The following responses won’t exactly mirror your numbering. I’m just going to cite a handful of things:

1. When I was asking for evidence that would back up the opening statement of Genesis, I was deliberately being cheeky (and maybe somewhat snarky). What I could have written but didn’t was this: There is no evidence for this claim, because pointing to a Bible passage, any Bible passage, doesn’t constitute evidence. Real evidence would be something that exists outside of the Bible.
2. Let’s imagine an eminently plausible statement that someone somewhere no doubt has said: “I prayed to so-and-so and my daughter’s/son’s cancer was cured!” That’s not evidence for prayer. “Intercessory prayer” is and can never be evidence for anything.
3. Ritual status versus material transformation. Yes, for non-Catholics, the business with “holy” water and “blessed” bread is a ritual. As an atheist, I see zero value in such rituals, but your point is taken: non-Catholics don’t believe in the literal transformation of water or bread.
4. Consciousness is a mystery that we haven’t figured out. All I’m saying is that we have zero reason to believe that something “spooky” (super-natural) is going on to account for consciousness, self-consciousness, and what we generally call the mind.
5. “I do not believe that God’s Will and Wisdom are grounded anywhere in the natural world.” This presupposes there is evidence for a super-natural realm. No such evidence for this realm exists.
6. There is no evidence for the existence of Hell. Reading the Bible more closely will not yield a positive answer on Hell or its alleged overlord Satan, in exactly the same way that giving The Lord of the Rings a closer read will not give me evidence for Sauron’s existence. To be clear: “Satan” is a character written by people who wrote the Bible. “Sauron” is a character written by J.R.R. Tolkien.
7. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that none of what the Bible says is true. I’m only saying that none of the super-natural claims made in it are true: parthenogenesis never occurred for a certain woman, nobody ever lived in a whale, nobody commanded a body of water to part, animals don’t talk, life was not *poofed* into existence over a few days’ time, and so on. I can’t claim the following comment is mine, but I wish I could because it’s perfect (it’s from someone named J.M. Green, but I can’t locate the provenance of this person on the Internet): “Claiming the Bible is true because it mentions some historical places and people is like saying the Sherlock Holmes stories are true because they contain descriptions of Victorian London.”