Human beings may have been experiencing the same world through their five senses for several million years, but the self-critical open system of science with its elaborate classification and calibration of experience has only existed for the last 400 years., or just a little longer if false starts in China and Classical Greece are included. Just as outer sense experience has to be handled within a sophisticated framework in order to get science, in the same way the inner experience of our own conscious being has to be put into a framework, and we call that framework religion. The open system of scientific inquiry has certain regulative principles - fidelity to experience, and the search for that description which is true for all possible observers. An open system of religious inquiry must also have regulative principles. It could be that these are coherence, compassion, awe, and humility.
Coherence means that a religious vision fits everything together.
It gives meaning and purpose to our desires and feelings, our thoughts, and our sense of self. It also fits all that together in turn with our immediate experience of the outer world, and our scientific knowledge. Science is based on the evidence of our five senses, but this evidence is coordinated and corrected by the operations of impartial rationality so that we seek for truth in that description which is true for all. We have a vivid sense of our own inward self. Impartiality tells us that others have the same sense, and it is equally valuable to them, and even that other forms of life may have the same inward sense to some degree.