"Religion was invented when the first con man met the first fool." - Mark Twain.

"Gods" per se probably arose with the rise of city-states. Prior to that it is likely small bands of hunter-gatherers worshiped or venerated "spirits" responsible for whatever they didn't understand.

I forgot who said it but “a god is mankind’s first and worst explanation for things he didn’t understand”

I am reasonably sure this is one of those unanswerable questions.

Which god do you mean? Since you capitalized it - the Abrahamic god? But other religions have their god(s) as well. I found the attached a pretty good summary....

I think it was a Tuesday. ?

According to Sumerian Cosmology Humans were a created species. And in so being that the Sumerians are considered to be humanities 1st civilization, they worshipped a group of beings that were from another planet, whom they say were here on the Earth for a time, then left. They believe humans were created by splicing the DNA of the present ape species and themselves, the Anunnaki.
The Sumerians worshipped the Anunnaki as Deities, until they left. Then Continued. As civilizations evolved with different cultures, the deities evolved. The Sumerian High Goddess Inana, became the Egyptian Isis, who became the Phonician Ishtar, who became the Greek Athena/Aphrodite, who became the Goddess Columbia. Who is the inspiration for the statue of liberty.

Washington District of Columbia.
Statue of liberty was donated by French Freemasons

The academic study of mythology looks at the evolution and anthromorphology of cultural deities.

The oldest cults are cults of the Sun, Moon, and Snake.... so those deities might be somewhat older within indigenous population cosmology. Cults of Saturn spring up during Canaanite/Hebrew times. The Sumerians are far older.

And not to mention the civilization that gives humanity 100 Firsts.... like math, law, schools, writing ect..

Define God.

Every time primitive man tried to understand existence ands of gods, demons, and angels have , someone invented a god or some reason to make life understandable. Humans like reasons for things to happen. We have created angels demons and deities at every stage of our racial infancy because we cannot tolerate ambiguity.

Unknowable, the questions are too woolly and unanswerable. Do you mean deities, gods or the Abrahamic god which the jewish, christian and islamic religions worship?

I posted an article about Daniel Dennett’s book on an evolutionary perspective on religion which answers a lot of these questions which might be of interest.

A Review of Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel C. Dennet

Define god. The Christian god? God as a deity? My way of looking at it is when out beetle- browed ancestors gained a sense of self, became sentient questions arose such as who am I, where did I come from and conversely where am I going to and what is my purpose. With a limited understanding of the natural world around them, man created god or multiple gods (sometimes in his own image, sometimes not) to explain where he came from and where he goes.

Deities have been around since mankind attempted to understand his world. If you want one God, look at the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten's philosophy around 1343 BCE. He stripped away the pantheons and replaced them with Aten the One God (the idea only lasted for his reign but that's another tale). Being as Abraham (or Abram) and his society are most likely set in the Iron Age around 1200 BCE, there is every possibility that Aten fed into the Hebrew theology.

You may find this video interesting.

A really good book to read about that very question is Karen Armstrong’s A History of God.

I'm with Herman Hesse who thought the concept of god was/is an insanity, so it was peyote, mushrooms, alcohol, low blood sugar or dehydration.

Gods have been around forever, but if you mean a monotheistic God, I think the Persian Zoroastrians may have been the first

The first concepts of a higher power were found in cave drawings to explain thunder & lightning.

I think the more interesting concept is how did so many different civilizations come up with their own gods. Seems to me that it's less a higher power and more of a human reaction to dealing with the unknown.

As jlynn37 stated, it mostly likely can’t be answered as I am sure it extents well before recorded history. The oldest story recovered is “The Epic of Gilgamesh”. About a half man, half god. 1300-1000 B.C. The oldest religion stilled practiced is hinduism. The oldest documented gods I can seemingly find is Tiamat, Enlil, Anu and Enki in Mesopotamia. Tiamat being the primordial god the oceans. Enlil(they are not sure what the god of. Part of name means “haunted” though), Anu(God of heaven) and Enki(God of wisdom). These three make what they call the supreme triad. I also remember reading somewhere that these really, really, really old burial sites had decorations on them, which could lead one to believe that they may have, at least, had some concept of an afterlife.

When humankind lived in caves they wondered who made the rain and plants, etc. Knowing nothing about the world they thought it made sense that an all-powerful being did it. That made sense! (To them at the time.)

I think Freud said the concept arose as one imagined the imperfections of one's father away. So maybe, naturally, most people developed the concept of such an ideal father. But why should early people have come to believe that such a being exists? I wonder if it could have been by natural selection in that the belief somehow had survival value.

Probably started with language. It was likely a concept passed down from the folks we evolved from.

Every time primitive man tried to understand existence ands of gods, demons, and angels have , someone invented a god or some reason to make life understandable. Humans like reasons for things to happen. We have created angels demons and deities at every stage of our racial infancy because we cannot tolerate ambiguity.

I figure about a million years ago