Huston Smith--Science preaches that matter never dies, like the eternal soul

In reading Huston Smith's autobiography, Tales of Wonder,  I came across an interesting quote on how science has supplanted religion and replaced the immortality of the soul with the immortality of objects. Smith was well known for his World Religions book and was a respected theologian.

As the twentiet century began, science equaled a materialistic worldview. As the twenty-first century began, the worldview of science, at least of physics and astronomy, may have traded places with that of religion. Consider Einstein's famous equation e=mc2. Nothing in matter dies but continues on in another form, elsewhere. The church divines and theologians for two thousand years have devised arguments and "proofs' of immortality but nothing equal to this.Huston Smith, Tales of Wonder, Adventures Chasing the Divine, Page 68.