For what it's worth... my two cents:
I understand the rationale behind deism, and it's tempting to go that route since it seems to explain the big mystery of 'Why does anything exist?', without suffering from the gaping holes in logic that belief in the Biblical God suffers from. You get to accept the findings of science without believing in genesis, the flood, jewish zombies, transubstantiation, etc..., and you get to retain some kind of a hope for something beyond this life... a nice compromise. But it still suffers from the largest problem that all religions face... aside from subjective experiences, what good reasons do we have for believing that it is true?
Science hasn't revealed that a God is necessary, quite the opposite in fact. While obviously not disproving the existence of God (which is impossible), we have more reason than ever to think that a God hypothesis is completely UNnecessary to explain the universe. For every rock we lift, and box we open, and every unexplainable thing we finally explain, we don't find a God sitting there. We find another natural principal we weren't aware of before. And usually another mystery to solve.
The suffering in the world is exactly what we would expect to find in a universe that is essentially devoid of (and hostile to) life. When a "theory" purports to explain something, it should make it easier to understand. Not more difficult. Although our world seems incomprehensible at times, stacking an incomprehensible God on top of it makes it no more understandable. We've just needlessly complicated the problem.
I'm not opposed to the idea of gods existing... I just see no good reason to assume they do. Which is why I'm an atheist.
