Materialism Is An Emotional Commitment That Always Leaves You Saying This Can't Be Happening!

Well, having to think about it, a good metaphor would be the various collections of numbers into sets and the capabilities you're restricted to if you insist on limiting the ones you can use to inspect reality.

If you take one out of all of the various sets of numbers, the natural numbers or counting numbers, you can do some useful things but you're stuck if you need the idea of zero, even the set of whole numbers which includes it leaves you with things you can do that just one through the often useless fantasy infinity* leaves you unable to do.

If you go to the integers, including negative numbers, you do algebra and use that to look at the physical world and to understand a larger number of things, events and relationships.

If you further extend that you get the set of rational numbers and even more is available to you.  Especially when you combine arithmetic and algebra with geometry and include all of those in a construct of coordinate relationships, which you can do in a crude form  with the set of whole numbers (needing zero for that) but which is far more useful when you use a more complete set of numbers.

Going on to more inclusive sets of numbers such as the complex numbers, including the widely misunderstood idea of  the imaginary numbers, you can make useful observations about more of reality, associating those numbers and their relationships with phenomena in the physical world and, probably somewhat less securely, more hidden events and experiences in real life.

Materialism, and let's be frank about it, atheism, makes an emotional commitment to using only the most restrictive of means of dealing with reality.  I would say that they insist on something like trying to explain it all with the set of counting numbers, the "natural numbers" but in the logical end of their radical reductionism, it's the equivalent of limiting all consideration of everything to the number 1, insisting that all of reality is comprehensible and only real if you limit your consideration to the 1 thing which you insist encompasses all of reality, which is why it is a monist system, one substance, one entity added to itself over and over again and anything that doesn't fit within their ultimate reductionist ideology is declared to not be real.

The numbers system and its application is an adequate metaphor for understanding materialism, if you take into account that it really is an emotional commitment, which accounts for why so many of atheists are addicted to being pissed off that lots of people don't agree with them. You can say the same thing about some religious people, that THEIR chosen commitment or their traditional or family beliefs aren't universally adopted but they don't start out by claiming scientific methods and its mathematical foundation are the basis of their belief.  All belief, all of what we choose to differentiate from that as being "knowledge" is based on the choice to believe it, it's not something that happens automatically because of some rule that when the percentage of scientists decide to adopt an idea that that makes its adoption compulsory.  Look at what was once supposedly a physical science, cosmology, and the myriad of sects and denominations in that, and don't get me started on psychology and the other so-called sciences in that regard.

But any sophisticated consideration of a belief in God would have to be like including all of the possible sets of numbers and far more than that in the possible compass of what constitutes reality because it has to a. take into account the limits of human knowledge and intuition because we are not Gods and b. take into account that there must be realities that we can't know due to our limitations.  You've got to have a level of maturity and humility to accept that reality. 

Maybe, at least in some of the really hard cases, that's what it comes down to, that materialist emotional attachment to the number 1, maybe in a lot of cases that "1" is the materialist trying to reduce everything to them.  It was certainly the case for the tin-pot dictator in her own family,  Madelyn Murray O'Hair, for the far more accomplished examples of that mindset such as Stalin,  Mao, etc.  You tell an emotional solipsist that they're not the center of the universe and they don't like it.  You tell them they have a moral obligation to treat other people as they'd like to be treated and it really pisses them off.  I believe it was Marilynne Robinson who speculated on that as the origin of the opposition to religion among the affluent elite in Europe, they didn't want to be burdened with the moral obligation to help the least among us.   I think it certainly accounts for the worst features of the "enlightenment age" United States Constitution and legal lore.   I think you have to be something of the sort to keep other people in slavery or in wage slavery and just about all of the people who have created those things certainly didn't include the golden rule in their legal system.  Slavery would never have happened, women would have been emancipated, there would be no destitution if that were the law.  But you can't find that in materialism.  Especially when you put natural selection into the mix.

* I haven't gone through the whole argument carefully but I'm at least provisionally convinced that an infinity of discrete objects doesn't actually exist.