(2) I meant to pick out one type of question theists think their faith helps to answer: How should I live? What meaning, if any, does my life have? And (less pressing for the theist, more so for us) supposing there isn’t one built into the universe, and that it’s up to each of us to create such meaning, are there more or less defensible processes for doing so, or is it just “whatever you pick”? Depending on what you meant by “teleological agency” in this context: I didn’t mean to suppose that the answer could only be provided by some transcendent “purposiveness” built into the universe, nor did I mean to suppose any kind of radical free will in humans. I can probably elaborate if it seems as though either of those things should be required to make the question intelligible.

But I have to ask about a couple of your elements, which seem inconsistent with your gestalt as I pick it up (apologies in advance for misgrokking you):

1) Do you really think it’s a Mystery that consciousness, qualia (if any), etc. are epiphenomenal to the neural substrate? Why is it a mystery (in comparison to say abiogenesis, where I agree there are at least presently some pretty wide gaps between for example iron-sulfur world/lipid bilayer and RNA World)?

2) “[W]hether I have any special purpose in life” the way you seem to be using it pretty much presupposes teleological agency [in order to be a meaningful question], no?

Surely, like Christians, we can hate the sin and love the sinner.

“I don’t know…why there is Something rather than Nothing…”

I think Simon Blackburn puts it best when he says that not “every apparently well-formed sentence introduces a proposition, or issue, about which questions of truth and falsity arise.”