That's a good response and you may very well be right.
Maybe it comes down to the type of perception, or mindset one has? I have repeated the following ad nauseam.
To believe the basic premiss of your post, that being, necessity is the mother of invention concerning the human psychological state, (we invented God and religion to appease some mental aberration) and in reality everything was produced by some form by self-generating, self-regulating natural order that constructed a mechanistic universe and all therein, requires, for me at least, just as much suspension of disbelief as the poor old Creationist.
They sees a complete environmental system pop up out of the ground in some divine instant, including 200 plus known platypus types from the fossil record, tens-of-thousands of dinosaur types, and all the creatures of the Pre-Cambrian and Cambrian epochs living cheek-to-jowl with modern creatures. It would have been standing room only, not to mention that this God then exterminated 99.999999999999% of all creatures He Created about one generation after all His hard work.
So back to your premiss, it suggests that life, sentience and consciousness are a byproduct of matter.
It also suggests that chaos has an inherent ability to establish the most profound order, by what mechanism nobody knows? If you say, "natural order, natural forces" then this can't be the case because they are inside the system and nothing can produce itself. That is, nothing can exist before it exists. The fact that the Big Bang, or whatever, can unwind into a profound state of order suggests at least to me that there is an unseen principle of order acting upon matter not from within the system itself, but from without.
Now clearly the God of religion does not exist. He, She, It, is a product of the human mind. However, religion is still an essential aspect of human development. It has been the primary mover of human social and moral life. This religion has to be seen with some degree of justice because it is a work in progress. It is not anything other that an imperfect attempt to find expression for that which will forever remains outside our perception. It's truths will remain only relative truths. It has no ability to describe what this force of God is. It has no concept of the forces that Caused a universe and life. It does not contain God anymore than science or philosophy does. It knows next to nothing about the spiritual state of humans, or even if a human has a spirit. It's all conjecture. But so what, because life is one big conundrum from start to finish. The only stuff that makes any real sense is the stuff that science proves up, explains, the rest is a profound mystery that religion paints in symbolic, poetic, allegoric language.
However, science too can't answer these big questions, because science is part of the system and can't step outside itself to look in and see what the true Cause is.
So no matter what rabbit hole you go down you still come up against Cause establishing natural. The problem then is that humans have to produce Mills and Boon version of what this, Cause is from their absolutely unquestionable knowledge of something they know absolutely nothing about.
It's a conundrum wrapped in an enigma, yet science knows enough in this age to understand that the universe did not Cause itself or provide its own profound degrees of order, the rest is pure speculation.
