Almut Hintze researching Zoroastrianism concluded that the Gathas imagined our universe as the body of a living god, infected with evil [summary here]. There's a lot of that in modern "environmentalism".
Gnostic Christianity believed that this universe is a Created Prison. Catholicism dresses it up better but, at base, agrees.
Atheists assume that our universe has no purpose, or (if you're a Lovecraftian) that we shouldn't follow whatever purpose the gods have laid out for it. So atheists don't care how we all came into being - with one exception.
The secular-humanists, with whom I hung out in the late 1990s, are an optimistic bunch. Humanists assume we inhabit an amniotic spacetime. That Seth MacFarlane joke about the pre-whisky Irish, riffing on "converting our bodies to pure energy"? An actual humanist thing.
Those atheists who aren't humanist, deep down, don't really think that the gods never existed. They suspect that the gods were here, once upon a time; but that they have abandoned us since.
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