Religion has been exploiting ignorance for as long as its been around. According to them, God is hiding in ignorance. At one point, god used to be responsible for much more — before we understood things like bacteria, mental disease etc. Before these things were understood, they would be wrongly explained with divine intervention. Even things like the origin of the Earth's species. Obviously we now know that evolution is responsible for the complexity of life — over billions of years. And the people that still believe in the genesis story — over evolution, are similar to those that still believe the earth is flat over the "theory" of it being round.
While many Believers still deny reality, many accept evolution as an explanation; but these people think that a god is responsible for getting it all started, or for helping evolution along (macro-evolution etc.). God is hiding in ignorance, and when the light of science shines upon it — God is never there. Humans being fearful of the dark is the reason why religion can exploit ignorance as easily as it can. The lower a person's IQ, the more religious they tend to be (there have been many studies that show this trend). People with poor intellectual abilities prefer simple fairy-tales to understand the world around them (regardless of how wrong they are), to complex ones which would leave them feeling even more ignorant.
Perhaps it has to do with feeling comfortable with ones surroundings. Some people prefer simple fairy-tales and an all-powerful god looking out for them, over a complex world without the sense of control that an omnipotent god provides.
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