Valid points indeed, pete. But the atheist position is predicated on the somewhat arbitrary nature of your [by whom I mean all theistic believers'] accounts of how it all came about. I don't see why it should have been God [however one pictures or conceives of Him] any more than that gila monster on the tortoise's back or whatever. If you go on, as some have, to urge that "God" is simply your formulation for The Primary Cause, whatever it may be, then one must rejoin that that is a complete begging of the question; as well as being entirely unsatisfactory, surely, from a theological POV, to any sort of theistically orientated person, whose beliefs must, by definition, subsume the existence of some sort of omnipotent supernatural Being? We don't know what did it; but we are pretty sure it was nothing that could be defined by the final phrase of my last sentence before this one; especially one that remains around, supervising what goes on within Its/His 'Creation", and thus susceptible to the concept of "prayer'.

~M~