Well, teleology can play a part. Humans are so constructed that they in general try to find reasons why things happen as they do – in short, that’s the whole idea behind science as a set of disciplines. It’s not enough to know that, e.g., watering a plant causes the somewhat droopy leaves and shoots to perk up and flesh out; we look at the process of transpiration and how the plant metabolizes the water it draws from the soil to identify why that happens.
When you get beyond biology, chemistry, physics, and cosmology, though, you enter the realm of metaphysics. But the question of why? is still prevalent. There’s a great deal of discomfort among many people in the idea of a purposeless universe, one that has interior causality but no exterior causality shaping why it is structured as it is. God as cause of the universe as a whole is a soothing answer to that question.
This does not, however, mean that the particular conception of God the defender of the Israelites, demander of obedience to an assortment of commandments, etc., is something that a modern person who accepts God’s existence must swallow whole hog. Even if one grants for the sake of argument the premise of a real god who made himself known to them, their understanding of him was, well, as limited as their understanding of parasitology. If people die of loathsome worms from eating (inadequately cooked) pork, one does not need to know modern helminthology to reason that it’s a bad idea to eat pork, and it becomes convenient to make it taboo, prohibited by divine command – whether or not he actually commanded that or not. For large quantities of early Hebrew stories and laws, a scholarly understanding of what may have underpinned them leads one to believe that they were in fact attributed to him.
So why not throw out the whole Bible? Well, for many people, a transcendent experience of some sort has led them to accept not only the philosophical premise of the existence of God but the further step of having faith in him – which absolutely requires to be understood not as an irrational, superstitious subscription to magical fairies in the garden but as accepting that there is a generally beneficient, loving relationship being offered by that god which they accept the reality of, the ablity to put one’s trust in his trustworthiness towards oneself. And the Bible, laden with folklore though it is, provides a treasury of knowledge about him as person (intermingled, to be sure, with great quantities of what somebody thought they knew about his will and ends).
Did he create man? This depends on how you look at things. I typed these words in the expectation that you would read them, and that other, third parties might read them as well, and understand my perspective on the issue. But it is the Chicago Reader who made the SDMB available to post them, Jelsoft Enterprises which wrote, compiled, and sold the VBB code and program on which the SDMB runs, Dell or Gateway or some other company who built your computer, you who decided to log onto the SDMB and read this post… I did not make these words appear on your screen – yet without my having written them in the first place, the entire panoply of causes that made them appear there would be pointless for the purpose of conveying my thinking to you.
So too if one assumes God’s detailed, thorough foreknowledge of how things will come to pass, it’s not beyond the realm of sensibility to suggest that he initiated the Big Bang in the expectation that Polycarp and Harri would several billion years later have this interchange on computers running a particular program and logged onto a particular website on one planet circling one star in the halo area of one galaxy among billions in the universe he created. It takes a huge amount of awareness to grasp the intricacies of all the events that led up to that – and to all the quintillions of other single events occurring in the universe. But he’s God; he’s capable of it, in just the same way as a limited human author is capable of conceiving complex characters and driving a plot through which they interact in a book he writes, keeping all the complex details of characterization and multiple plot strands in mind simultaneously.
However, I don’t think you can compare the two and say one is better understood than the other. It’s apples and oranges, really. For instance, can we predict which species will go extinct, leaving no descendants 10M years from now? We can predict, with a pretty high certainty, what the earth’s orbit will be then.