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God is a metaphysic like math. He doesn't exist, but influences people lives all the same.
Math and the concept of god are not in the same vein at all.
Religion, and the concept of god, is entirely fabricated by human minds
Non-human animals can count
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20121128-animals-that-can-count
There is no evidence that they pray to any deity
Religion and science are looking at reality from two entirely different perspectives. Neither can see the whole, so neither is "correct" in their own views 100% of the time.
It's like the blind men and the elephant. Neither is 100% correct, but also neither is 100% wrong. They are both useful tools that can allow us to find out what the truth is, provided that is the original purpose.
Religion doesn't do anything to find any truths. It's just people making wild claims with zero evidence to back it up.
Science and scientists make claims, test those claims, gather data, and make measurable conclusions about the world.
They are absolutely not the same.
It's just such a fucking shitty false equivalency to relate the physical to the meta physical.
Look at Christianity for example, the biggest factor in your choice of religion is where you were born first and who you were born to a close second.
You see a great amount of similarity, especially inter discipline, but you can find huge differences between states, even cities and counties. People will shop for churches when they move to find a version of the same religion that fits with their preferred style and interpretation.
That's inside of a body like the SBC, Roman Catholicism and the SBC are even more different fundamentally. Same books, same dudes tho.
Scientific models update with research, even if things are difficult to change, they change based on new info. Religion needs to constantly fit it's ever dwindling influence into the same scripture, you just get to think the words mean different things now.
While I agree with your assessment vis claims and observable truths, I also think that religion has to be seen as a kind of naturally evolved and universal system of sense-making in anatomically modern homo sapiens that would not exist did it not serve some kind of selective value in our distant past as a species.
In other words, religion, or notions of spirituality, wouldn't be as universal as they seemingly are were it not the case that they played something like an adaptive role in human evolution.
No. That is a post hoc justification. The kinda logic that says since nearly every rabbit gets eaten eventually by a predator the predator must be doing the rabbit a favor. Just because religion is near universal does not mean it exists to serve us. It could easily just be a selfish meme and we are it's food.
Please provide evidence for your claim.
I believe history would be that evidence. Since Asura-Mazda to the present day, almost all societies have believed in a god of some form. Whether that god exists or not is functionally irrelevant. The fact that humans seem to base their societies on an external power does seem significant to me. Where you follow Asura-Mazda, YHWY, Jehova, Allah, Baha, or any other God seems to work for us, until we run into some sort of other belief system, but the basics are all the same. We need to focus on our similarities, instead of our differences. All people have the same basic goals and ideals. We've all been working for hundreds of thousands of years to make it so our children will all have a good life.
Those that spoke out against religion were killed or punished. Those who used it were rewarded. Those who followed it, were either sent to slaugher members of different religions, sacrificed, milked for coin, or forced into submission by the scary make-believe hell.
Religion works because it gives people something in common, soothes human fears, and sets forth rules to abide by.
It was useful, once. We don't need it any more
Argument ad populism, logical fallacy.