How long ‘er men recognize the godlike properties of the stoat? See how the stoat designed divine recursion into that question to testify of its godhead?
Getting back to the topic here, I forgot to mention anything about men being promoted to or worshipped as Gods. The OP did ask that. Prior to WWII, the Emperors of Japan made the claim not only to be a god but the Creator One. Pharos, emperors, war-lords and kings throughout the ages have routinely proclaimed themselves to be a god or even the One God. Recent enrollees in the god club include such unlikely candidates as the Japanese Emperors, Filipino revolutionary leader José Rizal, Mao Tse Tung, Kim Il-sung, Father Divine, Francisco Macías Nguema, Juanita Peraza (Mita), Lou de Palingboer, Hulon Mitchell, Jr (AKA Yahweh ben Yahweh), Nirmala Srivastava, Jehovah Wanyonyi, Sathya Sai Baba, Mitsuo Matayoshi, Claude Vorilhon, and Vissarion.
Then there is this lengthy list of people who claimed they were the risen Christ. And of course, if Jesus was in fact God, as is claimed by his followers, claiming to be the reincarnation of Him is a claim to being the One God that’s actually Three in One.
All this shows why Pascal’s Wager is so utterly misguided. Pascal looked at it like a coin toss. He reasoned that it was a 50/50 proposition and betting on the one God he happened to believe in was a perfectly safe bet, whereas betting against him had a 50% chance of bringing a sentence of eternal suffering in Hell. But if Gods are jealous and you bet on the wrong one, that is NOT a safe bet, and there are tens of thousands of claimants to being God.
In a coin toss you do have a 50/50 chance of calling the right side. Throw a pair of dice, and you have a one in twelve chance of calling the number that will come up. But introduce tens of thousands of claimants for the position of One True God and the game piece becomes some sort of many-faceted polyhedron with tens of thousands of faces. Since Gods can be jealous, you are asked to call your number and roll the polyhedron and hope the you made picked the number that will actually be selected by the roll.
Oh, and it’s also possible that there is a real, existing creator God but all the claimants to that title are pretenders, and the true God has no interest in making herself known. This would be the watchmaker God of the deist, who ordained the elegance and indescribably perfect fine tuning of all the physical constants, set the Universe in motion, and never intervenes. This would be the God Einstein believed in. Alternatively, it’s equally possible there is no god, all claimants are impostors, and the only reason so many gods have been asserted to exist is that the easiest method of explaining what we humans do not currently understand is to posit a supernatural being and assign all the unknowns to “the god of the gaps.” Further, positing such a being is a great gig for the priestly set that teaches his/her/its commands and exacts the required tribute to assure followers a proper claim on an afterlife.