This opens up a big subject, and I don't know if in this first effort I'll explain myself sufficiently, but I'll try. The ancients, when looking at the world which they didn't comprehend, assigned gods to virtually everything. Humans didn't understand things, but gods did. Humans couldn't affect anything, but gods could. Just about everything had a god. Including trees, which had their dryads.
Clarification note: The Hebrews, by sweeping all that away and positing only one God, made an almost unbelievable intellectual leap. But that's not at all what I'm discussing here, and in rejecting the primitive notion of dryads (as did the Hebrews) we are not rejecting theism.These days we know -- at least we think we know -- that the existence of X doesn't necessarily imply a "god of X." We could describe the worldview of the ancients as a kind of quantum dualism -- a temporary term because at the moment I can't think of another. In the quantum dualist worldview, for each discrete object we observe there is both (1) the physically real thing, plus (2) the inevitable "god associated with that physically real thing."
Another clarification note: No, I'm not describing Platonic forms; I'm attempting to describe a worldview that's far more primitive.Science, in its methodology (and not necessarily in its philosophy) doesn't follow the ancient quantum dualism. Science proceeds to seek answers that do not employ the automatic assumption of quantum dualism. Often they succeed. When they don't, the default conclusion isn't the ancient dualism. If it were, they'd be proclaiming the intellectual equivalent of dryads.
Ascribing a god to a physical object is man's first approximation to understanding the world. IMHO the activity thus is not to be disparaged by us "more enlightened" thinkers.
I can imagine a future time -- say a millennium or two down the road -- when even "more enlightened thinkers" than we are would maybe look back at us presently-living (but by then long-dead) humans and would chortle at our superstitious beliefs. [I have some candidates to propose, but won't do that here.]
You wrote: "The Hebrews, by sweeping all that away and positing only one God, made an almost unbelievable intellectual leap. But that's not at all what I'm discussing here, and in rejecting the primitive notion of dryads (as did the Hebrews) we are not rejecting theism."
That truly was an extraordinary leap in being, not only in intellectual progress, Patrick! The one thing that the ancient Hebrews had in common with their more primitive forebears is the unshakeable conviction that at the bottom of everything in the Universe is God: Life and all of truth are divine principles.
In post-modern times, an interesting thing has happened: God has been putatively exiled from the natural world: There are no longer dryads in the trees. (Although as recently as the Nineteenth century, William Blake could still claim that the trees were "full of angels.") Today it is widely believed that Nature is absolutely independent of any kind of divine activity.
But the interesting thing about this is, while this understanding may push God out of the world of empirical phenomena, it can't push Him out of the physical laws that science employs to study the natural world. God is the ultimate foundation of Truth; thus the physical laws are utterly contingent on the God Who validates them by means of His Truth.
So in our imaginations, God may have been pushed out of phenomena; but it seems very clear that He has not been entirely pushed out of the Universe. Were that to be the case, then the idea of "law" would become unintelligible, and science would have nothing to do -- and no world to describe anymore.
I don't imagine that you are "rejecting theism." It's just you may think it belongs in church. But science ultimately rests on divine revelation just as much as any other human endeavor does.