The Egyptian-Greek-Roman notions of the cosmos and their related Judeo-Christian-Islamic religious traditions seem to have a much harder time accepting the scientific revelations of the depths of time and space than Buddhist and Hindu philosophies, which have vast notions of time (though perhaps not space) baked in, eg:

> "Imagine a great mountain of solid iron, one hundred leagues high and wide. If once every hundred years a man were to brush it lightly with a cloth, the mountain would be worn away before a kalpa ends. And yet many kalpas have already passed." (Buddhist Sutra description of a kalpa)

As secularism became more prevalent in Europe and America, some new voices appeared - eg, HP Lovecraft, one of the first writers to really dive into the consequences of the discovery of the immensity of time and space. It's likely difficult for people who've been taught their entire lives that they're the entire point of existence and the most significant element in a cosmic story, to have material scientific reality make such a mockery of that notion, and indeed many have thus fled from that 'deadly light' into what Lovecraft called 'the peace and safety of a new dark age.'