There is and was never a god.
We live in a universe that came about and evolved through natural means. For 13.77 billion years it has behaved exactly as a natural universe would. 10.07 billion years into its existence single-celled life emerged on at least one of its planets, and then swam blindly and without thought for a mind boggling 3.1 billion years, until one cell began living in another cell, and multicellular life was born. For another 598 million years life became wildly diverse, spreading to every ecological niche imaginable, but still having no complex, abstract, or philosophical thoughts. Then in the last couple million years (or less than 1/10,000th of the life of the universe) our ape cousins started walking upright, making tools, and thinking amazing thoughts.
So here are our predecessors, naked, wandering the world and wondering how it all works, and where it all came from. They of course know nothing about physiology, cells, atoms and molecules, magnetism, tectonic plates, electricity, germ theory, sperm and eggs, genetics, dinosaurs, gravity, the electroweak force, black holes, etc, etc. They see some stars move in the sky, and do not know they are not stars.* They do not know that stars are suns. They do not know what causes seasons, droughts, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards, tides, heat waves. Disease, cancer, infertility, twins, birth defects, allergies, mental illness, brain damage—all mysteries. They don’t know that the heavens do not revolve around the Earth. And for the longest time they absolutely no way to find out any of these things. But they are creative, crave order, and, like all humans, are subject to whims of confirmation bias and denial. So to explain it all they invent spirits, then gods, then God. When the Old Testaments books were, people were ignorant of nearly every natural phenomenon listed above, yet were propounding the origin and inner workings of humans, the Earth, and the cosmos.
It seems, and I know will find this offensive, laughable to me that for all of prehistoric time God the Father was just…hanging out. Watching untold trillions of amoebas bobbing around, watching fish wriggle out of the ocean, then watching dinosaurs conquer the Earth for 250 million years before falling prey to a random rock from space, and then sitting around for another 65 million years until he could send himself to Earth to die in the form of just one of the human species that has lived here, and then(!) have a stunning lack of foresight and incarnate himself into an illiterate family, leaving his Holy Words to be written down by other men decades later, and in conflicting form.
We don’t know yet where the universe came from, or why it has the laws that it does. Through the hard work, insight, and luck of brave minds we have solved thousands of natural mysteries, and there are uncountable thousands more, but “God” is the answer for those who wish to stop asking questions, to turn their backs on seeking knowledge.
*Say “planet” to a medieval person, and they will think “wandering star.” The Earth and the planets were not the same category of things to pre-Enlightenment people; the stars were not suns. There were fixed stars and wandering stars, the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun. You hear “Mars” and you see in your mind’s eye a terrestrial planet that orbits the Sun between the Earth and Mars, with mountains, canyons and valleys, but the smartest minds of 0BCE saw a red star that moved against the background of other stars, and that all of them revolved around the Earth. Although they knew even then that the Earth was round!