I always liked this notion of the God-shaped hole, even if it's meant as an indictment of atheism. As I understand it, an atheist exists not in a godless universe, but in a universe characterized (primarily, I should think) by God's conspicuous absence—or, rather, by the atheists' own blindness to God, I assume is the point, the idea being (presumably) that God is so real, so present, so not imaginary that a thing like a world without God is not only nonexistent but flat-out inconceivable (not so much like a life without a breakfast as like a breakfast without food: a contradiction in terms, an absolute logical and theoretical impossibility, self-evidently absurd—foolishness, nonsense).
One might point out that this "response" to atheism begs the question*—worse than that, it's circular: a circle with so puny a radius that it really doesn't go anywhere at all, even briefly—insofar as what it's really saying is: "You say that God doesn't exist, but what you fail to take into account is that God does exist! Q.E.D., heathe!**" But there's no need to pick a fight, particularly because what I like about the god-shaped hole isn't the argument or truth value so much as the concept—poetically, you could say.
And, anyway, in some ways I do think we live in a world with a god-shaped hole. In fact I'm rather sure we do. However, the hole is not in the universe itself, but in our society. As religious as our country is, today's religions seem either desperate & hysterical or toned down to the point of being little more than semantics***—in short, we live in a post-religious world. And, yes, religion was so dominant in our civilization for so long that removing it does leave a hole...maybe more like a tan line, but the point is that you can't completely change the structure of a society just by changing some of the details, and you can't escape your ancestors' influence entirely just by renouncing it.
50–75% related:
"...no matter how far our thoughts vault into the eternal sky of scientific progress, no matter how dazzling the effects of this progress, God will always bite through his muzzle...There will never be a day when God does not speak for the majority. There will never even be a day when he does not whisper into the ears of the most godless of scientists. This is because God is not an idea, nor a cultural invention, nor an "opiate of the masses," nor any such thing. God is a way of thinking that has been rendered permanent by natural selection.
"As scientists, we must toil and labor and toil again to silence God, but ultimately this is like cutting off our ears to hear more clearly. God, too, is a biological appendage. Until we acknowledge this fact, until we rear our children with this knowledge, he will continue to howl his discontent for all time..."
–Jesse Bering, What's Your Dangerous Idea?
* "begging the question does not mean 'evading the issue' or 'inviting the obvious questions,' as some mistakenly believe. The proper meaning of begging the question is 'basing a conclusion on an assumption that is as much in need of proof or demonstration as the conclusion itself.' The formal name for this logical fallacy is petitio principii." (Bryan A. Garner, A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, best book ever, man.)
** Will religionists please start calling nonbelievers heathes?
*** ...by which I mean, e.g., that sometimes when asked whether I believe in God, I don't know what to say because the inquisitor might well be asking whether I believe that there is goodness in the universe or even whether I believe in wrong and right—whereas if the question is really whether I believe there's some big dude in the clouds meddling with our basketball games and worrying about our sex lives, I'm pretty clear on that one.
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