They don't feel cozy without him.

They need someone to put them in their place, someone to fear if they leave home at 18, and because they feel they cannot make it on their own without a 'holy' ghost to lead them.

Some people are raised that way and never question their beliefs. Others, whether raised with beliefs or not, decide that God or Something Bigger Than Me exists, for any number of reasons, ranging from the need to have a defined belief system, to having experienced personal transformation or having discerned that something "beyond" is present.

Well, I'm going to focus more on the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic / Abrahamic Yahweh God primarily, mostly because I just know more about them, and I can't speak much to other faiths (I know a little, but not enough to judge anything but the having the feeling of "faith"). Why do they "make" God? I think it's revealing (almost, divine revelation! hehe) that they believe that God created humans in his image. I think that sort of answers your question. Deep down, we know we're a mostly hairless species of great ape, not entirely different from most mammals, and not possessing any qualities that we can't find elsewhere in the animal kingdom - our difference from other species is more a matter of degree than quality. Humans invent their gods, and their afterlife fantasies, out of vanity. We HAVE to believe that we're significant. Powerful divine entities, or THE one omnipotent God, basically created the whole Universe, with its trillions of galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars, just for humans. For some reason, God values what we value - food and sex, and hence nearly every religious tradition describes God being very concerned with the eating and sexual habits of our quaint little species. After all, God never mentions anything other than condoning awful things like genocide and slavery, but "a man should not lay with another man the way he lays with a woman", or some rot like that. God gives us a sense of significance - we're what it's all about. Most humans are desperately afraid to face the fact that we're mostly nothing all too special. We also want to live forever. We know we will die, and it (no pun) kills us to know that. Without believing we will persist in some form, we face an existentialist void that many can't accept - that everything we were turns to dust, and eventually is forgotten. But finally, and to be fair to believers in pre-Darwin times, before anyone came up with the beautiful, elegant idea of natural selection driving evolution, and we learned the true age of Earth, I think God and his creation of life and all species, with their sophisticated structures, was the best theory in town. Intelligent design was the ONLY theory, because no one had thought of any other way that nature, which generally seems to tend toward falling apart and entropy, could have these unconscious self-organizing principles at work given a variable population of self-replicants undergoing selective pressure over many successive generations. But now that we have a better theory, we're back to the basics - humans want to be important, are desperate for it. They desperately create and believe in their gods because, the more and better we look at the Universe, the more it screams out that we're insignificant and that it doesn't know or care about our hopes and dreams. We live on planet in a reasonably average solar system in an insigificant region of our insigificant galaxy that has hundreds of billions of other stars, many with planets, in an insignificant galactic cluster in an insignificant galactic supercluster. Most of the Universe is empty space. Of the matter within it, our own matter (atomic matter) constitutes only about 5%, with the rest being weird dark matter and dark energy. Even within us - we're composed of atoms that are mostly empty space as well. Our Universe, according to some theories, may not be unique either - there may be an infinite number of them, and 10 to the 500th power different possible sets of laws of physics if string theory is about right. Maybe the only sort of rare and special thing about us, which probably makes Earth rare for having intelligent, complex life, is that big collision early in Earth's history that created our Moon. But that's hardly something to need God to justify. Statistics more than covers that, given the scale of the Universe.