Why did the Greeks invent so many Gods? They have a God for love, lightning, thunder, the ocean, and just about every other human emotion and natural phenomenon. They invented Gods to rule the things that they didn't understand. Many atheists justify their way of thinking but pointing at the Greeks: today we understand how those things work and because we now have science and a superior understanding of natural phenomenon we now have no need of invented Gods. If anything, they might say, entertaining the idea of a God would stymie science and learning.

But consider this: when the ancient Greeks were roaming the earth it was easier to find and see things that were not understood. There may have been a blacksmith, a ceramist, a wheel maker, etc. All great technologies, but none particularly difficult to understand in the community. Perhaps the average individual didn’t know ​exactly how to make a wheel​ but they understood the basic premise. Physical technique and craftsmanship was the currency, more so than a cerebral and intellectually know-how. It wasn’t so much knowing or understanding something that others didn’t on a technical level, it was having practiced a craft that was difficult to replicate without years of experience. In an apprenticeship you probably spent more time practicing than you did studying. To the rest of the community how the wheel works is fairly easy to understand even if they haven’t practiced whittling.

A great science fiction writer that said: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” That is exactly what many technologies today are to most people. How many people have a rudimentary understanding of how their car works? A fair number maybe. Okay, what about the internet? How about GPS? Air Conditioning? To most people most technology is magic to them and yet they are un-dazzled.

Perhaps more so than the Greeks we are used to have a complacent ignorance of how the world, and more so the technology, around us works. What is certain is that fewer people now know what it is we do not understand. In order to understand what we don’t know you must already understand what we do know. In the time of the Greeks that wasn’t difficult to do,​ but now it is very difficult to do. To understand the physics questions that researchers at the Large Hadron Collider are trying to answer... you would have to know everything that they do. One must understand how a computer and transistors work before one can ask the question: how do we make transistors smaller? One has to understand what an atom is and the forces within before one can formulate the question how can I harvest atomic energy? To ask genuine questions today you must have a deeply sophisticated vocabulary.

Instead of inventing Gods to explain things that we now do not understand we attribute it to other humans and assume that we could learn and understand it if we just took the time to do so. While there is some truth to that, there is still an edge to what we know, and it is an edge that most people can no longer see. Out of sight out of mind: the edge doesn't exist.

The more we know the more questions we have about what we don’t know. For every one thing that is understood there are two questions about why it works the way it does. When those questions are resolved there are there are then 4 questions about those answers.

Combining these facts we can now introduce the two spheres. The first sphere is very large and the area within represents everything that the human race in its entirety knows and understands. The surface or edge of the sphere represents the edge of what we know, things that are being tested at the LHC or research into quantum computing or smaller transistors etc.

Within the larger sphere is a much smaller sphere that represents what any given individual knows, or even potentially what any given individual could ever hope to understand in a lifetime (but let’s stick to the former for simplicity sake). Now, these aren’t really perfect spheres of course, they're more like blobs right? Like a piece of play-doh that has been put in the fist of a toddler. There are some things that we know a lot more about then other things, so some parts of the sphere are more developed than others. While this is true for the larger sphere it's even more so for any one individual. What might the glob of a physicists might look like, or any other person in a highly specialized field. It might look like a sphere for the most part, but then on one side it might stick out, like a very tall and skinny cone has been placed inside, and if the person is so specialized that they are working at the LHC for example that very tall and skinny cone might just barely skim the edge of the larger sphere. This represents what that person is able to see of the edge, the edge of the human race's knowledge on the topic, in that one small spot. As for every where else: they don’t know what we (the human race) don’t know. They may presume that we have other questions... but they don't actually know what they are. Most people, I suggest, don’t touch the larger sphere anywhere. There is nowhere they can see the edge of what the human race knows.

In ancient times the smaller sphere and the larger sphere were much closer to the same size, and it was much easier for a large portion of the two spheres edges to overlap, and bring with it all of the humility and uneasiness of an unknown frontier.

There is always a place where the “technology” is sufficiently advanced and it is indistinguishable from magic: on the edge. In the case of most people that edge is entirely within the larger sphere, but they don’t feel uneasy because: someone else gets it and it was most likely a man made technology or phenomenon. But for the Greeks it ​WAS ALL MAGIC​. The edge of all knowledge was all around them, ever-present. Unlike the times of the Greeks most people today can do little more than skim the edge of the larger sphere. "Science proves that there isn’t a God," or "I can see no evidence of a God."

What drove many people in the Greek times to invent Gods? The unknown and uncertain. The unknown still exists, though most people cannot see it.

The Larger Sphere grows a magnitude of times more rapidly than any one persons knowledge can. No one persons sphere can be as large as the human race sphere. If that were possible, like it was in the times of the Greeks, people would still be much more in awe of the world and uncertain about how the world and universe works. We would be humbled and more likely to entertain the idea of God.