Is there any documented evidence of when human beings became aware of GOD or a supernatural being?
Here is some stuff, I don’t know if there is an agreed upon consensus.
It seems to go back to 500k years ago, maybe earlier.
Some of us still haven’t made it.
You’re using the wrong verb and adjective following the word “beings.”
Try “imagined.”
I don’t think there’s solid evidence for the date of the origin of superstitions, but very long ago, it seems.
They didn’t become aware so much as they created God in their imaginations to fill in holes in their knowledge.
Which leads us to the proper answer to the OP: Humans became aware of gods shortly after other humans invented them.
Most early religions are (presumed to be) animistic:
Monotheism was invented quite a while later, mostly with the founding of Zoroastrianism:
Of course, even in monotheistic religions, there may be the belief in a multitude of gods, but only one of which is worthy of being worshiped (or, for deists, not worshiped, just singled out as the creator-deity as a point of interest, but otherwise irrelevant to everything in daily life).
According to this it looks like (this is, of course debatable) sometime in the paleolithic humans started burying other humans and the like…so, somewhere between 30k-300k years ago, give or take.
I’m interpreting ‘God’ to be something supernatural or beyond life, and I’d say that burial would be a good indication that humans were thinking of something supernatural or beyond life. MMV however.
I can recommend A History of God by Karen Armstrong. It was written in 1994, before 9/11, and it’s been a while since I’ve read it so I need to read it again. It’s about the Western religions and helps you to see why Islam has so many internal squabbles. It’s probably in your public library, and at 496 pages it’s not a slim book.
When did humans become cognizant of God?
When God created Adam, circa 4000 B.C.
I’m thinking the first time one of them ate the weird mushrooms.
I think the answer is “always, depending on how you define ‘God’”
That is to say, Homo sapiens likely always had the tendency to attribute personality, and other human-like characteristics, to phenomena that they did not understand.
Then gradually, this becomes a belief in a multitude of gods (since if there is a sentient figure responsible for lightning, say, then that figure seems to have abilities humans do not, and seems to live indefinitely).
Finally multi-gods give way to a more elegant single god concept.
Draw your line wherever you like.
Perhaps since infancy the concept of large powerful beings doing things that appear magical and taking care of us form. Even perhaps in the womb, external sounds and even touch/motion sensations that seems directed towards the child.
Looking in awe at the huge dinosaurs lumbering about must have been a shock on their systems.
“Religion began when the first scoundrel met the first fool.” – Voltaire
Those saying burying their dead is an indication of religious thought must never have had an ant farm. Ants bury their dead.
Ants don’t bury their dead for the same reason, and they don’t, afaik, bury them with grave goods and other things like that.
Lets turn the question around: is there any documented evidence of ancient humans not acknowledging some God or gods?
I always assumed it was some cave guy around a fire making shit up to scare the kids.
You can imagine the progression -
Humans are pattern animals - they try to find the logic or pattern behind what are usually random events of nature. They then anthropomorphize these - imagine that some animistic force or personality driving the wind or river or trees. Similarly, they would attribute more intelligence and purpose to animal behaviour than was actually present, think of the animals as persons.
The progression is obvious. A string of bad or good luck allows the imagination to consider that maybe it’s not a “bunch of sprites” controlling the individual pieces of the environment, but once guiding force - possibly reflecting their experience. They learn to herd animals, the wild herds perhaps are driven by an invisible shepherd. The entire weather cycle is driven by a single weather sprite.
Eventually the local sprites are supplanted by a pantheon of more powerful, more encompassing deities… and the number of these that are important dwindles, until someone decides one single intelligence is directing all the vagarities of the world for their own mysterious purposes.
All because we want to find a pattern in the result of butterfly wings flapping.
(There’s a series of lectures from Yale, look on youTube for Introduction to the Old Testament by Christine Hayes. Apparently she traces the evolution of Yaweh as one of a local pantheon in the region - “the Lord thy God is a jealous God, thou shalt not have other gods before me…” - to the point where the followers deny any other gods exist. )
You mean, like a cave painting, with pictograms spelling “Woe is us, we haven’t invented any gods yet”? What do you expect such evidence should look like? Atheism doesn’t tend to express itself in any tangible way, except as a reaction to theism. In a society that hasn’t invented any gods, people would not be dwelling on the subject of religion and their lack of faith in something that they don’t acknowledge, much less leave behind any physical evidence that they did so.