Honestly, I don't even think, it was necessarily that someone didn't want to admit missing knowledge.

In my experience, us humans still love our false gods.
For example, how was the universe created? Well, there was the Big Bang, end of story. Most people just accept a big explosion as an explanation.

In reality, not only is the Big Bang not actually an explosion (nor finished), things happened before it, too. And we have a hard time seeing what happened before it, so we actually do not know that the universe was created. The theory with the least assumptions would be that it was not created, just spatially a lot smaller.

Of course, religion was itself involved in spreading the theory that the universe was created, but you've still got theoretically intelligent people not questioning how the void just kind of exploded for no reason and suddenly everything existed.

Another absolute classic of modern false gods: AI.
In most contexts, when a computer scientist says "AI", you can mentally replace that with "magic" and it's similarly meaningful. It's basically just a code word for them to not need to explain further.