Have you read When Breath Becomes Air?  It is a memoir of Paul Kalanithi, a highly regarded and successful neurosurgeon who, at the age of 36, was given a diagnosis of stage IV lung cancer.  As he faded away (unfortunately, despite chemotherapy and other treatments, the disease could not be stopped), he summoned all his remaining energy to pen this moving account of life, existence, and mortality.  He passed away in March of 2015.
     Why do I mention this book, a book that speaks of a topic most of us would rather not talk about:  death?  At one point in his meditations, Kalanithi ponders faith and the idea of God.  Although he is a scientist, one who strives to formulate decisions on empirical evidence alone, he says, "to make science the arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, meaning--to consider a world that is self-evidently not [his emphasis] the world we live in.  That's not to say that if you believe in meaning, you must also believe in God.  It is to say, though, that if you believe that science provides no basis for God, then you are almost obligated to conclude that science provides no basis for meaning and, therefore, life itself doesn't have any."
     Kalanithi makes a crucial and necessary point.  If we rely only on empirical evidence to understand the world, we have no answer to the mysteries, the mysteries of emotion, longing, and transcendence that course, in various ways, through our hearts and lives.  We can't measure those in empirical experiments.  Yet we know we experience them.
     So what do we do?  We must acknowledge that, as Kalanithi points out, science gives us much but does not provide a basis for meaning.  That's not science's job--and most scientists admit that.  We must look elsewhere.
     But in a material world, where else is there to look but in what must necessarily be beyond it?
     If we are whom we suppose ourselves to be, we will never be able to entirely dismiss the notion of God.