Fair enough.
Easier is not the right word.
I would also like to make the point that I am always willing to be convinced by a sufficiently powerful argument. If someone would like to try and convince me that religion is correct, I will listen to the argument with an open mind.
Returning to the issue of word choice, it is hard to convey the sense of what I mean. I will admit that there are many cases when the religious path is certainly more difficult than the secular path.
Convenient isn't necessarily the right word either, but it fits better than easy did.
The Behavioral Psychologist, Skinner, set up a series of experiments where he put pigeons in a box with a lever and a food dispenser.
In some cases, the food would be dispensed when the pigeon performed a certain behavior, and the pigeons quickly learned the appropriate behavior, even if it was quite complex.
Interestingly, he rigged a few boxes to randomly give out food, completely unconnected to the pigeons actions. The pigeons also developed complex behaviors. Several scientists have joked that these pigeons had discovered religion. Eager to make sense of their world, they noticed an initial pattern where some behavior happened to be met with the random food reward. The quickly concluded that there was some causal link, and kept trying until they were again 'proven right'. Slowly, they would add to their ritual, continuing to add things until one change would be randomly rewarded, at which point, they concluded that they had caused the food again.
I bring this up because in my mind it is similar to what I believe happened with religion. In any human society, especially one in a less academically advanced day and age is infinitely more likely to come up with a seemingly plausible anecdotal explanation for the unexplained events in the world before the apply enough scientific rigor to actually come up with what is actually going on. Even if the real answer ends up being easier in the long run then whatever the first explanation was, the first explanation is easier to originally come up with, and thus is more convenient.
It is a long road towards finding scientific truth, and anecdotal explanations are available immediately.
In the ancient Greek society, storytellers would invent myths for any unexplained event, and these were immediately incorporated into the religion, and believed, passed down through oral tradition.
Religious explanations are more readily available, and thus are the preferred option to the many who would rather cling to any artificial light than to continue searching until one finds the actual sun.
I would again like to stress that if you disagree, and feel like you have a good counter-argument, I will gladly hear it, and discuss it with you. I wouldn't be a scientist if I was unwilling to be proven wrong; being open to better explanations is at the heart of science.
Note: Deism still conflicts with Science. Just because there are those that are willing to believe in a deity and not abandon science doesn't mean that the two concepts are not mutually exclusive. People believe things that partially contradict each other all the time.
