It's the chicken egg thing with a decidedly blasphemous twist: Did God create man or did man create God? One reason I cannot believe in the God formerly inculcated upon me is that I have discovered the conspicuously unmagical wizard behind the curtain. Which is to say once you understand the origin of God, you can pretty much eliminate him from your candidates for Godness.
And here's where God came from.
Long ago when mankind was in its earliest stages and was embarrassingly dumb by modern standards, there was such a thing as ignorance. He didn't know why summer turned gradually to winter, but when it did... warmth vaporized into horrific cold. Freezing temperatures not only reduced his comfort, but also brought a recess to the growth of crops... winter chased away whatever meat he might have hunted whether lost to migration or hybernation. And he didn't know why day turned to night, but when it did his vision was debilitated until dawn. The sun meant warmth and light and growth and food and health. The absence of the sun meant shivering and darkness and weakness and hunger and sickness and death.
I submit that the first worship in the history of our species was the worship of the sun. It was our irresistible inclination to anthropomorphize that gradually decorated our sun with attributes and traits such as ominscience and omnipotence and omnipresence and justice and wisdom and love and forbearance or in more austere capacities... the not-so-warm-and-fuzzy characteristics of vengeance and wrath and jealousy and damnation.
So while a number of skeptics dismiss any challenge to disprove God by blithely insisting it is up to the believer to provide evidence to support a positive claim, I have no such scruples. I don't have proof there is no God, but I have what I think is a reasonable theory of how belief in God developed. He is the very important orb at the center of our solar system around which our planet and several of her siblings revolve on a consistent basis. Take away several thousand years of imaginative embellishment and he has no more personality than... let's say... a mustard seed.
