This is the most characteristic deist belief, from which its other positions follow: because God does not intervene, miracles and revealed prophecy are set aside, and religion rests on reason and nature rather than on divine disclosure. It distinguishes deism sharply from the theistic religions, which affirm a God active in history, answering prayer and working miracles, and equally from atheism, which denies a Creator altogether. The affirmation locates deism as a distinct middle position, and it is presented here as the view deists held.
Critics, both theistic and atheist, have long pressed a practical objection against this picture: if God never intervenes in the world after the initial act of creation, answers no prayer, and works no miracle, some ask what practical religious difference such a distant Creator makes compared to a universe with no God at all. Deists themselves generally answered that the difference lies not in any expected future intervention but in the metaphysical grounding the Creator provides for the universe's order and for objective moral law, and in the reasoned confidence that existence has a purposeful origin, even though that confidence yields no different expectation about what will actually happen in the world than a consistent naturalism would.