Whether God "exists"

or not is a triviality.

What matters is what kind of life and what kind of culture issue from faith and from faithlessness. Modernity supplies the answer. Without God as center, life and culture degenerate. Neurosis and madness proliferate. Freud did not sufficiently appreciate what he himself observed, that religion protects against neurosis. Like all moderns, he could not abide "illusions" and this blinded him to the fact that "fictions" and "illusions" are the stuff out of which culture is spun and are needed to protect human beings from the sterilizing effect of consciousness. 

Consciousness has to produce something that protects against its own death-dealing radiation. That is what produced religion.

The world, as symbolic enclosure

that separates form from formlessness, comes into being always and everywhere as divine creation. This is a mythical recognition of the structural necessity of the symbolic order remaining beyond rational comprehension or questioning. God is the navel of the symbolic order, the omphalos, the ineffable ground. The worship of the gods, then, is not evidence of credulity or of some sort of "alienation," but an affirmation of what enables culture to function as a refuge from chaos. Culture becomes a construct when it is falling apart. Only then can it become an object for analysis. 

The fools are not the devout but the sociologists.