists have put into the idea that the spirit is a supernatural thing, thus undoing a huge portion of the problem with religion to begin with, i.e. that it speaks of things that cannot be dealt with in terms of science.

So one way or the other, you're stuck. Either our consciousness really is immaterial, in which case it's not reasonable to argue that there is no such thing as spirits our souls, or else consciousness is a physical phenomenon which can be observed somehow, in which case you can't argue that there is no physical evidence for the spiritual.