I think this is a good point. It's not popular in the ultra-secular tech world, but materialism is not necessarily the only explanation of consciousness, there is very serious non-materialist philosophy. Personally I think Materialism is incoherent -- Daniel Dennett is sort of its logical extension: he argues that consciousness is a myth, a "folk psychology" that doesn't exist, since only material things exist. So we falsely believe that we are conscious. This seems patently absurd to me, but I'm not sure what the right answer is.