A touch that I think would help this argument: It was evolutionarily beneficial for our brains to demand a sense of purpose or higher meaning, which explains why we consider these questions important, which explains why we have generated fantastical narratives to fulfill these desires for purpose/meaning, and continue to use these narratives even after we have created new narratives that have better predictive power — because we haven’t explained the feeling in a way that resonates.

I mean, maybe it was just important for the brain to have a model of threats. Once we created models of obvious threats, the human capacity for abstract thinking generated abstract super-threats and then began to model such potential threats in the manner to which it was accustomed — via personification in the beginning, and then mathematically.

Really, physics replaces God as the dominant belief system because physics is scarier than God.