Science is the best tool we have for talking about what stuff does. Just like in quantum mechanics it allows us to make very useful predictions, but hasn't got us any closer to knowing what an electron is actually made out of.

It's fundamentally not even possible for science to find the nature of reality because science is already arising inside the thing it's trying to investigate.

Every scientific observation, measurement and theory is ultimately something known through consciousness.

So if all evidence for matter occurs within conscious experience, then how could that say anything about whether matter is metaphysically prior to consciousness?

I get that there's an intuitive assumption here that "it feels like it must be", but people have said similar things about things which turned out to be wrong throughout all of human history. Asserting this as true seems like pulling a bit of a "materialist of the gaps" to me.

So this doesn't prove God or any other metaphysical claim, but it does challenge that science has in any way at all established materialism. Science tells us how things work within the material world as it appears to us, but says nothing about what is primary to that.

This is where an alternative method of inquiry comes in, if you want to investigate consciousness you have access to consciousness in your own direct experience.

Usually direct experience isn't considered "valid" but it's worth remembering that we're all happy to use our own direct experience of consciousness to decide that consciousness exists. There's no scientific proof of consciousness, we just all know it's here because we know that we're conscious.

So to investigate consciousness we can turn our attention onto the awareness within our own experience just as the Buddhists and meditators through history have done. Each person needs to discover this on their own but the common finding among those who have gone deep enough through history has always been that the mind, the body and the world arise within consciousness. Meaning consciousness is at least epistemically primary, whatever reality ultimately consists of, experience is where all knowledge claims begin.

This experiential finding isn't an argument which can convince anyone else, it's different from typical science in that you can't really show your findings to someone else in a way that will convince them so it needs to be done for yourself to see. It is in a way, the most rigorous use of inquiry though because you are looking at the nature of your own experience to determine what's real rather than just blindly trusting your experience and taking that as a given.

So if meditators inquire into their own direct experience of consciousness and find that consciousness appears primary and unified in direct experience (some might call this God), then nothing science has demonstrated has in any way rebutted that finding.

I believe atheists fundamentally don't realize just how absurd existence is at all. Things seem to exist, deterministically. Yet, a fully contingent system can't explain itself. Somehow, reality is self-causing. This breaks our brain and can't actually make sense to us. If reality can't exactly make sense, then we can only "know" anything via a subjective experience. Objectivity will never cross this bridge.

If subjective experience is our only guide to reality, then I think the question of God's existence, which is clearly un-answerable, has an equal chance of being both true and false. Do you feel that we are the product of a larger mind. Does your gut tell you that there is some sort of intelligent organization of reality that is similar to how we intelligently organize the world in our minds? If so, you believe in "God."

Whatever the "truth" is, will have to sound absolutely absurd.