sure, but in exactly the same way rocks are embedded in reality's information-processing systems are creating temporal experiences (erosion, melting, etc)
Note that taking the opposite point doesn't require arguing from religion, either.
And what would be a non-religious opposite point? The human brain seems to be pretty physical, unless each has some magic attached to it that enables consciousness?
For instance the Big Bang Hypothesis largely came from observing that everything is moving away from everything else. So it's a very intuitive, even simple, hypothesis when you consider well what would happen if you just kept playing everything in reverse? The problem it turns out as we learned more is that a big bang, as we understood it, would not actually create what we see. For instance one problem, among many, is the Horizon Problem. [1]
Areas of the universe that should not be causally connected (light/causality itself, traveling obviously at the speed of light, would not have had time to go from one region to the other if it started at the birth of the universe) seem to be causally connected, in that they're effectively homogeneous. The currently standard explanation for this is cosmic inflation. [2]
Cosmic inflation suggests that for a brief moment in time, the universe's acceleration went into ultra over-drive expanding outward at many times the speed of light, only to suddenly slow down, and then resume accelerating again. This theory is 100% ad hoc. There is no rationale, logic, or remotely supported physical explanation - it's as good as magic for now. The only reason it became the standard is because it plugged a bunch of holes in the Big Bang Theory.
So too with consciousness, it's only in insisting in an answer that somebody is left waxing between the extremes of a basic emergent physical property with completely hamstrung ad hoc hypotheses to support it, or a God ordained proof to each person of their inner spirit. Its natural to seek answers to everything, but the reality is that we don't have those answers, and in some cases those answers may ultimately never be available. And while this may vary between people, I would much prefer to simply accept my own ignorance than believe in answers that have no more grounding than that opposite extreme which they seek to challenge.