Rather than viewing this question from a static position of a particular set of beliefs in any society at a particular time, I suggest we need to see how beliefs develop in a society over a longer period of time.
All human societies have developed from the time when the human mind emerged from the particular type of intelligence we could described as typical of animals (who can have 'intelligence') to something similar to our own experience.
In the beginning, lacking rational explanations for natural phenomena such as that experienced in thunder storms we would expect the explanations we find in the Bible (Job 38:1 NIV):
Then the LORD spoke to Job out of the storm
The belief system of that writer had, of course, developed from the sheer terror that a much more primitive human may have experienced during an electrical storm, particularly if one of his/hers group had been killed by a lighning bolt, an event that may have been explained by the invention of a divinity.
The mind of the author of Job was already inventing and recording stories that offered (to him and his peers) more rational explanations (to that group) that involved a parallel invention of ethical standards.
It does seem, that in the society we now know as early Israel, that some were already thinking about the question of the reality of divinities. Some likely (for whatever reasons) concluded that there was no God. King David who attributed his rise to Kingship to divine intervention, ordered his national choir to counter that thought in Psalm 14, which commences (verse 1):
The fool says in his heart, "There is no God."
But to look at another long lived human society, we can cross from David's West Asian society to East Asia and China.
There is archeological evidence of superstitious belief in the early cultural history of the various pre-history societies that eventually formed the Chinese civilisation. Its particularly interesting because of its long historical continuity and possible independent intellectual development (though, we cannot be certain that there were no cross Asian circulation of ideas).
Wing-Tsit Chan, in his, "A Source Book in Chinese Philosphy" writes (Chap 1), (and, I'm selecting thoughts from his first page)
"If one word could characterise the entire history of Chinese philosophy, that word would be humanism - (a humanism) that professes the unity of man and heaven."
" Humanism was an outgrowth, not of speculation, but of historical and social change."
Chan these discusses how the conquest of the Shang dynasty (1751-1112 BCE) (where superstition was prevalent) to the Zhou who (Chan suggests) challenged human ingenuity and ability. For example, replacing prayers for rain with irrigation projects.
They also developed:
" the doctrine of the "Mandate of Heaven, a self-existent moral law, whose constant, reliable factor was virtue. According to this doctrine, man's destiny depended, not upon the existence of a soul before or after death, nor upon the whim of a spiritual force, but upon his own good words and good deeds."
By the time of Kongzi (Confucius) (551-479 BCE) we find the influence of spirits further diminished, as he writes,
" ... respect spiritual beings (ancestors), but keep them at a distance." (Analects 6:20)
And a further one hundred years further on, teacher Liezi (circa 440-360 BCE) wrote:
"Hence, everything creates itself without the direction of any creator."
Hence we see demonstrated in Chinese society, that progression from superstition to rationality that upsets those who want to force us to be dependent on the whims of a mythical spirit being in the sky.
