Short answers, pulled from the story.
The earliest known written reference to the Israelite God Yahweh appears on the Mesha Stele dating to 840 BCE. This artifact discovered in modern-day Jordan provides a tangible link to the origins of monotheistic worship. The inscription reveals how early societies conceptualized the divine through religious language.
The word God derives from the Proto-Germanic root *gudan which comes from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning to call or to invoke. This etymological journey suggests that the concept of God was originally tied to the act of calling out to a higher power. The transition from neuter to masculine forms occurred during the Christianization of the Germanic peoples.
Thomas Aquinas formulated five main arguments for the existence of God known as the Five Ways. These arguments attempt to prove God's existence through reason and observation of the natural world. The Five Ways include the cosmological argument which uses the origin of the universe to argue for a first cause.
The term agnostic was coined by Thomas Henry Huxley in 1869. Earlier philosophers like Protagoras had expressed similar views before this date. Agnosticism represents the view that the existence of God is unknown or unknowable.
By the 10th century Western art began to represent God the Father as a human figure gradually evolving from partial depictions to full-length figures. The Renaissance saw a brief fashion for depicting all three persons of the Trinity as similar or identical figures. The Great Moscow Synod of 1667 later banned certain symbolic depictions of God the Father and the Holy Spirit.
Johns Hopkins researchers studying the effects of DMT found that a large majority of respondents described contact with a conscious intelligent benevolent entity. About a quarter of those afflicted by temporal lobe seizures experience religious experiences suggesting a neurological basis for such phenomena. These findings raise questions about the nature of religious belief and the role of the brain in shaping our understanding of the divine.