Epicycles were brilliant math, as description, while the crystalline spheres were lousy physics, as explanation.

I think the most immediate problem with modern physics is how it treats time.

We are mobile organisms, which necessitates this sequential process of perception, in order to navigate, so our experience of time is as the point of the present moving past to future. Physics codifies it as measures of duration.

The reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events rise and fall.

There is no literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

Energy is conserved, because it is the present. It creates time, as well as temperature, pressure, color and sound. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.

Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, which are as foundational to our emotions and bodily functions, as the sequence of time is to our thought process.

As the present, the energy goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past. Energy drives the wave, while the fluctuations rise and fall.

So energy and ANY information derived from it go opposite directions of time.

Consciousness goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it definition and structure go future to past. Though it's the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy, while the central nervous system sorts the information. Consequently there is an intellectual tendency to focus on the patterns, rather than the processes generating them. Math over physics.

As for religion; To culture, good and bad are some cosmic dual between the forces of righteousness and evil, while in nature, it's the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental, the 1/0 of sentience. It is just that the community has to function as an organism in the larger ecosystem, the hive mind, writ large. So it has to synchronize.

The two basic dynamics are synchronization, which is centripetal, versus harmonization, which is centrifugal. Nodes and networks, organisms and ecosystems, particles and fields.

Galaxies are energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in. The excess gravity is centripetal effects across the entire spectrum.