Creating A World With Hands-Off Deities?

[Max_Killjoy]

Various campaign settings and published worlds have different approaches to the level of interventionism and active presence deities or pantheons have in mortal life. The median standard is Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk, where the gods are noticeably+visibly present in mortal affairs in addition to granting spells to divine casters. On the opposite side is a setting like Athas/Dark Sun, where there are no divine casters and the gods are essentially non-existent, so no one worships them. Ebberon presents a third combination, where divine casters can still draw power and gain spells from gods, but the gods themselves are impersonal and unapproachable.

But could a cosmology be created that turns the triangle into a rectangle, with a setting where the gods do not grant spells or answer individual prayers, but are still indisputably present in the world such that people believe in them and worship them?

It's a problem I'm wrestling with in the latest iteration of my eternally changing setting - the divine-tier powers are too metaphysically 'big' to directly intervene in individual mortal lives. If they take action in the material world at all, it can only be on a massive population-or-environment-altering scale, much in the same way a scientist can observe bacteria colonies under a microscope but lacks tools precise enough to interact with a specific bacterium on the petri dish. There are other metacosmic reasons why even that sort of macro-scale intervention is done sparingly, so the end result are gods present on the cosmological level but rarely active at a scale or timeframe mortals can perceive.

In a world like this, how will the emergence of religion differ from the Greyhawk/Forgotten Realms standard? Would people even worship the gods at all when they see little benefit to doing so and few downsides to refraining? Will religion simply move 'down' a tier with powerful outsiders who can manifest materially and take directly attributable action being worshiped the way gods are normally while the 'actual' deities occupy the role an overgod would hold?

If the cosmic deities can "delegate" to "lesser" entities capable of acting on a more mortal scale, then it depends on how independent those entities can be with the power they thus have.

If the entities have low independence, and can only act as intermediaries, then mortal religion will likely still focus on the cosmic deities.

If the entities have higher independence, and can act of their own accord, then mortal religion will likely focus at least in part on direct supplication, veneration, and pleas at least in part at those intermediary entities.