Eben said:
Could a D&D world have non-interventionist gods? Or does the whole divine magic system presuppose hands-on types of gods?
Is the granting of spells and powers something a god chooses to do or could you say that it's something he or she has no control over?
If the gods of a D&D setting chose to be non-interventionist (having reached a divine truce, I guess), would you still have divine magic?
Peter
(with apologies is this is a bit esotheric.)
Here's the thing with divine magic. By core D&D rules, a cleric can use divine magic even when their devotion is to a philosophy or abstract concept rather than a deity. For instance, you could easily do some sort of Buddhist cleric in D&D.
This strongly suggest to me that divine magic isn't a "gift" of the gods in the sense that some god is sitting down and making a conscious decision to transfer spellcasting power to specific clerics every day. Rather in D&D-land, certain people have the ability to align their minds and souls with what I shall call extra-dimensional sources of energy. From these sources of energy, divine casters can (through their own exertion of will) draw forth power.
And remember that in D&D-land, ideas can often manifest as real, solid, objects. Many of the other planes of existance are nothing but abstract concepts frozen in physical form. So a cleric of the god of crafts might not so much be getting his power from the deity as from the very concept of crafts, which the cleric personifies as a god.
The alignment restrictions on clerics may be viewed simply as the danger of the cleric falling too far out of tune with the concept from which they draw their power. Note that there's nothing else in the text about a god having the power to withdraw spellcasting ability from a cleric.
So yes, if you have remote gods who do nothing else, then existance of divine spellcasters is not necessarily proof of their existance. (Though the great mass of people will understandably take it as such. After all, most people want to believe.)
Though it might be interesting to have semi-interventionist gods who likewise have no power to withdraw spellcasting ability from clerics who act in thier name. Hey, just because you worship the power of lightning and storm don't mean you agree with the god of lightning and storm on every little thing.