When did the idea of God first appear?
409863
In the oldest works of art ever put on cave walls, there are images of so-called fetishes, fertility for example, and other enigmatic beings that are only classified as being religious symbolism of some sort. \nSince we can't ask the artist, that's all archaeologists can classify as.
294850
Yes.  It was started by Jesus, who is both God and man.
892000
Some early humans created god in the image of man because they could not think of what god should look like.  But other humans have recreated god in the image of trees, mountains, animals etc...  They can't help it.  They have to create something to reflect upon.  Why they did not look at their reflection in the lake, I cannot understand.  But then look what happened to Narcissus!!!
759563
I know it's not directly related to the question, but it's useful to realise that the Greeks' view of God had a huge impact on the monotheistic faiths. I'm currently reading A History of God by Karen Armstrong, which details how the Greek philosophers' attempt to define God affected early Christianity as well as Islam and Judaism. Fascinating.
782260
Well Plato did! And he is known to be the greatest thinker that ever lived. He came to the conculsion that there must be a God through pure thought
1119209
Atheism means you have no religion, so it came first.  But it was only after man invented religion that we knew what to call it.
938813
See my article pertaining to the traditional notion of God.\n\nhttp://tcrnews2.com/spong.html\n\n\n\n\n\n\n---
649323
We don't need to speculate on the history of religion in general, or Christianity in particular.  We have a pretty good grasp of how these ideas evolved over time already.\n\nReligion didn't start out as a way to explain the world, that came later, religion started out as a way of honoring the sun, which was viewed as the bringer of life.  It evolved from there to what we see today.\n\nThe ideas attributed to Jesus were not original even in Hellenistic Judaism.
349973
It is generally believed by historians that the earliest religion(s) were animistic, which developed into increasingly complex polytheistic systems.  \n\nEven the Bible tends to support this idea --- Abraham was said to abandon his "idols" (e.g. polytheism) in order to establish worship of the One God.\n\nReligion probably originates in the attempt to understand and explain the inexplicable in the world.
823130
The first evolved idea of religion was during the Sumerians time, when the cities of Ur & Uruk were founded, circa 2000BC, and was Nephilim worship. Basically a group of messengers came to Earth and bred homo sapiens as workers. After several thousand years, several Nephilim felt enslaving us was wrong, and started to impart their knowledge to us. There was a civil war among the Nephilim regarding the future of mankind. This led to the biblical flood of 4000BC, in which almost all human life was lost, though finally the benevolent Nephilim won and through a fe,ale Nephilim, the human race was created, leading to the view that we are all Gods children, and the opinion that we all contain a small essence of the Divine. They taught us the wisdom of how to grow crops, religion, philosophy etc. This info was largely lost with the rise of the Persians, Babylonians and led to the forgotten knowledge scenario.\nUruk has been found and its great zigarat (pyramid) remains unexcavated approx 150miles NW of Basra, Iraq, currently occupied by UK troops.
56430
I was raised Catholic but still never really believed in God. Rather, I believe Camus' idea of absurdity--the contradiction of reality with man's irregardless desire to have some God.
84971
You have to understand first that we are not on the same realm as God.  God is higher than us.  His ways and his thought are higher than ours.  We should never question anything that God has done\n\nAs for where God came from...God has always been.  It is hard for us to imagine this because we think only as humans.  To us,  there is a beginning and an ending to all things.  Not to God.  God always has been and always will be.
1039161
God created man in his own image.
1001683
D and E. A bit of a contradiction, true. Cognito ergo sum. I think therefore I exist. Man thinks of God, therefore he exists. Which points to the fact that if the God is a product of man, then the supposed God of (A) does not exist. Therefore I motion that a god, or gods, do not exist at all. How can a god exist and de-exist, through the thought of man? Logic101. My weak point in college, but a great tool in regards to faith, religion, and gods.
677160
Well when I was in catholic school they said around 6,000 years ago, around the same time god created everything.\n\nBut now I side with reason over faith and will state that creation is a nice story and nothing more.
224242
Answer:   The atheist Bertrand Russell wrote in his book "Why I am Not a Christian" that if it is true that all things need a cause then God must also need a cause. He concluded from this that if God needed a cause then God was not God (and if God is not God then of course there is no God). This was basically a slightly more sophisticated form of the childlike question, "Who made God?" Even a child knows that things do not come from nothing, so if God is a "something" then He must have a cause as well, right?\n\nThe question is tricky because it sneaks in the false assumption that God came from somewhere and then asks where that might be. The answer is that the question does not even make sense. It is like asking, "What does blue smell like?" Blue is not in the category of things that have odor, so the question itself is flawed. In the same way, God is not in the category of things that are created, or come into existence, or are caused. God is uncaused and uncreated - He simply exists.\n\nHow do we know this? Well, we know that from nothing, nothing comes. So if there was ever a time when there was absolutely nothing in existence then nothing would have ever come to exist. But things do exist. Therefore, since there could never have been absolutely nothing, something had to have always been existing. That ever-existing thing is what we call God.
415825
As far as I know, it was invented by Martin Luther during the 1500's.  When he posted his Thesis against the Catholic Church, he used it to get the Word of God into the hands of the common people.