Hello Percy, I've been thinking about this for a while now, and I have a couple of comments:
How would we know just by examining the world around us that there is a God?
Translation: how do we determine whether something non-material exists by examining only material evidence? I'm not saying that god is non-material, just using this as an analogy.
For myself, I would approach this question by asking what differences might exist between a world created by God and another world that came about in the absence of a God.
The problem here is only having one set of data, one that you can't tell whether it is created or not.
How would gravity be different in a created universe versus one that came about in the absence of a god? One could argue that in a chance formed universe that things would behave according to simple basic laws that could be easily determined, like Newtonian gravity, while in a created universe the closer you looked the more mystery was involved.
How would matter\energy be different in a created universe versus one that came about in the absence of a god? One could argue that in a chance formed universe that things would be formed of simple particles, particles that are stable over time and different from energy, while in a created universe one can become the other at whim, and the closer you looked the more mystery was involved.
Thus one can argue that a self formed universe would be necessarily simpler than the one we see, while a created universe would necessarily be complicated due to complexity added by the creation of something more than a simple universe.
Which would be expected to have more wars, more prejudice, more disease, more disasters? Certainly we seem to have enough of these to suspect the possibility of an absence of God in this world.
Was that the purpose of creation?
If the purpose was entertainment, then the fact that we entertain ourselves with historical and fictional accounts of such things would show that this purpose is fulfilled.
If the purpose is to compose a 4-dimensional kaleidoscope, the existence of certain life forms and their peculiar peccadilloes may be incidental "noise" in the system.
Say there were no Bible, no Qur'an, no Bhagavad Gita, no religious texts of any sort.
Humans seem particularly adept at developing religious texts without needing a particular starting point, in every culture known. If god existed and could be partially perceived by occasional mystics in some necessarily incomplete manner (due to the vast complexity of god), then we would logically expect many different religious texts.
Enjoy.
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