Theism vs. Atheism

Religion and the concept of God are inextricably linked. This is where the concept of God originated. If you are going to denounce religion as false then you are also denouncing your own beliefs, since this is where the idea of God came from. If they were just making it up, then you are just believing their story, because you like it, you just don't like the way it was told. It's possible of course that this claim of religion could coincidentally be true, but this is really a giant leap, to imagine that religion itself could be nonsense yet this one absolutely shocking statement they made just happened to be true. They just stumbled upon an incredible and seemingly impossible to guess truth? It seems incredibly implausible to me. Either there is a God, and he revealed himself to us via religion, or there is no God and religion is a bunch of hogwash. But how can religion be a bunch of hogwash, yet there actually is a God? It's incredibly illogical to imagine that is the case. What evidence do I have that God does not exist? I have exactly the same amount of evidence there is that he does exist. None. You cannot prove that something does not exist, not without first achieving omniscience. Luckily my task is not to prove that God does not exist, but to answer whether or not atheism is more in line with the search for truth and knowledge than theism. Since atheism is a critical analysis of the world in which we live based upon skeptically verifying claims and theism is a bunch of delusional nonsense & recycled fairy tales it is obvious which is a search for truth and which is not. Your conception of God as a 'gaia-esque' creature is beautiful, to be sure. But if any complex system must have consciousness, then why not my washing machine or my computer? Why not any system at all? Aren't the electrons racing back and forth in an eraser an example of a bunch of signals resulting in consciousness by the same logic that drives your wild speculation? There is nothing wrong with speculation, if you are a science fiction author, but the search for truth demands the application of cold hard reason not flights of fancy that would make Asimov proud. Indeed the whole thing seems to be copped from an Asimov short story where they linked every computer in all the various worlds together (a whole bunch of signals resulting in consciousness) to ask it "is there a God?". The machine replied "there is now". I am not a believer in science. Personally I think that people of our age will be found to be as wrong as those who believed that your health was determined by the ratio of bile to other humours in the body or those who believed in the phlogiston theory of combustion. Science evolves and new theories replace old ones (usually against the bitter protests of everyone who is emotionally and intellectually invested in the old theory). Kuhn's work on this is critical. Yet while science cannot explain everything perfectly, it is very much in line with the search for truth and knowledge because it does not simply make an assertion, or speculate wildly. It tests via experimentation. It is critical of it's own theories. In a sense science is a religion, some if it's basic axioms cannot be tested. But this is only a very vague similarity; when it comes to the search for truth science has self correcting mechanisms in order to ensure it more accurately describes reality whereas religion, spirituality, theism, whatever you want to call that hodgepodge of emotional appeals and boogiemen concepts that constitutes a belief in God does not. Theism is simply an unproven assertion about the world, it's an appeal to authority and nothing more.