The world’s oldest monotheistic religion is Judaism. Christianity is a direct continuation of that cultural and historical heritage. I’ve always had faith, but I’ve recently met some weird men of faith who argued that people have always known about the Judeo-Christian God.
Their answer came after I questioned what people believed during paleolithic times. They must have had some religious customs and beliefs, but I doubt their rites were the same as ours. If God was an unknown concept to them, would God punish them for their sinful ways? And, why didn’t God reveal himself to humanity until 5-6000 years ago? (Genesis is now thought to be written in the 6th and 5th centuries BC.) The simple answer is: we don’t know.
I don’t have the answers. One argument would be that we don’t know when and how God revealed himself to us for the first time. We trust the written sources, while oral traditions can’t be accounted for. Science and religion share the quest for knowledge, but they try to gain that knowledge using different prerequisites.
I consider myself a man of science, and my scientific curiosity has guided me through much of adult life. My faith in God has also been a large part of my identity, and I’ve never once questioned God’s existence. I can’t, however, explain God, nor can I challenge the evolutionary timeline. The two do not contradict each other if you read the Bible as a narrative.
We’re still scientific infants. We try to understand our place in this vast universe, but we cannot explain what sparked that initial Big Bang. I believe that God is beyond time, matter and space, but I can’t make my belief scientific because I don’t understand my metaphysical beliefs. I neither comprehend the brilliant theories that Einstein put forward, but just because I don’t understand them doesn’t make them invalid. I put my faith in the great minds, much like I trust God.