The gods lack existence anywhere. In the setting, the word ‘gods’ never happens.
That’s nice.
And if doing a Lord of the Rings or Song of Ice and Fire style game—aka the two most popular fantasy stories—things like
fireball and
cure wounds probably shouldn’t exist. But that doesn’t mean D&D should have to dump those options as a baseline.
The game can’t account for every variation imagination.
Having no gods or faiths of any kind in your game is still simple. Again, it’s a single line of flavour.
“In this world, the gods do not exist and people have rejected supernatural origins for events. Clerics draw their power from the Positive Energy Plane <or other source>, which fuels their pseudo-divine power. All attempts to contact or ask advice from deities instead communicate with good aligned outsiders.”
That took me 2 minutes and 14 seconds. On an iPad. It’s not a noteworthy amount of time to “remove” gods from clerics.
My concern is personalizing character concept. And personalizing cosmology concept.
But in any case, with regard to gaming design, the paladin class works better without alignment mechanics, the cleric class works better without gods mechanic.
There are lots of games that remove the divine from the cleric. Really... they just have a “mage” or “spellcaster” class and let you choose between healing or offenive magic. Because without the gods, magic is just magic.
But that’s not D&D. D&D is not and has
never been an entirely generic RPG system. D&D has always been a game with pantheons of gods and its own lore and baseline assumptions. Even in Basic D&D variant where their were zero gods, they were replaced by Immortals and clerics dedicated explicitly to an alignment.
Removing gods from the game would help YOU. But it wouldn’t help virtually the rest of the audience who has gods and has always had gods. It doesn’t help Dragonlance or Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms or Spelljammer or Planescape or Ravenloft.
If clerics divorced from the gods was something a large percentage of the fan base wanted, that would have shown up in the feedback.