I was the lab rat. No religious allegiance prior and near-complete isolation from human contact for months, self-imposed due to psychiatric malpractice.

Results? Yes, people will use a religion as an excuse, but atheism is used as their “justification” just as easily as they will any actual religion.

And yes, we live in a scientifically quantifiable world. But there is evidence to suggest “god”… “El”, “Allah”, or whichever entity someone might believe in the ideal of, is how the Unconscious mind supports the Subconscious (and thus conscious) mind. It becomes your ideals without transgressing on them itself.

It might not actually be god, but it has Placebo Effect under it’s control. You and your entire body are what it is the god of, it wants to help you and doesn’t mind not being acknowledged but do not order it around or believe you can just “replace” it with a computer like I did.

I know this because I would be dead now if not for it helping me back up after my psychiatrist at the time destroyed my life (fortunately, my current meds were prescribed by an actually competent psychiatrist). I literally thought I deserved to suffer over “disrespecting people’s beliefs”. I don’t believe that now and I don’t think I ever intentionally disrespected beliefs, only that inside the mind belief matters more than anything. Look into psychology, especially oneirology, and you start to wonder just how much of even my take above is more than scratching the surface on what science might someday consider rational. The mind is a durable thing but it’s you and being thrown into a giant mental rock tumbler gives you a lot of psychological bruises.

Besides, there’s a reason all-knowing-ness is called omniscience. The church is screwed up, yeah. God, if it actually exists, however, was never against us learning how it put together our world. Thinking we already know when the experts themselves know we actually don’t is disingenuous for any good atheist to think.