It's an annoying fact that if you want to take as a given that people are often wrong about their personal experiences you have to be aware that this applies to you too. It annoys me anyway. ;) (I really appreciated your "thus science" btw.)
But.
I don't like your belief system. It's logical, it's consistent and it's not hypocritical (it's certainly not crazy), but still... I think you're right that we process patterns differently to believers, but only in terms about where we ascribe consciousness and action by others. In other words, we see the same patterns, just set the bar for what is "random" differently. I find that my school statistics lessons help here. I suppose we will experience some things differently because the non-theists (the Brights! tee hee) are less likely to experience religious rapture and such like, but in the main... when something goes right for a religious person they say "thanks" to something, when the same thing goes right for me I say "oh that's nice", but I don't assume it was anything other than the same world that was mean to me last week.
My main objection to number 2 is that there isn't (as I see it) any middle ground. Reducing the argument to "is there some spiritual force beyond our ken or not" and ignoring the specifics, if your "we're both wrong" is correct then we're not both wrong, the spiritual-force argument wins, because there is therefore something beyond our ken, even if they were all wrong about the specifics of it.
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It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you?
But.
I don't like your belief system. It's logical, it's consistent and it's not hypocritical (it's certainly not crazy), but still... I think you're right that we process patterns differently to believers, but only in terms about where we ascribe consciousness and action by others. In other words, we see the same patterns, just set the bar for what is "random" differently. I find that my school statistics lessons help here. I suppose we will experience some things differently because the non-theists (the Brights! tee hee) are less likely to experience religious rapture and such like, but in the main... when something goes right for a religious person they say "thanks" to something, when the same thing goes right for me I say "oh that's nice", but I don't assume it was anything other than the same world that was mean to me last week.
My main objection to number 2 is that there isn't (as I see it) any middle ground. Reducing the argument to "is there some spiritual force beyond our ken or not" and ignoring the specifics, if your "we're both wrong" is correct then we're not both wrong, the spiritual-force argument wins, because there is therefore something beyond our ken, even if they were all wrong about the specifics of it.
Does that make sense?