God shaped holes

The phrase "God shaped hole" was recently used in a comment. I have to say that I disagree with the whole (or, hole, if you prefer...) image here. It's worth explaining why. God isn't some sort of fixed concept, even for theists. One of the reasons the word lacks any real meaning is that it's applied to all sorts of areas that people don't understand. Initially, the word "god" could explain everything - why we're here, how the universe was created, why we behave as we do. Then, after humans began studying the world, the spaces for god became smaller, as science began to explain. So now, when we can explain the evolution of human life, much of how the mind works, the way the atoms build up matter, the creation of the universe from a matter of microseconds after the big bang, and so on, the "god shaped hole" seems to have become smaller. Do we just say "well, god programmed the world to continue in this way after the big bang"? If so, it dismissed the notion of free-will - something that is important to religion (if you have no free will, how can god punish you - after all, you're only doing what he's made you to do. A problem for them, anyway, but one worthy of its own topic). But where else is the hole that he's supposed to fit, now we can explain so much else? And isn't it worth assuming that we can explain the rest as well, since we've had so much success so far? The god-shaped hole gets smaller and smaller...
However, that's not really the point that was being made. It was that people tend to fill this hole with other things (cf. Chesterton here, although he's thoroughly deluded...) - material goods, "New Age" nonsense, and so on. But again, the hole image fails - I believe that god is, and always has been, some sort of ontological Polyfilla - something to shove in cracks in your picture of the world. The cracks were once larger, now they become smaller - perhaps too small for people to want to really refer to god. So they choose something else.
So the image of a hole is too large for the purposes people use god for.