Every God that mankind has made up, and you have to admit we have a stunning knack for it based upon the vast numbers that litter the annals of history, is designed with one major purpose; each god acts as a placeholder for the unknown. Thor does thunder, Poseidan the seas, Yahweh does all the animals and so on. As we explore our world and our knowledge increases these gods slip into history their job done to be replaced by reason and knowledge. Gods only survive when no better explanation exists.
Jehovah has retreated , for most Christians, from the animal maker ( evolution ), the sun maker ( gravity ), the earth flooder ( hydrological cycle ) and the Eden planter (geology, archaeology, palentological and astronomy.) Each Christian may or may not be defined by a brand but under the hood they align into loose groupings of what God's supposed existence answers for them. We have the xian deists who , lacking accurate knowledge of how something can come from nothing default to a Westernised divinity rather than something like Taoism, there are after lifers who need to know that there is a reward for life's pain, there are supernaturalists who want non medical explanations for dreams, voices and visions, pattern matchers who see order in everything and see coincidence as too ineffectual for the sorting they perceive, egotists who need something all powerful to explain why they are right despite contradiction, ignoramuses who are too lazy or fearful to study and want a justifiying authority for their lack of knowledge, bombasts and evangelisers who feel driven to speak up and need an explanation for that drive and emotionalists who feel the powerful tug of intuition and romantic ideals and seek a better explanation for their passion than mere chemical interactions and genetics.
For many of these belief drivers there are perfectly good answers and just as the Thunder gods slipped from social prominence the gods of emotion , answered prayer, weather control, earthquake causation and miracles are disappearing. Gods still hold powerful sway where science hasn't found demonstrable mechanisms in nature but expect to see the cessation of the abiogenetic god, the voices in the head god , healing god and the revelatory god as science moves human understanding on. Expect to see more Xians moving to the deistic, experimental observation or all knowing , idea and comfort giving god away from the visceral, involved, physical god of the Hebrews and early Xians.
