If it were that self-apparent, wouldn't we expect Kant, Kierkegaard, Anselm, Anscombe, Heidegger, Gödel, or the countless other philosophers and heavy thinkers of the past several centuries to have not even wrestled with the question?
Heck, even Antony Flew, a contemporary philosopher of religion who was a staunch advocate of atheism for much of his career, later declared himself a theist. Did he simply fail to realize that it's pretty obvious that religion is make-believe?
What do you know that they didn't? What did they know that you might not?
First, the "God of the gaps" has basically disappeared. All natural phenomena in our personal experience are understood well enough that we can say with confidence that nothing supernatural is required to explain them. That doesn't mean that every individual understands them well enough, and while it's not a hard binary distinction, there is certainly a correlation between spirituality / belief in the supernatural and lack of understanding of natural science.
Second, religion is to a large extent social glue. As humans increasingly live in large cities, social glue in general is disappearing, and religion is just one facet of that.
I've heard both theists and atheists express similar feelings about the implications of physicalism (I think that's the term, but I'm not a philosopher), but I've never understood why in anything other than an abstract sense. I can understand why someone would be concerned by things ending so finally, but it's not like you'll be around afterward to feel bad about it. If anything I find it very comforting.
I can understand wanting to be around for other people, but afaik there are plenty of religions where people aren't able to intervene after death and I don't hear the same concerns about those.
Supposedly secular western people invoke the same basic concept. For example, they talk about things like "human dignity": https://www.humanrightscareers.com/issues/definitions-what-i... ("At its most basic, the concept of human dignity is the belief that all people hold a special value that’s tied solely to their humanity."). That papers over God as the source of "human dignity" but it's expressing the same basic belief. That assertion makes no logical sense if you abandon the underlying metaphysical notion and posit that humans are actually just meat.
Abstract concepts, even ones considered materially 'incomprehensible' like love, or ones considered materially inconsistent or impossible like taking the square root of a circle, are names - very long, patterned symbol sequences condensed from salient features of the far more complex structures they reflect, objects that would be otherwise inconvenient to discuss or contemplate on human time scales and within human constraints. Abstract information, any information, is the result of an energetic compromise necessary for our relatively insubstantial chunk of brain tissue to be able to play-manipulate objects far greater in scale, scope and remoteness then it physically could interact with. But it is still physically manipulating them, or rather the lightest of lightweight representations of them, at the mechnical, physical matrix of neurological energy exchange processes.
What came before the big bang? And why does it seem that all matter came from one location in space? Seems to break the second law of Thermodynamics even. We don't know. Will you put your faith in the idea that the system of science CAN EVEN know eventually?
Can set theory prove everything? We know that it cannot prove a number of things, thanks Turing. Those things end up being pretty important to proving everything evidently. Science rests on mathematics.
Why should you believe in a particular philosopher's revealed truth? Well it seems consistent with the rules of logic. Seeing as set theory is the most concrete, repeatable form of logic we've ever come up with, see the above for why thats maybe not the best stance to put your faith in.
Maybe believe in nothing? But you will believe in something, even by accident. The nature of human heart is to make idols.
All require leaps of faith at the bottom of them. Either in systems or individuals.
My two cents, before thinking about the Catholic Church or any Church's claims for that matter, form a relationship with Jesus/God. You seem like a pretty tuned in person, I feel that you will find your answers. If we are made in His image, and He gave his only Son up to be tortured and killed for us, there is no way your suffering goes unnoticed.
Without that relationship, every Church is just a bunch of rules to follow, and ya, that would really suck to be involved with. God bless you on your journey.
Philosophy - is backed by reasoned arguments and open to debate
Mathematics - is our construction, how can we not believe in our own invention
Religion - requires that you buy into an archaic fairy tale, with no empirical proof or reasoned argument, to the extent that you will sanction wars and oppressive gender inequality on the basis of unsubstantiated belief
...
One of these things is not like the others
This is actually an integral part of the Catholic intellectual tradition, which is why Catholic philosophy (see St Thomas Aquinas for example) can incorporate insights from pagans, Muslims and Jews. Hans Urs von Balthasar took inspiration from an even wider variety of thinkers. I could go on but hopefully I've made my point.
What the evidence shows is that we are meat, with sentience being an illusion of complex chemical reactions. What “rights” does meat have? Why can’t we, for example, kill drug dealers, if that would make life on earth—the only kind of life there is—better for all the other meat sacks? The Chinese communists at least practiced atheism correctly and followed it to its logical conclusions.
I think a more accurate characterization would be that European Christianity has evolved into a different religion which retains the notion of the divinity of the individual, but drops explicit references to God.