In the beginning man created God. The question that of course preoccupies agnostic or atheist thinkers is for what object? What made it necessary to create God? 
I was raised and brought up in the law, so that when I examine the problem, I take a lawyer’s approach.  The law works happily with fictions.  It cannot deal with plain reality alone, just as it is.  To do justice and get the results that plain reality sometimes precludes, the law invents a fiction, which is a lie, and artificially turns it into truth.  Concerning God, the fiction goes thus: God is to be regarded as though he created man.  The fiction of Torah is that it is regarded as law given by God.  
The nature of a legal fiction is that what we postulate --- the ‘as though’ --- becomes the truth. Thus, a child born of a married woman is regarded ‘as though’ he were the son of her husband.  The truth is that this child is not the son of her husband but a bastard. But the legal fiction, which in many legal systems is not open to refutation or disproof, is that, whatever the truth, the child is regarded ‘as though’ legitimate.  And what is the reason for that? Why does the law have to make of a lie the truth? Very simple --- the good of the child comes before everything else. That legitimate ethical objective can be reached only through the use of a fiction, through a truth which is in fact a lie.

God Was Needed to Make Man Obey the Law
The legal fiction concerning God filled a very important function ---- to make people obey the law.  If primitive peoples had given themselves laws without saying that there were gods in the heavens keeping a watchful eye on them, no law would have had any force.  Had Moses handed down the law on his own authority, he would have been laughed to scorn.  The story of the golden calf attests that the people did not believe the legal fiction and demanded tangible proof. A fiction invented for a purpose does not depend for its life-span on its success.  A great many people believe --- more then than now --- that God rewards the good and punishes the wicked, and that every sinner against Him will be punished, if not in this world then in the next.  Hence the necessity of the fiction that God exists and will execute judgement.
Some people have argued that all legal fictions were created for moral objectives only --- justice as the embodiment of morality.  There is no legal fiction, at least not in modern law, with a purpose other than moral.  The Romans had an expression for it: Pro veritate habitum --- the lie in the fiction shall be deemed the truth.  If by applying the law I do a wrong and could do justice through the use of a fiction, then I am in favor of the use of fictions. 
Moral justification can also be found for the fiction of God as lawmaker or creator of the world.  Firstly, obedience to the law is obviously morally positive in itself.  We cannot exist without obedience to the law.  Secondly, man has to follow moral rules and what does it matter whether they are attributed to God or are man-invented. Attributing them to God gives moral rules a far greater chance of being accepted and of taking root.  This is the reason the moral component of Jewish religious law is so large, as it also is in Christianity and Islam.  Religion is also a fiction. When I say that the world is regarded as the creation of God, or that Torah is regarded as given by God, I turn religion into truth.  No man has come closer to that conception than Spinoza.  He stated that Moses attributed the laws he himself had written to a Divine Lawmaker, knowing that only He possessed the moral or political authority to compel the people to obedience.

If God Desires Evil, What Kind of God Is He?
Every man is responsible for himself. He has his conscience to point him to the path he should take (in Hebrew the word for ‘conscience’ and for ‘compass’ are made on the same root). If we do not trust man and his conscience and want to have him follow a path chosen ‘above’, we are lucky to have the Divine Fiction to lay down morality and to free man from the responsibility of devising his own.  Yet, to say that we need God to make us moral is to detract from our dignity. Cannot man determine his own moral values? Is he so lacking in morality that he cannot lay down rules of behavior for himself? 
The Greek philosopher Epicurus said: If there is evil in the world and God cannot prevent it, then God is not all-powerful. If there is evil in the world and God could prevent it but does not, then God wants evil to be there.  If God desires evil, what kind of god is He?
 It is impossible to understand the evil in the world if one assumes that there is a God.  It is impossible to understand a God who watches over Israel, neither slumbering nor sleeping, and who falls asleep and abandons Israel in its hour of need.
Spinoza was able to see God even in evil. I think that evil is a human quality.  Precisely because evil is so human a quality and  because God cannot put a stop to it, it proves He is not part of our reality.
The Holocaust proves nothing regarding the reality or non-reality of God.  Personally, it convinced me that I was right to doubt.  I cannot understand that the God we pray to, the God we have been taught is compassionate and merciful, just and true, whose justice is  everlasting, could permit such evil to happen under his watchful eye.  If there is such a God, I am not prepared to pray to Him or worship Him.
 
All ‘Proofs’ of the Existence of God Have Been Refuted
God is an individual matter. Every man pictures or creates his own idea of God.  Personally I think that good classical music is God and that pop music is garbage. Another man will believe exactly the opposite. Each man to his own taste, conscience, opinions, and thoughts.
Many philosophers, in all periods of history, have tried to prove the existence of God.  All the proofs have been refuted.  Regarding the non-existence of God, no one so far has presumed to have proved that He does not exist.  For us it is simply beside the point.  We do not have the gall, nor do we assume the authority, to decide there is no God in the world.  We simply have no belief in his existence.  The times are long gone when we had to make the effort to refute the ‘proofs’ of God’s existence.  Today we can accept that a lie is a lie and know that an illusion is an illusion, with understanding for the motives and reasons which led to its devising.  As a jurist, I say: I believe what my eyes see and my ears hear.  The burden of the proof of God’s existence rests with those who believe in Him. 
There is much divinity in the world.  Nature is divine, beauty is divine, woman is divine; there is a divine spark in every man.  Which does not mean, of course, that up in the skies there is some being who created the world and is compassionate and merciful or fanatic and vengeful. Our concept of God is an ideal one: it is not physical at all, not even meta-physical.
There are people who believe in God and even preach that belief, but who in practice are as full of doubts as we are.  There are people who cannot live with doubt. They find a safe harbor in the world of religion: everything is ordered and ready-prepared --- the table is laid and to every question there is an answer.

Apikoiros: Epicurus, the First to Disbelieve
Jewish Sages called the first secular Jew an apikoiros, the Hebrew rendering of Epicurus. They chose the ancient Greek philosopher as the prototype of the disbelieving secular Jew and they were right, but for the wrong reasons.  The Greek philosopher has secured his place in the history of philosophy as the great advocate of pleasure, even though the pleasures he had in mind were spiritual rather than fleshly. True pleasure, he believed, comes to man through what his eyes see, his ears hea, his senses sense, his intelligence understands.  This is what can and will pave the way to constant pleasure and mental peace.  Or to put it in negative terms: Epicurean pleasure is in absence of pain and disability,  in immunity to hypocrisy and self-righteousness, superstition and self-delusion.
 The scientific study of nature and Epicurean philosophical thinking have the capacity to free man from the fear of God, a fear which, to Epicurus’ mind, is the source of all evil. Absolute truth is not to be attained since everything is dependent upon what our senses can sense and our intellect can grasp, and there is no reason to believe that our senses are all-sensing and our intellect all-grasping.
Epicurus was also the first to develop a nuclear theory of the formation of the world and to repudiate the stories of creation by  God or gods.  It was his opinion that man will not attain pleasure if he has not first ensured that his fellow-man can also do so.  Doors must be opened to whoever wants to explore into the depths of things. When the gates of heaven open, every man shall decide for himself the path best suited to him, the best path to explore to seek his own goal.
It is perhaps because Greek philosophy was no longer part of the Jewish Sages’ conceptual world, or perhaps for some other reason, that they wanted to bring Epicurus closer to their own language and turned his name into Aramaic, parsing it as though it derived from the Aramaic-Hebrew root p-k-r meaning ‘to abandon’, ‘to desert’;  as though his way was the way of those who abandon the Torah and its students or who desert the obligations of  its commandments.  For whoever abandons Torah also abandons its commandments.  And this is precisely what the apikoiros does. Yet, to my understanding,  there is nothing in that term --- in Hebrew or in Aramaic --- to detract from the right of a present-day apikoiros to make direct contact with the ancient Greek philosopher and his Torah [Torah means ‘teaching’] ---- he or she will find only enlightenment there. 
It is this torah which lights us [humanists] our path. A torah not only of mutual tolerance, of aspiration to peace between men and equality of rights, but also of man’s liberation from mystical and supernatural fears, of his standing strong in his own strength and self-confident in his capacity for freedom.