Worldwide, some 16% of people do not believe a god exists. Only ten years ago that was 10%. That percentage is steadily increasing. Permit me as one of the nonbelievers to offer some reasons why.

Essentially everything humans value is tangible. You can see it, you can smell it, you can touch it, you can feel it, you can hear it, you can physically engage with it. Atoms have been seen with incredible microscopes. Only religion is invisible, housed deep inside the mind of humans.

The human mind’s intellectual concept of gods first emerged maybe 5,000 to 10,000 years ago, probably in Egypt. People lived in a hot unforgiving desert. Many were goat and camel herders. Some grew handfuls of vegetables, figs, dates. Others were camel-travelling merchants.

Physics was unknown. People were ignorant of what constituted tangible reality. They began to wonder: how had life come into being? Finally in fictional literature people imagined invisible gods living in some indefinable place out in space among the stars.

This man-made creative idea captivated our imaginations. It helped explain a lot of mysteries: it gave an answer to where did we all come from? Why were we even here? Where were we headed? No other immediate answers existed. Why not believe in gods?

We’d already been around a couple of million years. So, only in late years of existence did we finally develop the intellectual capacity to conceive of our belief in gods. Many potential gods evolved in our minds to the idea of one single god.

Jews accepted this idea, Christianity the same. And Islam. They just didn’t all agree with one another on details. They’ve been arguing and fighting about it ever since. The god idea still guides most of our politics and wars.

And the idea over 2,000 or more years stopped being an idea. Instead, the human mind started thinking of god as unquestionably real. Until some highly skeptical thinkers started thinking about it.

Until today, it is becoming clear to increasing numbers of people that, factually considered, god is a humanly-created concept rather than indisputable reality. Nonbelievers are growing. The faithful are anxious.

The human struggle now is whether our fate is to be decided by ever-evolving, tangibly-supported Universal facts or by faith in a concept that may be simply untrue. That struggle today, as has always been the case, still inspires the bloodiest carnages known.