Gah. I'll stick my neck out a bit. Short barely-defensible version: sometimes your low-level-language/ontology should be bits, sometimes it should be gods. Souls are a pretty good model of how memetic cognitive algorithms make up about half of human experience and don't reside in any one body. (You could remove all of the memes from someone's body and put them in someone else's body, and that'd be damn close to reincarnation. There are obvious objections here but I'm just going to plow ahead.) For instance, Wikipedia: "In philosophy of mind, dualism is a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, which begins with the claim that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical."

'Non-physical' is the key concept. I like to model cognitive algorithms in terms of e.g. memetics and computer science and phenomenology, not in terms of atoms. So when the nasty monists come along and say 'everything about this soul business can be explained in terms of atoms', I say, well sure, the languages are Turing-equivalent, but who cares? There's barely a difference in anticipated experiences, it's just arguing about which ontology better carves reality at its joints. Personally, I'm just fine with using the ontology of souls and gods and magic. Yeah, half of it 'reduces' to the placebo effect and memetics and what not, but why choose that ontology? Use ontological pragmatism.

(I guess there's an argument that you can have a speed prior over speed prior languages and should use low-level languages when all else is equal, but I find 'algorithmic ontology' to be simpler and easier to reason about than 'atomic/physical ontology' anyway, so once again I think I disagree with the monists.)

With regards to God in particular: God exists in a lot of peoples' heads. He's a massively parallel distributed cognitive algorithm that millions of people use and model. That's more of an existence than your average person, by far. What atheists mean when they claim He doesn't exist is something else that no theists actually care about. He's revealed Himself to them. Once you've personally experienced the God cognitive algorithm, are you going to listen to some snobby scientist who comes along and tells you that God doesn't exist? But you directly experienced Him! And so did half the people at your church! Silly ignorant scientsts.

In that sense, and it is an important sense, God is very real. More than that, all memes (memetic algorithms) are real. Now, it might be bad ontological pragmatism if this leads you to go ahead and start believing you'll go to the Christian heaven after you die. And there are all sorts of just-plain-wrong things that theists believe. But I don't think that they're that much more wrong than your average atheist. Both are pretty damn wrong. But it doesn't really matter, because most beliefs are clothes. It's when people start taking things seriously that you run into trouble.

And I realize this comes across as just being pointlessly meta-contrarian, but it's important to reason about these things correctly when you're doing Friendliness philosophy.