If we wish to explain our ideas of the Divinity we shall be obliged to
admit that, by the word God, man has never been able to designate but
the most hidden, the most distant and the most unknown cause of the
effects which he saw; he has made use of his word only when the play of
natural and known causes ceased to be visible to him; as soon as he lost
the thread of these causes, or when his mind could no longer follow the
chain, he cut the difficulty and ended his researches by calling God the
last of the causes, that is to say, that which is beyond all causes that
he knew; thus he but assigned a vague denomination to an unknown cause,
at which his laziness or the limits of his knowledge forced him to stop.
Every time we say that God is the author of some phenomenon, that
signifies that we are ignorant of how such a phenomenon was able to
operate by the aid of forces or causes that we know in nature. It is
thus that the generality of mankind, whose lot is ignorance, attributes
to the Divinity, not only the unusual effects which strike them, but
moreover the most simple events, of which the causes are the most simple
to understand by whomever is able to study them. In a word, man has
always respected unknown causes, surprising effects that his ignorance
kept him from unraveling. It was on this debris of nature that man
raised the imaginary colossus of the Divinity.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Necessity of Atheism