"The savage mind finds mysterious and arbitrary spiritual powers everywhere, in rivers and springs, inherent in the wind and rain, and presiding over the crops; but, with advance in civilization and the development of ordered knowledge, an ever wider compass is established as the for the reign of natural laws. Those who base their faith in God on the ever-receding miraculous phenomena, on the tacit assumption that human limitations prove the validity of religious interpretations, are ever pointing out some weak spots in the scientific web of cause and effect and saying "Here Science is baffled, and you must admit the need of God." But Science keeps extending her domain; and so the history of the thought of these men is the history of a continuous retreat. Their position is fundamentally a bad one because it makes God a personified symbol of our residuum of ignorance, and justifies Reinach's definition of religion as a "sum of scruples impeding the free use of the human faculties." No, the Creator must be seen as God of all Nature and of every natural law."
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Life and Philosophy of W. H. Chamberlin (1925) pp.144-145
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ralph_Vary_Chamberlin
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Ralph Vary Chamberlin
Ralph Vary Chamberlin (January 3, 1879 – October 31, 1967) was a biologist, ethnographer, and historian from Utah. He described over 4,000 new species, specializing in spiders, centipedes, and millipedes, but he also wrote on topics such as anthropology, language, religion, and history. A Mormon, he was in a notable modernism controversy at Brigham Young University: one of four professors whose teachings of evolution and higher criticism were seen as in conflicting with the views of the The Chur
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