I believe the concept of a god, as defined by most of the major religions, is a human created idea born out of genetic hominid tribalism. Humans have this deep desire to know all the answers and will invent ideas and unproven facts to fill those gaps. Religion tries to fill those gaps, often weaponized as a means of controlling as big a group people as possible, or a few very special souls that were lucky enough. As Haggoth pointed out, it's usually about money and control, telling people how to think and act about sex, life, morality; all under the ruse of altruism and divine providence.
I have my own ideas of a higher power, one that may or may not be intelligent by human definition. To me it's an energy, vibrations, patterns, the physical rules of this universe. This universe somehow went from a dense hot state to the expansion it's in now, destined for entropy, eventual death, every last black hole dissipated into dead dark coldness in trillions and trillions of earth years. The Big Bang is kind of like god for science; it's an assumption, an idea, along with many others, as to what existed before the big expansion and if there was any intelligence behind it. So far we have nothing to measure or know what existed before expansion, some mathematical and scientific guesses and it can quickly gets philosophical. If you say it's all random events, that's a conundrum as it appears the universe itself has a consciousness, manifested through us. If you say it's a simulation its another conundrum of who is running the simulation and who is running their simulation; the who created god(s) problem. Same conundrum if you take the human created gods as plausible.
At least science admits when it's theory and ideas and not observable truth. Even those with years of experience with psychedelic substances, those that explore the brain and consciousness, they usually admit they have no solid ideas as to what is going on there. Of course, even some scientists and psychonaughts have and will continue to invent religions.
It would seem, for us on this tiny blue speck of dust, that this universe is far from understanding it's own existence, especially if we are the first intelligent life to look out at it all and ask the big questions, try to figure out all the mechanics of it with our scientific technologies and discoveries. In spite of what our little ape egos tell us, that we are the most important things in this universe, that may or may not be true. If humans and their tech manage to get off the planet and even populate the galaxy, other galaxies, etc., can we, or our silicon based evolutionary progeny, solve entropy? I often think about Asimov's paper The Last Question
http://www.physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf. Humans may be nothing more than the cosmos trying to grapple with it's own eventual mortality. Maybe we are just an early mid-life crisis or a teenage stage of establishing it's own identity.
I find it a struggle sometimes to live with all the big life purpose questions unanswered. I often churn these questions over in my mind when I have time to be alone, especially out in nature. At the same time I find the not knowing to be quite liberating, and I convince myself it's okay not to know. It took a lot more mental gymnastics to make the mormon religion work for me than the big unknown realm of discovery and endless ideas I occasionally grapple with now.
