[Thor]

I think since human instincts and our actions are in the discussion I should clearly state that we have strong evolutionary reasons and explanations for so much of the way we behave.

There is a neat time in evolutionary biology today where there's a rather reinvigorated attempt by people to study religion scientifically and also to look into the great evolutionary question to all things "how does this benefit me?" in regards to why would evolution of religion occur. There's the discussion of the meme's, of group evolution benefit (controversial at best) that works only 'within' that religious group not outside.

There is a reason why our minds look for patterns in everything, its our brains ability to find patterns that has evolved us into such curious and insightful animals and a big reason for our success on this planet. The part that became religion, lets say real organized religion which we can safely say goes as far back as at least 5-10,000yrs; fills probably some evolutionary need that goes well back of that and became religion in our desires when it was something quite different in ancient Homosapien.

Some of the more interesting ideas are that Religion is there in our minds because something in our minds that shares a similar need like our desire for sweets; religion has usurped that place which our mind previous to religion has now taken up residence in that part of our mind.

I've found with my own journey that getting a real understanding of the big bang, understanding as much as I can about physics, astrophysics, evolution and the natural world... These things guide me to believe in there definitely not being a involved divinity and that natural processes have allowed us this very fortunate window to come into existence here in our little corner of this massive cosmos.

I think humans inherent need to assume something has to start and end is also a major reason why creators are 'created' to explain life and its meaning. For me its taken me some time, but I'm at peace with the idea that in terms of the cosmos, the big bang is a re-occurring incident that will happen over and over. That there is no beginning or end to it all, just a cycle that happens over such a immensity of time that we could barely hope to really grasp the size and scope of such a process.

Its that obvious flaw in our brains, that we can understand what we see and our minds evolve to look at our world in that sense since it benefits us evolutionarily speaking since we don't need to understand the micro world but we do need to understand that rock = hard = tool/weapon. But as we know the deeper we go into the rock we realize that in fact that rock is incredibly porous since as we get into atoms we realize that what makes this hard thing is actually immense space between tiny particles.

For us a start/end to everything we see is how we best deal with the rules/laws of this planet, but its a narrow field of vision as we do understand now much of not only the big bang (we can go back to the first milliseconds of it 10 to the power of 50 or whatever lol) but our natural world which only 200 years ago we couldn't conceive of the diversity of life and the natural world without assuming design.