FifthView
Vala
For ambiguity's sake, perhaps?
I think it's because, when I think of stories I want to write, my focus is on the people in those stories, the human condition, and having gods walking about among them interacting with the story would remove that focus. But yes, also enabling doubt and skepticism and that eleventh hour desperation for human characters, and for the reader, is more interesting for me.
I have read stories which included such interactive gods and enjoyed them. But I have a natural aversion to putting them in my own stories. This isn't really a decision I make consciously, however, but more like a default starting position.
The presence of very real, very tangible gods raises all sorts of questions as to how a society would function that I do not think the average fantasy addresses well. Many don't address it at all. So far I have two WIPs with religions with gods that you can be sure are as real as your kitchen table; in both cases, they are heavily theocratic.
Yeah, having tangible gods raises so many world building and plot questions.
I do have one WIP in which the empire's founding principle is that a goddess long ago gifted this land to the people and set up the empire's structural elements (form of government, centers of authority, etc.) The empire is a "soft theocracy" in that there's the assumption that the emperor has a divine right to rule and the entire empire has only the one religion. But it's a deist form of belief: The goddess set things up and then departed. The magic in this world is considered another gift from the goddess, but kind of a "standing endowment" sort of thing; she is not making decisions in any direct way to give this person or that person magical ability.
Even this interaction-at-a-distance raises some important questions about the nature of reality: The mere fact that some people acquire magical ability thanks to that goddess's ambient influence means that her influence still exhibits itself within the world, and so who can be skeptical of her existence? This is the effect of having an observable "proof" of a deity's existence.