This, I think, has a bearing on the God question. Buddha’s original teachings were far more agnostic / atheistic than the way that they have been developed and embellished by later schools. Indeed, as the Buddha discouraged the worship of images, no depictions of him were created for the 500 years following his death. The first images were fashioned by the Greek community who had come to India with Alexander the Great and fallen into Buddhism as a means of being validated without entering the caste system; they made images of the Buddha similar in aspect to Apollo, and these later evolved into the deity-image we see today.

So when we look at the relationship of God and Buddhism, we need to first be clear to what ‘Buddhism’ refers.