re: Lay off everyone

"So much so in fact that it requires a 'many worlds' theory to account for the very existence of our planet. That taken into consideration, atheism and and belief in a higher power require approximately equal amounts of faith."

Not remotely. The odds for the existence of an Earthlike world are pretty good actually. The odds of the universe itself coming into being? We don't know. We don't have enough information. You really can't infer anything from that. And "we don't know" DOES NOT mean "God did it," it only means we don't yet know, and don't know if we can ever know.

Besides, even if "God did it," that just turns the question into "So where did God come from then?" Any answer to that can just as easily be applied to the beginning of the universe in the same way, without any need to invoke a "God" in the first place.

Equal amounts of faith? Not hardly. The God-botherers are the ones postulating the existence of a God in the first place, it's up to them to find hard evidence that he exists. The rest of us simply have more useful things to do. We don't need to prove nonexistence.