no
b. You're composed of matter.
c. Therefore some matter is conscious.
d. What's true for some matter might be true for all matter --- or not. That's the "hard problem" of consciousness.
A failure of vision or imagination on their part. They don't realize that the universe, plain and physical as it is, is capable of consciousness and thus "sacred". For them the world is just dust. I believe the world is plenty mysterious and special without imaginary friends in the sky.
Take this: N years ago, for some value of N, nobody talked about friends in the sky. Now they do.
Atheism: myth busted :)
this seems to be the case regardless of religion.
If we find "friends in the sky," i.e. alien intelligences, that would be as likely to argue against religion as for it. Consider the dilemma posed for Christians by the idea of another planet with another intelligent species. That would challenge their core belief that we were shaped in a deity's image -- a deity imagined to rule the entire universe.
Just for fun:
If we play with the idea of Platonic Theory of Forms as a super-set of what we can perceive with our sens-es(-ors), under assumption philosophy/math is above reality, we can simply be plugged into some kind of a virtual machine with some API of sorts (of course undocumented) that is called by our brains when we think. Those who figured out some rare API calls on their own or by a secret tradition we call magicians, conjurers, gurus, Neo etc. Maybe words/thoughts could invoke some of those API functions, hence magic Harry-Potter-esque words and generally prayers in many religions. Similarly, what we call angels could be simply API services with highly intelligent behavior, preferably operating outside time, providing verifiable and expected outcome. Demons then are some intelligent services gone completely wrong, messing up with the rest of intelligent services that depend upon them, playing eternal asynchronous byzantine generals (by e.g. trying to upgrade all services to Windows 10 or flat interfaces with telemetry /s).
I think I should write a dystopian cyberpunk sci-fi "Services and Daemons" about this ;-)
This is a very old, but unproven hypothesis. You might have heard of it, it's called "soul". :-)
Of course, we found a novel meta-parallel way to access souls in the GAS reducing the search complexity to O(Sqrt(n)), hence we make a lot of money exposing this API externally for a fee. Do you want to make somebody lucky? Arrange a life situation that looks like magic? Any enemies that should taste fear of damnation? Please visit www.soul-as-a-service.com to know more!
Remember, each age views humans differently. Previous civilizations viewed humans first as based on magic, then hydraulics, then mechanics, then electricity, now we view them via lens of information processing, as our Zeitgeist dictates. It's likely people in 100 years will be laughing at us and our stupidity (hopefully they will be more advanced and not in a dark age), after they crack more things about Universe.
Obviously, this doesn't explain phenomena like brain exhibiting multiple different persons inside for patients with schizophrenia or when connection between left and right hemisphere is broken - some experiments shown people behave like as if there were multiple persons inside fighting with each other. Perhaps a bug in the nexus when there is a hash collision somewhere? 8-)