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...there is no evidence for their existence.

More than that, we can explain why people once believed in them. There was once great ignorance about how the natural world worked and humans were at the mercy of frightening natural events such as lightning, earthquakes or rainstorms.

Naturally, they looked for explanations in terms that they could understand and imagined supernatural beings (in many respects like super-humans) who were responsible for the apparently meaningless events in the natural world and who could sometimes be appeased.

Of course, some gods of the ancient world are still worshipped today, such as the divinities of Hinduism, or Yahweh – the god of Judaism – and there are newer gods too, such as the gods of Christianity and of Islam. Some people believe in ‘a god’ but not the god of any particular religion; others say that all religions worship the same god but in different ways.

Humanists apply the same tests to the claims made for the existence of all these gods of today as to the gods of the past and, for that matter, to the existence of anything else. What is the evidence?