Who or what created the universe

[Belacqua]

We don't know how the universe was created (yet) but I don't see how making up fairy stories helps anything.

If making up fairy stories is beneficial for people, why shouldn't they do that?

I agree with you that we should construct new myths or some other kind of framework for our thinking. And myths don't need to be thought of as literal truths -- they are narratives that shape our thinking. I don't think this needs to include a universe origin story, however.

In the absence of a religious view of life, society has largely defaulted to a capitalist, liberal bourgeois way of determining value. So for example someone on this thread said earlier that the goal of science is to help us "live materially less precarious lives." But that leaves open everything that's not material -- the ethical, the spiritual, the aesthetic, and other things -- in other words, all the things that make a materially less precarious life worth living. By focussing entirely on the material, as science and capitalism do, we exclude any reasons for stopping the conditions that make global heating inevitable. Capitalism demands constant expansion, until we're all dead. Science is supposed to be ethically neutral, though some people treat it as normative.

The liberal approach is to make all those non-material choices personal. The mantra is that we are free to do whatever we want as long as we don't interfere with other people's liberty. But with no sense of common purpose, we're in big trouble. 

And it's not as if we've done away with myths. We've just replaced the old ones with new, more self-serving ones. 

At this point some kind of religion or non-material value system that makes the preservation of nature spiritually and ethically sacred would be a great improvement. Science isn't sufficient to do this.