[jogger08152]

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so when the river flooded and the crops grew and sustained people...Osiris did it.

when lightning and thunder crashed...Zeus did it

countless other unexplained phenomena have been attributed to gods...but these phenomena have since been explained without invoking a concious being who willed these things to happen.

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“My dear Holmes,” said I, “this is too much. You would certainly have been burned, had you lived a few centuries ago..."

“It is simplicity itself,” said he; “my eyes tell me that on the inside of your left shoe, just where the firelight strikes it, the leather is scored by six almost parallel cuts. Obviously they have been caused by someone who has very carelessly scraped round the edges of the sole in order to remove crusted mud from it. Hence, you see, my double deduction that you had been out in vile weather, and that you had a particularly malignant bootslitting specimen of the London slavey. As to your practice, if a gentleman walks into my rooms smelling of iodoform, with a black mark of nitrate of silver upon his right forefinger, and a bulge on the right side of his top-hat to show where he has secreted his stethoscope, I must be dull, indeed, if I do not pronounce him to be an active member of the medical profession.”*

I could not help laughing at the ease with which he explained his process of deduction. “When I hear you give your reasons,” I remarked, “the thing always appears to me to be so ridiculously simple that I could easily do it myself, though at each successive instance of your reasoning I am baffled until you explain your process.”

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The leap from "I (loosely) understand the mechanism" to "ergo, God isn't responsible" really is wonderful to behold.

I have no idea whether science will ultimately lead (back) to a God conclusion. I suspect nobody else does either. I do wonder why more people don't find the question as interesting as I do though. The rampant assumption that religion and science will ultimately point in opposite directions tho, just because once upon a time the pope and Galileo disagreed on movement (which, by the way, turns out to be relative anyway) - just blows me away.

Does this really seem clearcut to anybody?

Prodigy, the phenomena you named above are understood trivially better than they were in classical Greece. The sun's not a chariot, it's a ball of hydrogen (among other elements) undergoing nuclear fusion. So where'd it come from?

*Borrowed from "A Scandal in Bohemia", natch.