Is that if God wants you to believe in him, he would just show up. Why play hide and seek?
True that. The greatest evidence speaking against the existence of a divine being is you can't see it. One factor speaking against the existence of any divine being is the many purported versions. Forget about the "issue" of what is the "one true religion". If there really was a god, it'd be so obvious by now, with all the marvels of the advances in science; there would be no question of its existence and of what version it took form. So, by the very factor that there's a Roman Catholic god, a Muslim god, a very many Hindu and Native American Indian gods, and god knows how many other gods, speaks tremendously against the existence of
any god, much less which version is correct.
Carl Sagan painted a wonderful illustration of why atheism is the correct stance. If it was said that there is a dragon in your garage, but one which is invisible, rendering ineffective your ability to see it; which is also floating, rendering ineffective your ability to track it; which, while fire-breathing, is heatless, rendering ineffective your ability to sense it; essentially that if at every point and turn, the dragon was outside the realm of detection...
"What's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder."—
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan
That perfectly describes the god quandary. The greatest argument put forth by theists for the existence of god is "You can neither prove nor disprove" the existence of god. They unwittingly admit their god doesn't exist. Atheists win by default. If you cannot conceivably be proven wrong, you will lose arguments every time (at least logically. God will win the emotional victory on any given day).
The idea of god [was] created by men trying to control soceity.
This, I must disagree.
The conception of a god arose to answer three things: 1) To answer for the uncertainties of the cosmos; god is in the gaps, so to speak; anything which cannot yet be explained by science is automatically attributed to god; as knowledge has expanded over the centuries, god has shrunk; it used to be "magical" and an "act of god" how when people had sex that the woman's belly stretched and nine months later gave birth, but now we know how the mechanical process works; 2) To answer for the visciousness of the universe; lightning, hurricanes, volcanoes, famine, snowstorms—"surely" those were acts from a divine being, one to be praised, prayed, worshipped, for safe harbor and nutrition; 3) To cope with the viscious human life cycle and the knowledge of impending death.
It's also evolutionary. We are pattern-seeking creatures, trying to find patterns in everything. For 250,000 years superstitious beliefs held a monopoly over thought and, comparatively speaking, if all that time was compressed into a single day, it was not until a blink of an eye a second ago that science arose and became a viable option. Belief in a god is an entirely emotional affair, deeply rooted in hundred of thousands of years of relying on it to ease our curiousities and fears, and that is something which is not easily erased by the very late entry of rational thought.
There is no longer a need for god. The conventional wisdom that society needs religion in order to keep order is patently false. Apparently, sometimes conventional wisdom is dumb.
