they have to. science keeps painting ‘god’ into a smaller and smaller corner every day.

I feel like I know who you're quoting, and I remember encountering: https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-debate-hawkings-idea-that-the-universe-had-no-beginning-20190606/
to quote the part that appeals to me:

In their 2017 paper (opens a new tab), published in Physical Review Letters, Turok and his co-authors approached Hartle and Hawking’s no-boundary proposal with new mathematical techniques that, in their view, make its predictions much more concrete than before. “We discovered that it just failed miserably,” Turok said. “It was just not possible quantum mechanically for a universe to start in the way they imagined.” The trio checked their math and queried their underlying assumptions before going public, but “unfortunately,” Turok said, “it just seemed to be inescapable that the Hartle-Hawking proposal was a disaster.”

idk, it seems to have described so much about the universe with so few input. And can just study itself like in "Gödel's incompleteness theorems" to give constraints on what you aspire to achieve with it. I'd call math/logic/reason fairly strong by themselves.