It’s enormously easier (as it turns out) to write a computer program that simulates Maxwell’s equations, compared to a computer program that simulates an intelligent emotional mind like Thor.
Here's why the seemingly simple god hypothesis is a massively complex explanation. Imagine some Norsemen see a sudden flash of lightning jump from the clouds and kill a group of people on a nearby hill. They might conclude that some invisible superintelligence in the sky was angry with the dead men, and hurled a bolt of lightning at them to avenge his anger. On its surface, that seems much more straightforward to grasp than explaining all the math needed to calculate Maxwell's equations and explain the lightning by the real physics underlying it. But that's not so.
