That man created God

I intend to demonstrate that in the beginning, god did not create man but instead, man created gods, a lot of them. To do so I will review some of the common claims made by the believers who argue that a god exists. Then, I will focus on Christianity and demonstrate that the character of god as described in the scripture is the mirror image of  human shortcomings rather than a perfect being. I will also demonstrate that the content of the Christian scriptures contain falsehoods, many of them.

Before I start, it is worth making the point that even if you could demonstrate that it is certain that a god exists, it still does not prove that he created man. The burden of proof lays with whoever makes a positive claim. The claim that god created man needs to be substantiated.

The first and surprisingly weakest argument often put forward to support the claim that a god exists is the "argumentum ad populum", which basically says: "there are billions of people who believe in god, how could they all be wrong?"The answer is simple: they could all be wrong by all being wrong. In fact, using simple logic and commonsense it is possible to demonstrate that a large number of people in the world today are totally wrong and are believing in a man-made religion. 

The split between religious populations is roughly Christianity 2.3 billions followers, Islam 1.7 billion, Hinduism 1.1 billion, Buddhism 500 millions, Shintoism 105 millions, Daoism 95 million, Sikhism 30 millions, Judaism 14 millions, Muism 10 millions and Cao Dai 7 millions. Only one of all the contradicting religions can be true. This means that in the worst case scenario, the Muism followers are right and at least 5 billion people around the world spend their time believing in nonsense. If Islam is true, it leaves 2.3 billion Christians hanging, and so on...

The next and very popular argument is the creator argument. It is entirely self-refuting. It goes like this: something cannot come from nothing therefore there had to be a creator who created the earth, man, and everything around. However, if something cannot come from nothing, then the creator was created by another creator, leading to an infinite regression. In order to sustain the creator argument, special rules have to be granted to the creator. For example, that the creator has special powers and case exist out of time. If that's the case, then the world itself can be granted special powers and create itself in a "self-ignition" process. There is no need for a creator.

Another common argument for the existence of god is the personal experience. "I felt him" say believers. "I don't need any proof because he touches me every day" is another typical comment. This experience takes place exclusively within their brain, an organ that has been demonstrated by science to be extremely unreliable. In fact, to some schizophrenics, the voices they hear are real when in fact we know that they are just experiencing auditory hallucination. 

A combination of psychology and neurology has demonstrated that the brain is wired to believe at all cost. it needs to resolve observed patterns through mental shortcuts. Countless experiments have been conducted to demonstrate that humans often believe in something that is not true or real. 

Research indicates that this need to believe is a product of our evolution. We have evolved as pattern-seeking mammals who thousands of years ago could hear a suspicious noise and either believe that it was a dangerous predator or that it was instead the wind in the trees. Those who believed that it was a predator and were wrong (false positive) did not suffer any bad consequence. Those who believed that it was the wind and were wrong (false negative) became lunch and were taken out of the gene pool before reproducing. This natural selection has led to the people alive today who are very much prone to believing in something, anything. They believe in god, astrology, prayers, miracles, psychics and everything else in between that has never had a shred of reliable evidence to support it.

Miracles

This leads us to another common claim that attempts to prove that a god exists through "miracles". Miracles are a fantasy, they simply do not exist and there has never been a single instance of proved miracle occurring at any time and anywhere in the world. To me, a miracle is when I find an extra $50,000 in my bank account and the totally unexplained transaction reads: "From God with love". It is not when low-probability event such as a crash victim survives unscathed what looked to be a fatal crash. 

An event that is extremely unlikely to occur is not a miracle because it is fully explained by physics. If there exists a powerful god who wants to prove beyond any doubt that he can perform miracles, he would have made the severed limb of an amputee regrow during a church service. Such an event would go a long way towards proving miracles, but it has never happened. The "miracles" put forward by religion are either claims that have no witness and no proof or low-probably events that could happen naturally without divine intervention.

Predictions

Often, predictions are used to grant divine status to whoever makes them. For example, much exposure has been devoted to the so-called predictions of the bible. If a book makes 100 predictions and 1 appears to be true through convoluted rationalisation, can the book be deemed to be divinely inspired? Surely, if god makes predictions, they would all be clear and obvious and true. They would certainly not require human interpretations to fit reality. I can predict right now that "when the sky turns orange, a man in the mountain will discover the truth" and sit for any number of years until somebody identifies with the prediction and says it is true. The predictions in holy books are complete nonsense. They are certainly not befitting of a god. They are more often wrong than right, just like the predictions of humans would be.

Prayers

Prayers are also extensively quoted as proof that not only god exists but he can intervene in the real world. Christians are particularly big on prayers except they contradict themselves. One one hand they say that god has a plan for each of us and on the other hand they suggest that somehow god will drop his plan to fulfill their prayers. 

Whenever prayers have been scientifically studied, they have failed to prove any connection between prayers and outcomes. Prayers can bring benefits to the people praying by making them feel better but they certainly do not have any effect on changing any outcome. The reason why people think that prayers work is because of the Confirmation Bias, a phenomenon well-explained by psychology. People will remember all the prayers that appear to have been answered and they forget all the prayers that have resulted in a negative outcome. This leads to a distorted sense of success.

Falsehood abounds

If the Bible is the word of god and god exists as a powerful and perfect being, then the stories contained within the scriptures should all be true. Unfortunately, the Bible is riddled with falsehood, from the creation story in Genesis to completely stupid stories such as Noah's Ark, disproved at every conceivable level by science and commonsense. It is possible to categorically state today that the story of Noah as described in the Bible could not have happened. 

Also, I am also sure that nobody today believes that the earth is flat as claimed in the Bible. Only humans would have believe in ancient times that the earth is flat. A god who created the earth would have known that it is round, it is not immovable (Psalm 96:10) and does not have foundations (Psalm 104:5).
The Bible does not have a monopoly on falsewhood. The Qu'ran stands out as its main competitor. For example the claim that the earth was created before the sun and other star. However, the biggest lie in the Qu'ran is the claim that the Prophet Muhammad was the greatest man to ever live. He was a warlord who conquered, pillaged, raped and murdered at will. He treated captives as slaves, stoned women to death, had sex with children, taught that women who do not believe can be raped and he went as far as having a poetress killed because he did not like her poetry. Greatest man ever perhaps according to mentally ill goat-herders.

The Christian God

In his book "The God Delusion", Richard Dawkins famously describes the christian god:

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

In his works, Dawkins substantiates each of the claims he makes about god. God appears to have a character that is just like a bad human being. Such a character would be consistent with the invention of men rather than a divine being.

There is a mountain of evidence suggesting that the Christian scriptures were inspired from other religions. The story of the Garden of Eden comes from the Persian scriptures of the Zoroastrians, the story of the great flood comes from the story of Utnapishtim, found in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the book of proverbs is heavily influenced by the Egyptian Instruction of Amenemope, the chapter of creation and book of Isaiah in the Old Testament come from the sacred texts of the Zoroastrians, the concept of angels and demons were taken from the Zoroastrians too as was Satan and the forces of good against evil and much more. Heaven and Hell also come from Zoroastrianism and the Trinity was influenced by pagan mythology. Even the Ten Commandments come from chapter 125 of the Egyptian Book of the Dead (around 2600 B.C.). 

Some of today's prominent historians have published research suggesting that there is only a 30% chance of Jesus having existed. By using computer analysis of ancient texts, they have been able to map out exactly how the bible was written and by whom. They have revelead consistent patterns of authors "borrowing" from other authors. Is this consistent with scriptures coming from god or is it consistent with amateurish ancient pseudo-intellectuals plagiarising content from wherever they could find it?

Perhaps the most damming piece of evidence against the creation of man by god is evolution. Evolution destroys any suggestion that man was created by anyone. We know with certainty that man evolved from an ancestor common to ourselves and chimpanzees. Our ancestor descended from more primitive forms of primates. The evolution of man from its ancestor has been demonstrated by several fields of science.

If god existed and had indeed created man, we would have all humans agreeing with a single religion, all predictions and miracles would be irrefutable and the scriptures would contain god-like wisdom instead of the nit-picking nasty human-like garbage that pollute its pages. There would be no disagreement about anything, no arguing about translations and interpretation and certainly the revelations from god would have taken place in public rather than in isolated places with no witnesses and delivered to illiterate messengers.