I've been working on a theory that seems to be controversial online. It's a personal theory with no backing, built entirely from my experience, but it goes a bit like this - I think many people use god to close that gap between our understanding and reality.

My background religion has man eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which was once a knowledge far beyond our actual grasp without also having eternal life from the tree of life. This was the creation of the knowledge gap as we can say what's good or evil, but don't have the farsight (both forward and backward) to know if our decisions were actually correct. When we took this good and evil knowledge on ourselves, we set ourselves apart from the other animals and started down a rather harsh path.

As time has marched on from our realization, we created tools to simulate the power of the tree of life. First it was spoken stories, which allowed knowledge to exist for more time than a single human could harbor it. Next was writing, which made passed knowledge more exact. Next was language in the form of religion which used speech and writing to pass down the knowledge of good and evil, but also created a framework that people could interpret in situations that didn't have preexisting stories.

Religion was limited to the timeframe of the spoken and written story and so science started to develop. The laws of science give us good guidelines as to the way of all things, both forward and backward in time, far beyond the life of our species and our planet. This knowledge we apply to our knowledge of good and evil, though it can seem so vast that nihilism becomes a viable option. With science comes philosophy, which creates a new moral language that can be tested more externally than the internally tested religion.

It's a steady march forward that seeks to close the gap between our knowledge and reality, but while the gap is getting smaller it is still always there - a deep unknown that we cannot control. This is what I image when people speak to me about god. When their perception of what should be does not match with what is god can act as a tightrope over that void, allowing individuals to traverse from one side to the other and live a richer life.

That's the idea so far. I'm sure there are gaping holes in it.