What I think about our supposed discontinuity with nature can be seen under Ad VI . Apart from that, it seems very likely that we are dealing here with a way of explaining phenomena from a time when people's knowledge did not reach as far as it does now. They therefore had to explain matters which went beyond their knowledge by analogy, referring to something they could imagine. As they saw that humans are capable of creating complex things, they may have projected that to a superior being to explain the complexity of the world. Science covers the mental field of knowledge and religion the mental field of belief .
Belief starts where knowledge ends.
When there is no way to be really sure if something is true, people are capable of believing that it is true. When it comes to subjects as the meaning and value of life, science cannot say anything about that, and it does not claim to. The other way around, religion cannot make any statements about whether this or that scientific theory is untrue, simply because what is known by science is supported by fact and religion is not meant to deal with facts, but rather with beliefs and values. Naturally, scientists are humans too, and as humans tend to work between these two mental fields, there will always be a mixture of beliefs and facts in how a scientist views the world and his particular field of research. You may call this scientist's world view, of course, a belief on its own, but the difference with a real religion is that the scientist's world view is based on factual knowledge and research, whereas religion is based on what is stated in an ancient book of wisdom.