Only theists conceive of God as an essential element and thereby perceive a god shaped hole in atheists world view? What religion does your cat practice for example?

Nature is like gravity it is a label we attach to things in order to communicate about some aspect of our mental models of the universe we share or imagine we share sufficiently to communicate theories about the underlying thing those models point to. It isn't in most cases not imagined to be a sentience modeled after ourselves but rather an abstraction around some aspects of everything in the overarching model.

Religion, Philosophy, Science are all systems of models of the world but they belong in different category based on characteristics in the same way that a trout, a dog, and an duck are all animals but they aren't all fish just because they all swim.

Religion especially western religion has classically been a pre scientific exploration of different theories about how the world came to be lacking virtually all actual understanding and focused on the idea that something much like man writ large was responsible for the universe and that the man who acted as conduit to the wishes off that man would derive some measure of that beings power mirroring primitive social structures and extending them skyward to the fanciful creations of our own mind. As if an ant had imagined the entire world was a giant burrow made by giant ants who could make their wishes known to lesser ants by way of the arrangements of your dogs droppings in your yard.

Science is merely a system for harnessing the same imagination but directed towards testing our fanciful explanations and building an increasingly powerful set of facts and models that are extremely likely to be somewhat true. We by the nature of our brains are builders of models and we must have them to exist and to progress but we don't need to build a system that glorifies the very flaws to which our minds are most heir to and exploits them. That is to say we haven't replaced God with nature we have simply built mental models of the universe that don't contain a first cause because we don't believe there is a conscious act at the center of it all.

Those of us who have wings know that a wing isn't a different kind of fin and a rocket engine isn't a different sort of wing and naked is not a style of pants.

There is no reason that we can't at the end of a long road have a pretty good idea how how life on earth came to be in the same way as we have a pretty good idea of how to continents came to be as they are. It wont be perfect but it will keep getting better every year as we learn more.

Your god was invented thousands of years ago so someone could claim to speak for him and attain status within his or her tribe without hunting more animals a trick that amazingly still works NOW. Throwing off the yoke of his adherents doesn't free one from the obligation of life, meaning, your family, or your fellow man. It is a harder obligation not an easier one. You incorrectly frame casting out comforting lies and facing down a terrifying truth as an easy way out but nothing could be further from the truth.

If a lie it is and I for myself call it a lie then adhering to it would be an unacceptable act of cowardice. If you truly believe it then to you it is courage to adhere to it but neither of our experiences is a lie and you definitely do not understand mine or any other alike.