Richard Feynman's Views on the Irrational Origin of Religion

"God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you're taking away from God; you don't need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven't figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don't believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time -- life and death -- stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand. Therefore I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out. "

Richard Feynman, quoted by P. C. W. Davies and J. Brown in Superstrings: A Theory of Everything,p. 208.   See also "Collected Thoughts of Richard Feynman" and "The Richard Feynman Webring". Best Feynman site is "FEYNMAN PAGE", info and links.

If a faithful account was rendered of Man's ideas upon Divinity, he would be obliged to acknowledge, that for the most part the word "gods" has been used to express the concealed, remote, unknown causes of the effects he witnessed; that he applies this term when the spring of the natural, the source of known causes, ceases to be visible: as soon as he loses the thread of these causes, or as soon as his mind can no longer follow the chain, he solves the difficulty, terminates his research, by ascribing it to his gods... When, therefore, he ascribes to his gods the production of some phenomenon... does he, in fact, do any thing more than substitute for the darkness of his own mind, a sound to which he has been accustomed to listen with reverential awe?

Baron de Holbach, Systeme de la Nature, 1770. (Quoted in Carl Sagan, Cosmos,p. 167.)