There is a palpable difference between the universe described by many religions and the universe described by science. The former is all built from concepts rooted in human society such as father, son, judgment, commandment, obedience, sacrifice, punishment etc. The latter is built from eerie ideas such as force field, wavefunction, observable, reference frame, superposition etc. The former feels small, ordinary, familiar and manmade. The latter feels like we're fumbling for words to describe something that fundamentally transcends ordinary human experience.

BTW: The numbers involved in each description are also telling. Those used by religions are often small and comfortable for a human mind, e.g. ten commandments, seven days of creation. Even the supposed large numbers such as 144,000 never come close to what you need to describe nature such as the number of stars in our galaxy (around 10^11) or the number of atoms in a human body (order of 10^27). See physics constants for even better examples. Also, religions often describe reality using numbers that look suspiciously memorable in decimal notation. OTOH, nature never gives us round decimal-friendly numbers for constants. I think this also makes religion feel manmade and science authentic.

It's not a direct relationship, but IMHO an indirect one.

Personally for me it is basically like this, that the Universe is so infinitely huge, somehow just calling it huge doesn't do it justice, wherein the concept of God or Gods as is defined by most Earth religions seems too tiny to describe an entity or a race of entities that could be the real God or Gods.

Moreover, even if the above mentioned entity or race of entities does exist, which created the Universe, I'm so infinitesimally tiny that they don't care about me, and certainly don't care about whether or not I pray to them.

In other words, the human concept of God or Gods is just one level above the humans. And, then if you add the fact that this one-level-above is also just a matter of faith and there is no evidence even of that, then the whole thing crumbles.

In other words, whether or not there is a God or Gods, has no bearing on me and my life and me and my life's decisions are not going to be bound by that.

Whether that is atheism, or being agnostic, or something else can be left undefined. It's more like, I don't care. It is simply that my life's decisions are not going to be in any way influenced by whether or not God or Gods exist, whatever the right word for that is.

BTW, the Hindu cosmology [0] does delve into such philosophical things, and perhaps my Hindu upbringing has something to do with my beliefs wherein asking such questions and pondering over them is allowed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_cosmology

It depends on what theism is to you. For many people [0] believe in God is tightly intertwined with the idea that this supernatural being has strong opinions about how life on Earth is to function. And it's hard to believe that when you look at the scale of the universe and how small our lives are relative to it all.

It's possibly to believe in God and think that God is too busy with the cosmos to be concerned with our tiny lives. But it isn't a very "useful" belief, in the sense that it's a belief with no practical implication.

[0] certainly those who grew up in Abrahamic religions, I'm not familiar enough with other schools of thought to comment

I'll try to answer your comment more directly. The other responses are good, but they're not exactly responding to your comment about the parent commenter's change from agnosticism to atheism upon learning the scale of the universe.

I've had a vaguely similar experience, but over a longer period, not a single "moment", and not entirely to do with the physical sciences.

They way I look at it is this: To ants, we are gods. We can provide an unimaginable bounty to them by simply dropping the remains of a sandwich. We can destroy their entire world with callous indifference. A step in the wrong place is all it takes to crush an anthill.

But do we care about an individual ant's good behaviour? No. Not in the slightest. I don't meet out punishment on one particular worker ant because it failed to respect the queen, or move enough seeds one day.

Simply put, we are so far removed from ants, so far above them, so much greater, that there can be no meaningful interaction of this type. The UN general assembly does not give a flying fuck about the misdeeds of a particular ant in some particular ant-mound in some particular forest, in some national park, in some country far away. Conversely, an ant can have no concept of the latest UN resolution's effects on international tourism and its side-effects, such as the likelihood of an increased number of dropped sandwiches in national parks. There is no though that an ant can possibly have that can encompass even a fraction of such concepts. They're simply too abstract, too advanced for such tiny brains.

Any God that could possibly have made a Universe as vast and complex as ours would be similarly far removed from us. We would be ants to such a God. Personal, individual communication of any type would be hopeless. A "relationship", as Christians like to say, would be absurd in the extreme. Ants don't have relationships with senators, or kings, or generals. It's simply unthinkable.

Science could study such a God, if it existed, but it wouldn't be entirely clear if it would be possible to actually gain a truly meaningful understanding. A superficial, surface knowledge, perhaps, but that is all. Prayer would certainly be an utter waste of time. Holy books could not have possibly be written or inspired by such a God. Rituals would be meaningless. Rites and celebrations would also be embarrassingly pointless.

Most religion is a way of explaining what can’t be explained through reason. Back in the day it was “Persephone is in Hades and Zeus is throwing angry lightning bolts” but now that we’ve figured out a lot of science, religion just talks about unfalsiable stuff like the creation of the universe and the afterlife. Not a stretch to imagine that those things are as imaginary as all the rest

It's certainly possible to have a religion that accounts for the grandeur of the universe, and there have certainly been many religious folks whose religious experience is heightened by their understanding of the cosmos, but I'd guess those folks have put a fair bit of their own efforts into such belief because IME the common teachings of the major religions imply that the actions of the humans that live in a tiny slice of history in a tiny piece of the cosmos are of major significance. I would argue that perceiving some of the grandeur of the universe may make it difficult for the most common teachings to really resonate without significant modification.

Also, for folks who are drawn to religion primarily due to "spiritual" experiences they've had with the religion -- where they experience a loss of self, a one-ness and connected-ness with others, and a distinct sense of clarity -- it may be that having a very similar experience in a non-religious context may lead to new beliefs about what that experience is or means.

There are two basic reasons to give up on religion. Reason One: It's obviously silly. Reason Two: Some personal epiphany.

For a lot of people, Reason One just isn't enough. They need a story to go along with their revelation. They need to look at a picture of a galaxy, or watch their religious grandmother die slowly, or read about pedophilic priests, or whatever.

People are irrational.

Alan Watts talks about this idea in The Wisdom of Insecurity. I don't have the book to hand so this is the closest quote I could find:

“The discovery of this reality is hindered rather than helped by belief, whether one believes in God or believes in atheism. We must here make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.”

Interestingly, I know many scientists who take a general theistic worldview (might I say universeview?) despite (or, I think, because of) this vast universe. But their perspective generally has little to do with organized religion and often in really just an intelligent creator, who may or may not share qualities with “God”.

I think it's because the more we learn about the universe in which we exist, the more and more apparent it becomes that we are not a special part of it, that there is so much more to it than tiny slice of space and time we happen to occupy. The universe existed long before us, and it will continue long after us. We are inconsequential. This is all pretty contrary to what most religions tell us.

Personally I have no reason to trust or believe what clergy say (they're as human as the rest of us and make lots of unverifiable claims), so all I have to go one is what we collectively discover about our universe.

This. I went to thinking the Universal God is more supreme than the Christian God