Since time immemorial, human are facing several mysteries and miseries. During prehistoric era people lived as nomads and they faced the forces of nature such as weather, floods or droughts.
At some point in time—we do not know exactly when this happened—people in various far-flung parts of the world developed an instinct. Whenever people encountered some power beyond their control that could harm or help them, they began to worship that power. They believed that worship protected them and sought the blessing of that power. For worship, priests all over the world devised more or less similar methods such as folding their hands, bowing, kneeling, floral offering, prayers and sacrifices. Priests taught these to the masses and gradually designated the powers as gods.
For example, climatologists have identified an Ice Age, one that stretched approximately between 30,000 BCE and 10,000 BCE. Humans, living during the Ice Age, had largely inadequate protection against the extreme cold: they were at the mercy of available sunlight, and that was inconsistent and beyond their control. In this scenario, people began solar worship and that was a logical outcome. In a similar manner, humans considered thunder and lightning as devastating, mysterious and frightening. Consequently, their leaders or priests imagined a divine sky god that was behind the changes occurring in the sky. Gradually, they began worshipping the sky as a god. There is enough historical evidence to assert that the ancestors of Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Christians and Muslims worshipped the sun and the sky, before their religions came into practice.
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We are the choir, here, and assert nothing more than man's propensity to purpose his wealth of imagination as the power to explain what his knowledge cannot.
Witnessed lightning and its destructive power with a loud cracking boom that can be felt through your whole body. The strike left a magnificent entangled web pattern on the ground. Lightning has such beauty, but it also extremely dangerous at the same time. How could it not come from a god in the clouds? They had no way to test it. A "god" was the only thing they could do to make sense of it.
Speaking of the entangled webs. Does anyone have any knowledge of the subject that it is where the idea of the Bifrost from Norse mythology came from? When Thor leaves to the heavens it leaves a burned pattern on the ground. At least in the films.
I think that dreaming had a lot to do with the development of religion. Just a guess , but having dead relatives visit you in your sleep might have inspired ancestor worship. Dreaming of a paradise inspiring belief in unworldly places.
I can't comment on the "when" question, but I will on the "why". Michael Shermer, Editor of Skeptic Magazine and American Scientific contributor has posited that belief in supernatural agency is a function of our pattern seaking brains and an evolutionary concept about Type A versus Type B mistakes. Our minds identify patterns very quickly and have given humans extraordinary capacity to succeed as a species. We noticed that seeds grew into plants with sufficient moisture, and pre-history farming was born. We see patterns that aren't valid, like a human face in the clouds or in the arrangement of twigs at our feet. Our brains are ultra powerful and the important pattern seeking capacity can easily be misdirected to identify such things that have no real basis in reality.
This is where the evolutionary advantage of Type A mistakes can lead to seeing agency where none actually exists. A Type A mistake is where someone perceives an event that might be a threat or might be of no concern at all. A member of a species that generally operates on the better-safe-than-sorry rule and treats such things as threats has a higher survival advantage than one that makes a Type B mistake, which is to operate on the basis that events that might be a threat are more likely than not of no real concern. That individual saves energy from not running when there is no reason, but will eventually lead to its death and removal from the gene pool due to a Type B mistake.
So evolution favors individuals and species that make Type A mistakes, humans have the mental capacity to identify patterns that aren't real, and voilá, a god is born. We see lightning kill people who dance to the moon and we figure that the storm might really hate it when we do that. We see whatever positive or negative event occur and have the capacity to misassociate that event with non-related events and conditions, and voilá, more supernatural concerns are born. We tend to make Type A mistakes and treat possible concerns as valid, meaning that we operate on the basis that there really is something larger at work than actually is. Add in that fact that we live in communities, have the capacity to communicate and empathetically feel someone else's experiences, pain and fear, and were desperately ignorant of what was actually happening and we have a plausible recipe for god.
Nishant, I liked your timeline summary of sun-god worship. If you happen to know of a site that describes more about that please share it. This is an interesting topic.
Religion was created by humans to control humans. Humans created their god(s) to cement their control over other humans.
Humans created religion to help them understand the world ... but some scumbags found out that they could control other people with religion so .... Here we are now .. with most of th world being controlled like sheep :'( -_-