Can the fact that there are beliefs in many gods and religions around be taken as evidence or proof that all religions are false?

No. Two wrongs don't erase a right.

I do not think that you can claim that this makes all religions false.

The fact that there were many different hypotheses about evolution does not make all of them false.

The difference here is that Darwin's hypothesis of evolution actually gained evidence to support it, and the other hypotheses were disproven. So we all hail Darwin as The Genius Who Discovered Evolution, when to some extend he was just lucky that he looked at how species change one way, and not the other.

And Darwin's original theory has been shown to be lacking in areas, and has been refined and improved.

And this is what no religion has been able to do - - - to provide credible evidence that shows it to be true, and other religions to be false. All the "evidence" I have seen for any religion also applies equally to every other religion. So all we can say is that there is no credible evidence that any religion is true. We can not say that they are defiantly all false.

Religion was created by people to either control people, or to help them try to be good enough to go to heaven (and that's stupid) No one can be good enough. I know I'm not.

'Goodness' is a gift if we allow Jesus to take away our "sin".

Did you know Jesus was completely anti-religious?

It was one of his greatest traits -- he stood opposed to the "religious" way of trying to please God. Instead, he said he had come to finally ABOLISH all religion and provide a spiritual way of having intimate, direct relationship with our Creator.

No longer, he said, should we have to go through institutions and religious organizations to come to God. Instead we can now "dial direct" and have a relationship with God through Jesus. How wonderful! :)

That's why I do my best to be as "irreligious" as possible and stress the fact that I support the Christian FAITH, but not the Christian RELIGION.

That's what makes the Jesus of history so attractive to me -- he never came to start a new religion, but to show us how we can come directly to God through him.

It's up to you whether or not you want to follow this man. He invites everyone. If you don't want to, He walks away without you.

Hitchens is simply wrong in his assertion that all religions must be false since there are so many and that they disagree with others. It's just that man has an inborn knowledge of the Creator but struggles with how to identify and worship Him due to our sinful, fallen nature.

Elvis Presley was once a superstar in his time and held great influence in singing and style and many have tried to imitate him over the years but the fact that so many others have tried to do so does not mean that he did not exist.

In the same way with religion, people have thought up various ways to identify and worship a false god or gods in history but that does not mean there is no one true God or religion. The evidence of a Creator is all around us in the complexity of life on Earth and the universe which could only have come from an intelligent source of supreme power and wisdom. Mankind has come up with a variety of ways to explain that in the various religions but there can only be one truth and one true God. All others are simply false, flawed and man-made ideas of who they think or believe god to be whether it it monotheism or polytheism, Gaia/nature worship, idolatry, human sacrifice, etc..and a means to control and subjugate populations.

In ancient Greece/Athens, there were more temples to various gods they had deemed to worship for various identities than there were people living in the city of Athens and even a temple to an unknown god in case they missed one.

In many polytheistic religions, they are setup to mimic human society with all the variable needs that are produced and controlled by various humans since no one person is intelligent enough to think up, design and control all the aspects of society or nature....art. literature, construction, design, maintenance, health ,etc.. So their gods have multiple identities and purposes.

Some religions worship nature or the heavenly bodies like the Sun or Moon but those things could not have derived from purely natural causes or existed eternally. Sun worship goes back a long way to ancient Egypt, etc..but we know today it is not the greatest star in the universe as they thought. Nature is the product of an even greater Creator.

A supreme God who can create the entire universe and life forms on Earth is far more intelligent and powerful than us and does not require lesser gods to perform or control what is needed.

Occam's Razor would suggest a simpler answer is that there is only one eternal and omniscient, omni-present God than an infinite number or quantity of lesser gods or an infinite number of creators of the one true Creator.

Something must be eternal and capable of creating the universe and life on Earth and it can only be one true, all-powerful and supremely wise Creator/ God. All others are false gods/religions based on flawed and sinful human thinking. The odds of the universe forming by pure random chance for example are well beyond what is possible...calculated at around 1 in 10^10^123rd power by the British mathematician Roger Penrose.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lU5-rhhyrag

Since God announced publicly, very early on, that he would send a Holy Messiah to redeem fallen mankind and destroy Satan's evil dominion, but he didn't explain precisely how or when he would do so, Satan quickly got to work dreaming up various possible scenarios, each based on one imaginary scheme or another, as well as the worship of demonic, false gods. When the promised Messiah finally arrived, the question of who he was, how he conducted himself and exactly what the priorities of his mission might be confounded not only the civil and religious powers of the day, but also Satan, the devil. Only afterwards did everyone concerned have a chance to figure out what had actually happened. But for Satan, it was already too late. God's work had been done. Satan's evil dominion of death was destroyed. Sinful mankind was once again in God's good graces, Heaven was reopened, and Jesus Christ, true man and true God, was now firmly in command of the heavens and earth. His glorious (and totally unprecedented) Resurrection from the dead, is proof of all his claims. The Holy Catholic Church is the living eye witness to God's truth and all of this was prophesied in the Sacred Scriptures, hundreds and even thousands of years, in advance. Neither Hitchens or anyone else can satisfactorily explain away the huge body of fulfilled, Old Testament and New Testament prophecies, which are unique to the Judeo-Christian faith tradition. Nor can they truthfully deny the existence of the real, historical person known as Jesus Christ. In short, scoffers can scoff, but believers need not work too hard to verify 95% or more of the claims of Christianity, and reconciling the last 5% requires only a modicum of faith. Authentic Christianity is all about freedom from perpetual slavery to Satan, sin and death. Not control. Not subjugation. Certainly not degradation. Rather, restoration, glorification and even, the eventual deification of fallen humanity, just as God has always intended. That's what I think. You're welcome!

Have you ever seen a game of "Guess the Number of Jelly Beans"? That's where people try to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar. So for example, 50 people might guess anywhere from 100 to 1000. Using your logic, since there are many different guesses, that proves none of them could be correct, right?

I'm not certain which logical fallacy(ies) you are violating, but the "hasty generalization". "false equivalence" and "appeal to probability" come to mind.

No.

That may be proof that there are many false religions, but not that one of them isn't true. One religion can be true and other religions with contrary beliefs must be false.

The problem with the line of argument you follow is that many mistaken beliefs in religions and about gods cannot logically prove that ALL religions are false. Some of them, yes, most of them, even. But to prove them ALL false you would have to be able to prove that there was not even one God that existed.

That is why the quote from Christopher Hitchens is nonsense. He is correct to think that it's inconceivable that all religions can be right (because of how they contradict each other) but if there is one God who requires a certain form of worship from those He created, then there must be ONE religion that is correct!

Here's a helpful quote from John McArthur: "Fallen man is not naturally godly; he is naturally religious."

This is what accounts for the massive amount of religiosity in every century, in every society. Humans are 'fallen'. And when people fall, they try to stand up again. But all attempts (bar one) are self-help ideas that suppose we can pull ourselves up by our own boot-straps. The Creator has warned us that our ideas fall far short of His, because we are fallen sinners. We rebelled against His only way and now we're so full of our own ways, we have wandered even further from Him in a confusion of religious systems. The way back is uniquely stated in Christianity to be admit God's judgment of us is right and just, and that only His way back will work.

To claim that ALL religion must be false is to throw the baby out with the bath-water.