Human imagination made the Greek gods and goddesses.
The gods and goddesses that the Greeks created had all the fallacies of their human creators.
It has been a LONG time since I studied Greek mythology, so perhaps I shouldn’t opine. But I will anyway, and agree with you in part and dispute in part.
It has to be accepted that human imagination made the Greek gods and goddesses, but it was almost a compelled imagination. Their deities typically represented things that were true, at least to some degree. One might attribute that to the fact that humans have a perception of the natural law even in the absence of Revelation.
So, for example, “hubris” brought the wrath of the “erynis”. Humans could not overstep their natural entitlements without paying a severe price for doing so. In like manner, Providence, as conceived by Christians, cannot be “forced” by one’s will or actions, and the attempt to do so brings ruin. Shakespeare melded Greek tragedy principles and Christian principles in plays like “MacBeth” for example. The difference being that even MacBeth is not inexorably the pawn of “Ate” (fate), but could have changed it by true penitence, as offered to him at the last by MacDuff. That alternative, Christian in source, is not, however, available to Achilleus, whose “Ate” proceeds inexorably from his fatal overstepping of bounds set by “the gods”. That difference has naturally led scholars to query whether true “tragedy” in the Greek sense, is even possible in a Christian view of things.
Intriguingly, one of Apollo’s epithets is “Smintheus”, which means “mouse”. Apollo was the healer, but also the bringer of pestilence. So, another “truth before its time” the Greeks perceived a relationship between rodents and disease.
Greek mythology was multi-level, and studying it is like peeling an onion. Zeus of the Iliad, for instance, is sometimes nothing but a thug. Sometimes he is the ultimate deity; the source of all justice and of all creation. Sometimes Ares (Mars to the Romans) is hardly more than a powerful man, but sometimes he is an abstract principle, and hardly a being at all. Scholars have debated whether the more sophisticated view of gods and goddesses we find in even very old sources was an adaptation of older legends of a more primitive people, or whether those of better mind simply tolerated and accepted the highly anthropomorpic “versions” of the deities that lie on the surface of the myths, rather like Shakespeare propounded very profound human truths, but also provided ribald action for the unsophisticated “groundlings”.
It is intriguing that Christianity found little early acceptance among the Jews, but spread like wildfire among the Greeks. Was it because the Greeks no longer believed in Zeus and Hera, or was it something deeper? Was it perhaps that the sophisticated Greeks, who had, in their philosophical ruminations, long sought the “logos”, the principle that would explain how those things they perceived through rational inquiry and study was relevant to some ultimate Truth; a first century “Theory of Everything”, suddenly realized that the union of God and man in the person of Jesus was, indeed, the “logos”? I have long been intrigued by those words in the “Dies Irae”: “…testae David cum Sybila…” Some one or more of the Sybils had seemed to foretell the coming of Jesus. Indeed, Michaelangelo portrayed two of the Sybils on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
So, perhaps it could be rightly said that while the gods and goddesses of the Greeks were human inventions and had human traits, they also represented understandings of truths that went beyond the surface meaning of the myths. But, having no Revelation, the Greeks were, until Christianity, more or less “stuck” with those (perhaps more ancient) personifications.
