The likely participants here are likely of the one god school if they are in the god business at all. There are sort of three religious divisions in the single god market. Islam is the only unambiguous one save for the satanic verses. Islam requires faith, a creed, as does Christianity. With Christianity there are many variations upon the creed most of which have the incredible trinity codicil to the mono. Judaism is a ritual/taboo religion requiring no particular beliefs at all and has always been polytheist as the kaballah version is today.

The ORIGINAL stories today considered the old testament by Christians was written by Judeans living in Alexandria in the 2nd c. BC. There is no evidence to the contrary and only religious tradition disagrees. The traditions of religions are what idiots believe because older and wiser idiots told them it had to be believed.

Monotheisms are of course popular in the world today and were they not spread by force they likely would not exist. One can read Josephus and learn the sons and grandsons of Judah Maccabe (whom he gave GREEK names) forced the conversion of the Idoumeans and the Galileans. They failed to force the conversion of the Samaritans. The Yahweh cult existed only in pissant Judea and conversion by the sword was required.

The writers in Alexandria invented their stories of the Yahweh god. There is absolutely no reason to think they were ever other than stories for entertainment. The Yahweh cult religion they were talking about was ritual/taboo not a creedal religion so any stories were permitted and belief in their "truth" was not required. Of course we know the religion of the women of Judea was to the goddes Astarte/Ashara/Ishtar aka Venus and that there was a temple to her in Jerusalem into the 2nd c. AD.

Anyway the point is the only ex post facto advantage of monotheism appears to be its ability to raise the greater armies.

So when considering what one might consider physical evidence for the existence of a god one must also consider gods in the plural.

Next the nature of this/these god/gods must not go beyond the physical evidence.

This takes us back to Laplace (?) when asked about god, I have no need of that hypothesis.

The point of that observation is always to take the minimum necessary hypothesis. So far, no matter what has been observed, there have always been explanations far short of the grand concept of a god or gods.

Even if one avoids all possibility of incremental explanations as science develops the opening premise is plural gods as that is the simpler hypothesis. The simplest observation is that nature is not harmonious, that different natural forces compete with each other, fire and water, thus different gods is a simpler assumption than a single god.

Here is a little secret I'll let you all in on. We have a limited number of ways to think about things. As astrology is to astronomy, theology is to science. Call science theonomy if you wish. Progressing science in a polytheistic world would have defined the principles by which the gods behaved and did their magic.

Did a god create the world? Is there a big bang? Or did a god separate the formless void? Did a quantum fluctuation lead to the structure we see? Does a butterfly flap its wings and cause a hurricane? Did Zeus arm his son Perseus and all kinds of wonderful things follow from it?

We are talking about the same things the god believers did but using the language of math and science and literally doing things that were once reserved only to the gods.

Our conceptual life is barely different whether it is gods or laws which rule the universe. Were the gods capricious? Don't mind that. We have chaos theory.

We and our ancestors saw the same things and we view them in the same way. We have different ways of expressing the same things. Our objectives are the same as those of our ancestors. Our methods have been more productive by uncountable orders of magnitude but that does not preclude a better approach coming along tomorrow.

The question of belief in a god is completely missing the point. Do you find a god a better approach to dealing with this world than our present methods relying about quantification, theory and testing? I doubt anyone here does -- unless they are expecting to find signals from angels or some such.

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Unvarnished
Haaretz
Jerusalem Post
The origin of the Yahweh Cult