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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doctor Futurity" data-source="post: 6692390" data-attributes="member: 10738">I've always felt that despite the fantastic elements of a typical D&D world it is quite possible to maintain a form of atheism in the setting. The existence of magic which mortals can cast, the ability of those mortals to gain greater and greater power until they are (in most editions) able to defeat gods, suggest that the bar of entry for a deity is fairly low....much, much lower than omnipotence, which is riddled with paradox anyway. For this reason alone I suspect that a great many wizards and other spell-casters who make it to high level in many D&D worlds would question the validity of the gods.Of course, D&D is extremely flexible as a system goes so you can have worlds where the gods are clearly inscrutable or their level of power is unattainable. But the core conceits in at least 1st and 3rd edition seemed to suggest you could wack a deity and even replace him.....meaning deity is almost more like a title in some ways than a profound state of being with cosmic purpose.In the end, an atheist in a D&D setting would probably be someone who refuses to believe that the gods are omnipotent and immortal....rather instead believing they are high level beings of great but still fallible power. This wouldn't be like the atheists of our modern world (of which I am one), who simply abstain from belief in the supernatural due to lack of proof/existence, since a D&D atheist would have lots of evidence that a force called magic does exist....although such a fantasyland atheist might spend a lot of time seeking out the hidden physics behind how magic actually takes effect.</blockquote>

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