Atheism is unstoppable.

[Belacqua]

So, is the answer to my question that fictional writings can sometimes evoke emotional reactions in people?

In my view, "emotional reactions" is too simple. It's not merely like feeling happy when you see a puppy. 

The human world, the lived world, the phenomenological world, the world of our experience rather than the dispassionate world of science, is real to us. It is where we live. It can never be separated from desire or interest. It is in part sensed and in part filled in by knowledge and theory-laden projections. 

Perhaps you are a divine spark of pure reason placed into a body-vehicle due to a fall from the divine world. Frankly, I doubt it. Everybody else I know is a human being, and human beings are made of meat. Our brains and bodies operate on several levels, some more conscious than others. There is no reason at all to think that what our minds and bodies do in conjunction make sense in any logical way, are consistent, are not self-contradictory. We want to live and we want to die, we want to stop wanting, we are capable of loving and hating the same thing at the same moment. It may be that some people dislike this fact and strive to eliminate those qualities. But I find them very interesting. 

To misquote Thomas Nagel: there is something it is like to be a human. Of course science informs us of the mechanisms through which we get there, but it doesn't tell us what it is like. 

There is something it is like to be me. And most likely, this is different from what it is like to be somebody else. Especially if we're talking about someone far removed in time and culture. And people have long wondered what it is like to be a superior person. This is one of the main themes of both Proust's novel and Murasaki Shikibu's, and we learn a lot from what they say about what superiority is to them, what it would be like to be that way, etc. Others have wondered what it would be like to have total perfection in a human being, and this is an important part of the Christian tradition. 

Since self-contradiction is a part of what it is to be human, along with many other non-logical functions, human stories do not strive for the same kind of qualities as a scientific paper. 

Have you read any Nietzsche? He says that lying underneath our mental phenomena is just chaos. For him, the order that we perceive in the world is a kind of overlay, projected onto the world of no-order. In physics of course he is not correct -- there is order in the world independent of our perception (probably). But in the lived world he is correct. Scientific investigation doesn't tell us about the meanings we overlay on the world that physics studies. But when you walk down the street, most of what goes into our consciousness is human-created. The purpose of the sidewalk, the beauty of this year's fashions, the value of the iPhone you just dropped -- these are not available to physics. But these are what we live with. And these are the things that both the arts and religion work on.