In summary:

1. Primitive man had questions about his small world.

2. We've answered those questions (except for 'why,' which is begging the question).

2.5. Thus destroying the original home of the gods.

3. We didn't get the implications of destroying the home of the gods, and mistakenly continue asking the question.

4. The home of the gods remains at the edge of knowledge.

5. We have no knowledge of gods themselves.

6. Either the nature of the gods has actually changed, or their invocation is a declaration of ignorance.

Since we lack evidence, all that's left to do is interrogate the question itself. People come up with these very rococo apologetic arguments, trying to reify the gods through contorted double-talk or bad analogies alone. The knowledge and reasoning ability of the average person today, atheist or theist (even an apologist), would instantly demolish the specious reasoning of those from which we've inherited our critical blind spot for the question, if not the question itself.

I agree that the data points to civilizations independently deriving different concepts of gods, either as provincial or ultimate authorities, along with various other sprites, demons and elemental spirits. It doesn't suggest anything about validity, of course (since they're don't corroborate each other), only our inclination to invent them.

This is a straw man argument. The position of mysticism and religious philosophy through history is not this weak, the contemplations of ancient man aren't crude or immature by definition. It may be popular thinking that ancient man were savage brutes without reasoning faculty but this is really not true. the original tools of reason, that we still apply today, come from the same places as theological thought. 

 affirming the consequent. the home of the gods is not in the classical physical realm so answers in that scope don't have any effect on the spiritual/deistic realms of light and paradox.

Talk about a straw man, this statement totally misses the point. The point is that even if early man was a supergenius in terms of natural reasoning power, he lacked the knowledge gained through millennia of research to create our present understanding of nature. God and the supernatural was a reasonable explaination, but only given the limitations on the information he had access to.  

There are no spiritual/deistic realms of light. The classical, physical realm is all there is. Paradox is how we know that something can't exist - like God. 

I just don't see how you can say that we don't have orders of magnitude more information about the natural world now than ancient man had. He didn't have microscopes. He didn't have telescopes. The great experiments that revealed the theorectical underpinnings of things like electricity and gravity and light and chemistry hadn't been done.

Spritual thought is debunked insofar as it attempts to make claims about the natural world ie that God exists. Attempts to discover the world through spiritual thought have always failed to yield any discovery or new information. Compared to science, spiritual thought has acheived nothing. Further, we know now where spiritual thought comes from: the same neural processes that create all other thought. Spiritual thought is the same as fantasizing.  

Light fits quite nicely into the classically defined world, in fact our observations of light have played a huge role in determining our classical theoretical models. We have evidence of light, we can observe and measure its action all around us. We don't know everything about it or how it behaves under certain circumstances, but this suggests nothing except an ever-receding limit to our knowledge. Nothing about light requires or even suggests a realm where our standards of rationality break down.

There is no such thing as a paradox in the natural world. The fact that we are able to imagine paradoxes that we can't define as untrue suggests nothing except the fact that our brains our able to play with their internal model of reality to produce alternate models that are not connected to the real world. This is no more amazing than the fact that I can think a suitcase can fit into a trunk, and be mistaken.

Light is only apparently the subject of paradoxes because we don't have a unified model for how it works. 

For instance, light did indeed appear to be paradoxical in that it didn't matter how fast you were moving toward a light source, you always measured the same speed of light. But Einstein resolved the paradox by explaining that time is local and relative to the observer, and that when we accelerate toward a distant light source our mass increases and local time slows down, perfectly offsetting the increase in velocity and leaving the light speed constant.

My gut tells me that a similar revolution in thinking will be necessary to unify quantum and classical physics. Until that happens, we are stuck with paradoxes that are pointing to two things: the error in our theoretical models and their own untruth.

I actually think that it's our finite minds but meh. 

Apparent paradoxes. And several gigantic leaps forward in our understanding of the world and our power over it. The score in the Advancement of Human Knowledge game then stood at Enlightenment: 256129487, Centuries of Spiritual Navel-Gazing: 0. Spiritual NG then elected to punt, hoping that their rookie linebacker Co-opted Multiculturalism would be able to turn the tide on defence. So far it seems to be working out for them. Disingenuous Pleas for Equal Time is having a hell of a game, too.

You keep saying we will resolve them. I highly doubt it. Not because they're wrong, but because QM seems random and operates and distances and energies beyond our understanding. By the looks of it, we may never reach these energies and distances.

That is what I'm saying. 

Yeah it's actually the order of magnitude of ignorance that I am challenging in your argument though, Magilum. It's not as weak a position as asking questions and always in every case coming up with completely wrong answers, that simply is not where theological thought stands objectively in our present day.

The specious reasoning is not the all of theology, though, which is why I say straw man. You can put up and knock down superstition on the grounds that it is superstition, fine, but it really can't be said that all human revelation of theological import fits in that same category, it's just not so.

as I was saying to Tilberian, this kind of thinking is a source of frustration for me and I mentally kick those who popularised it in the teeth for my having to argue it with atheists. It never was in the classical physical realm it was always in the realm of the unseen foundations of physical existence. That is not proven false at all; it is in fact proven True that such is the place where light and paradox trump classical reasoning.

What? 

Having read the passage, I concede the point that the gods weren't uniformly given physical status. They were, however, credited with physical principles and phenomena to the explanation of which they are no longer contributors. I don't see theological speculation about a 'foundation' for reality corresponding with physics and more than I see the Genesis account being corroborated by Big Bang Theory (as a comparison, not saying you made this claim). I think the immaterial/supernatural was invoked to rationalize the incomprehensibility of physical principles of which they were ignorant, and viewing it as, say, a prediction of particle physics is something like equivocation.

What I mean is that our minds are not finite. They cannot be by definition of emergent consciousness, such consciousness has non-local direct access to all information in the system.

So I say that it is the finite organisational structure that sorts this information which stands between us and the unification of known and unknown reality.

One essence of this structure is heirarchical order- the order in which data is organised by its relevance and importance.

For example if I ask you to take three values which you think are most important, you might say progress, rationality and simplicity. Then your conscious data will be organised around those principles. What does not fit with those values is filtered to a lower level in the heirarchy even to the point where it is relegated to a heap of garbage. For an atheist that is where most theological data goes in the heirarchy of thought, but that's beside the point. The point is that the structure is finite, not the mind .

I think delude is the wrong word.  Science has an astounding record when it comes to asking questions about nature.  Out of, I don't know, maybe ten million questions that have been asked, science has answered about nine million nine hundred ninety nine thousand nine hundred and ninety.  It's reasonable to predict that with that level of success, science can eventually answer any valid question.

I'd say we have a reasonable expecatation that science can answer any question that's been properly asked.  One thing to take into account is that good questions require cumulative knowledge.  In other words, we couldn't ask "What caused the Big Bang" until we knew the Big Bang existed.  

Again, the past success of science leads us to believe that either:

1) Science will answer the questions we are asking

or

2) Science will answer other questions, such that we will see that the questions we are asking now aren't the right questions, at which point, science will answer the questions.