@tkhoffman
Your position that "Science can never verify anything of a spiritual nature" is what is called a General Statement. And is therefore, self-refuting. It just takes a teaspoon of imaginaion.
Let's take just one example. Psychics.
Let's say we have a psychic. And, unlike all other psychics I have seen, this one actually wins the lottery. A lot.
Now, is there any reason one would not be able to do a study, to ascertain that this individual has access to information, that otherwise would not be readily available to them? No way at all?
Because I cannot think of any reason why this may be so.
Now let us say, this psychic specializes in performing seances. Could we not then have that person perform one of their sessions in an experimental environment, and set up equipment to scan the room for any sort of anomalies? Be they magentic, sub-sonic, radioactive, RF, ultraviolet, thermal, gravitational, or whatever?
Now, given all you and I know about the spiritual world, who are you are I to say that none of these results would turn out positive? At least, without even trying first?
But let us assume they all turn out negative. Can we categorially say there isn't any other tests that could be run, that I haven't even thought of yet? None at all?
So let us not presuppose too much, about either the nature of the Spiritual realm, nor the limits of the Scientific Method.
That path has led to the embarassment of too many others, in the past.
Now, as I mentioned before, my personal belief is in an historical figure who lived about 2000 years ago. The claims he made, if true, meant that God had taken on human form. I suppose at that time you might even have said that his existence was scientifically verifiable. What you could not verify scientifically was whether the claims he made were true. If true that would mean that God actually entered into our world and into a pattern that our minds could understand. Of course now, we are left only with eyewitness accounts which we can either believe or not.
If my epistemology only allows me to obtain knowledge based on scientific evidence I will never accept his claims. If, however, my theory of knowledge allows for knowledge other than that based solely on scientific verification then I am free to believe and that belief can be based in reason.
Niether of these epistemologies are scientific. That a theory of knowledge relies soley on Scientific evidence does not make that theory or philosophy scientific. Both the Materialist and Non-materialist are bound by their presuppositions. It is up to each of us to decide which presuppositions are more reasonable.
The problem with the non-materialist view (if I understand correctly what you mean by it) is that it opens a can of worms, each of which is an unverifiable hypothesis. Dealing with such translucent knowledge doesn't seem possible: when anything can be true and anything can be false, there is very little that can be inferred from the available facts, and presuppositions, superstitions and personal beliefs become dominant. It is pretty clear that such a system cannot produce much knowledge useful by humanity as a whole.
Hence, I believe, some kind of universal logical method of gaining knowledge and establishing facts has to exist. It may be scientific method. It may be some other method. But it has to have a clear core assumption in mind (for example, in science it is the fact that the world is not inherently chaotic, but orderly, with the cause-effect framework defining the order), otherwise no collective knowledge can be assembled.
But, of course, no matter what method is employed, it is followed by humans, very flawed and biased creatures. Belief has to be a part of our world view, and it is even a part of the scientific method (a scientist has to assume that a lot of evidence he/she is dealing with is genuine and not made up, for example, otherwise he/she will never get anywhere and be stuck on verification of millions experiments of the past).
My system of beliefs makes me see things like religion, rituals, traditions in a very skeptical, even humored, light. But I am an individualist by nature, it is hard for me to accept a product of collective consensus not on the grounds of practicality, but on the grounds of communal unity. Understanding this inherent bias is important, it makes me have full respect for people who believe in things I might not take seriously personally: I never think less of people just because I strongly disagree with them on something. Ultimately, each of us has only their mind as a reference: exclusively material or not, none of us has a monopoly on what is reasonable and what is not.
On this basis, scientific method, even if more developed and practically useful than many other knowledge-gaining systems, still leaves a lot to be desired, and it is very possible that it will be replaced by a more flexible, or even completely different, system in the future.
I think I understand where you are coming from but Science only deals with material (physical) reality and leaves unanswered any questions outside that sphere. One is then forced to look to naturalististic explanations for all of life which in the end begin to look similar to supernatural explanations. We all end up in the same place as far as scientific proof for our respective positions.
We start with diversity in the natural world and posit evolution. Pushing further back we posit abiogenesis to explain how life began in the first place. Now we might posit many worlds to explain how the right conditions for life arose. We eventually get to the question of matter and how it originated and end up positing that it is eternal. In a sense we make matter our god. To me it seems, like it or not, that the existence of the universe leads us all to religious views of some sort.