A baby who can barely form a sentence picks up god into her/his vocabulary. At an age when the child's critical faculties aren't fully developed, she/he is vulnerable to believe whatever is told. This is a well known and well exploited vulnerability..In India, we have a whole bunch of demons, monster and flying creatures that will abduct the child if she/he doesn't eat well, wander outside after dark, not listen to the parents or plays too much.

At some point in our lives, we stop believing in most of them largely because our parents/elders stop telling us about them thereby not further cementing our beliefs in them. God escapes this decision. We never stop hearing about god for almost all our lives. Out of all the heavenly beings, hellish winged and horned monsters, god gets business class privileges. We pray to him multiple times a day, thank him for the food the farmer produced, the successful surgery the doctor performed, the grades that we worked our asses off for and so on. God gets multi million dollar structures to his name. No one gets to question his authority. He also has mediators to dispense his word to the masses. Mediators who are paid by you but unlike you, can evade taxes .

My point is, had people stopped hearing about God the same time they stopped hearing about the Tooth fairy, the human society would have been quite different. The idea of a super intelligent creator wouldn't have advanced any further than the other bedtime stories.

The Norse believed that lightning was the outcome of Thor striking his hammer, The ancient Greeks credited that to Zeus throwing his bolt. Hindus have Indra, Shintos have Raijin, Baltics have Perkūnas.

Today, we all know better. Lightning is caused due to charges building up between ice particles within clouds that develops powerful electric fields and at a certain point of the build up, release energy in the form of heat and light. The heat expands the air around it explosively, compressing the air in front of it creating shockwaves. This is the explanation given when asked to explain lightning & thunder that even religious folks agree to without rebutting it by invoking any out of all the gods of lightning & thunder.

On topics like the origin of the universe, theories are plenty, but you can't bet all your money on any of them with the same confidence you have while explaining what causes lightning. If a big bang did happen, what was there before it? How exactly, did life originate on earth? These are questions to which we don't have definitive answers.

People have gone great lengths to explain how these events might have unfolded. The fact that there are gaps, leaves more room for investigation. Not necessarily a bad thing. What would be a bad thing is filling those gaps with super intelligent beings.

"God created everything" takes two seconds to say. If doctors and scientists settle for that, we wouldn't have a liveable world at hand considering what one pandemic could wreck. Invoking god as an answer to difficult questions is the easiest way to wash your hands of the burden of having to give an explanation. Unfortunately for the theologians, not everyone is trained to believe theories without evaluating reason. The problem with the god hypothesis is that since god can't be observed, his existence is neither verifiable nor falsifiable. But this shouldn't be a problem for the ones questioning it as the burden of proof lies on the one making the claim.

Quoting Bertrand Russell from his parable of the celestial teapot-

"Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is of course, a mistake. If i were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving around the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every sunday and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attention of the psychiatrist."

The fact that the existence or non existence of god can't be proved does not give both the arguments equal footing. One is clearly more likelier than the other.

I have an invisible Pegasus in my barn. You know that's bullshit, but how are you going to prove an invisible Pegasus doesn't exist? You don't. You just call out the bullshit. Its amazing how human beings can use their logical mind almost everywhere and voluntarily not use it when it suits them.

Monotheists and polytheists though they believe in a personal god who listens to and answers prayers pull a weird card out of nowhere when most other arguments fail, that there is some force or energy that can't be denied. What force? What energy?

There are four fundamental forces namely gravitational, electromagnetic, strong and weak nuclear forces. To name a few energies, there are heat, light and sound energies all of which are observable, kinetic energy is possessed by objects in motion , energy possessed by an object by virtue of its position in a field is called potential energy. None of these are outside the realm of physics.

To the ones who say, there are forces that can't be denied, hell yeah there are, but which of these forces or energies do you pray to? What sense does it make praying to gravitational force or potential energy?

"Who created the universe if not god?" is a frequently asked question, for something so complex as the universe cannot come into existence by chance. It doesn't have to be a "who" question. It is loaded with the assumption that the creator of the universe is a being with intelligence and intentions. That conclusion is reached by comparing the universe to something one knows for sure was designed by an intelligent being.

We've seen cars. We know they are made in huge factories. Cars are designed, produced and assembled by human beings. If we happen to come across a car that looks nothing like the ones we're familiar with, we still recognise the design and safely assume that like other cars, this one was designed by people too. Our references are other cars.

With the universe however, there is no reference. How many other universes are we aware of? None. Had we been aware of a few other universes that were created by intelligent designers, it then would've been safe to assume that our universe too was created by a similar one. But that's not the case, is it?

Even if we are to believe for a moment that the universe for all its complexities had to have a creator, then who created the creator is the next obvious question. The answer given for this is that God is not a created creator but an uncreated one. The problem with the claim that everything complex has to have a creator is that you set off an infinite regress:

"Something so complex can't come into existence by itself, so who created the universe?...A creator."

Well, Who created the Creator then? Another creator? Who created that creator?

God isn't immune to this regress just because a lot of people believe he didn't need to be created. If one can believe that something uncreated (God) can exist and always have existed, why not take a step back and believe that the universe didn't need creation and that it always existed by the same logic?

Another argument is that god is the source of morality. That the fact that humans have a sense of morality itself is the proof of god. True that the idea of god makes a lot of people do less evil, but its also true that the idea of god or the "true god" has caused countless wars, genocides and is the cause of ongoing oppression in several places.

In any case, had god been the source of morality, how did he pass the lessons of morality on to the people? "Through scriptures" it is claimed. So scriptures are the source of morality in the material world. Had that been the case, women across the world would be having a harder time than they already are. Almost all major religious scriptures consider women's primary role to be serving their husband's needs. Women are considered property of men. These texts that supposedly teach morality fail to recognize slavery as a problem. Homosexuality and Apostasy are unforgivable crimes.

While going through the scriptures, one can't help but notice that there are portions with questionable morals. If our source of morality truly were religious scriptures, we wouldn't have been capable of perceiving something within the same text as immoral.

To this, theologians and religious apologists say that these verses are often misinterpreted. Miracles are taken literally and doesn't lead to misinterpretation but the portions that make the text look bad are the only ones "misinterpreted". How convenient! If it was indeed the message of an omniscient being, he could've atleast abstained from speaking in riddles.

All these screw ups make religious scriptures seem like the works of fallible mortals. All that aside, if the reason for one to be kind & caring towards another being is in return of an entry ticket to paradise or to save oneself from damnation, then it beats the purpose of morality. What it then is would be a quid pro quo.

To protest the Kansas State board of education's decision to permit teaching intelligent design in public schools as an alternative to evolution, Bobby Henderson penned an open letter in which he demanded equal time dedicated to teaching the "Flying Spaghetti Monster" alongside Evolution and Intelligent design.

The FSM movement promotes a light hearted view on religion. The myth goes to say that an undetectable flying spaghetti monster created the universe after getting drunk. If it sounds stupid, that's exactly the point. Replace the spaghetti monster with god, chupacabra or lobsters, and the argument is equally feeble.

"But if god isn't real,why would a lot of people believe in him? They all can't be wrong."

To think of something to be true because a lot of other people does is a logical fallacy. The fact that a lot of people believe in god is not evidence for his existence. That's a point for a popularity contest. As far as "They all cant be wrong" goes, a lot of people where wrong about Thor, Zeus and Indra remember? A lot of people were wrong about the sun going around the earth. A lot of people were wrong about the earth being flat. A lot of people have been and can be wrong about a lot of things.

Shared myths and beliefs hold large numbers of people together from breaking the imagined codes of morality without which it would be difficult for huge masses to cooperate and maintain order or atleast get close to it.

Throughout the history of mankind, countless stories have been told. Some stories fade off, some are little known to us, some shape entire civilizations. God is one such story. Given time and a lot of people to believe in it, any story can ascend to the status of a Myth. But it'll always be important to take it for what it actually is..A Myth! We all believe in some and do away with others. That reminds me of a quote by Richard Dawkins-

"We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further".