A nice treatment of the subject. Thanks.
Our brains evolved to believe imaginary stuff over not believing things that are real (The "tiger in the grass" analogy). On a savanna with tigers, it's a survival feature, not a bug.
Our brains are wired to make rule-based models even if the rules are wonky (religion), because those models help us navigate and predict risks and rewards.
Whatever happens, we seek a 'reason' for it. People do stuff, they have reasons for doing stuff: in that order.
Sometimes, the reasons are helpful in building community groups, but more often, some bully/salesman just uses our own rule-finding to exploit it and get money or votes out of us.
Nature makes it pretty simple though, if we are willing to set aside the noise of civilization's sales pitches for a moment.
The species that survive are the ones that contribute more to their future (environment) than they consume in resources.
The fish pays a 'tithe' in extra eggs or mosquito control and is 'rewarded' by Gaia with survival. The DNA molecule accumulates 'junk' that costs a tithe to keep around; seemingly 'useless' until that one time when a volcano erupts or an ice age starts.
Humans have circumvented our response ability to the environment that spawned us (service to God, when you think about God being in everything, would require us to pay a tithe to the environment we depend on) by building walls between people and the risks of Nature.
We can't find a collective "reason" for our existence because we are pretending that only our artificial constructs matter (including religion), and the natural ones were somehow 'outmoded'.
Meanwhile, we have traveled so far down this wrong road that we cannot face the uselessness of most of the things in which we have become immersed.
For a nickel's worth of electricity, we receive 5 manhours of work (a day's effort of a hunter-gatherer). It's pretty hard to go back and put that genie back in the bottle.
What does it all mean? That humanity doesn't know what living actually is for, and it doesn't want to talk about it now.
Hakuna matata.
