A Little History of Religion - Conflicts

When reading the first few chapters from A Little History of Religion by Richard Holloway and further discussing the main idea of those chapters in class, I realized that I found it hard to connect the idea that religion was created by humans with basically everything that religious people believe in. I found myself saying "Well yes this is obviously true, but doesn't it entirely erase the idea that any religion is real and valid?" and "How does one believe in this but also believe that religion was placed into our heads by God? Are believing in both even possible without contradicting the other?"

The first few lines of the book come right out with the idea that religion is created by humans having the innate desire to explain why we are on this earth and what we should do while we're on it. It also mentions that we are the only animal on the planet who found it necessary to have a higher power in the first place. In my opinion, these ideas and basically everything else mentioned in the later parts of the book completely shoot down the concept that religion was placed into the heads of the people by God (or any other deity that people worship) as we are meant to believe through our religious teachings. I couldn't wrap my mind around how somebody religious could hear the things written in this book and agree with it whilst still continuing to believe in their religion and their God.

As somebody who doesn't know much about what I believe in when it comes to the spiritual world and religion, reading something like this is almost dangerous. It further agrees with my rationale that humans just made everything up to explain the world around them, create a set of rational morals that they could get everyone in that religion to follow, and to produce a sense of purpose for humans in general, and to always be able to possess the faith that once we die there isn't just infinite nothingness. As a very literal person who doesn't normally believe in something just because it was told to me, why would I believe in God or follow a religion when there's proof like what's written in this book that essentially goes against the entire thing? Why would anyone?

To answer the questions above, and to rationalize the human thought process a bit more I turned to something that I have often heard my mother, a woman who believes in God, express throughout my lifetime. To explain her intermixing of believing in both science and her religious teachings at the same time she says that anything is possible, and if God is all-powerful like he's supposed to be, then he created every single thing and every single scientific phenomenon that happens on earth and to humans. If I think about it from this point of view, I can better understand how a person who believes in rational things like science or the ideas presented in this book, including the fact that humans created God with their minds, but could also believe in God at the same time. Although this book seemingly discredits the idea that God is real and almost makes it seem like just another natural thing that humans did in their free time to explain the world around them, if you think about God as being all-powerful as he is supposed to be, then why would he not be able to give humans the ability to think about him and create their own ideas of how he created the world?