Quote Originally Posted by The Glyphstone View Post
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?
This is very close to religion in my own setting. The real movers on a practical basis are outsiders, whose own attitudes towards the handful of overgods shape the various religions, though even these outsiders are generally more distant and "cosmic" than say, a FR deity.

Some of these outsiders have set themselves up into pantheons or established cults to themselves, while others have attempted to keep the faith, so to speak. The latter have established a handful of religions with very similar core tenets that still have differences and disputes because even for a celestial communicating with mortals is like playing telephone. Their active involvement still prevents active religious warfare and serious persecution between these "allied" faiths.