Technically a god or deity is defined as such when there is some sort of worshipping. That can range from simple rituals like hitting a tin when it's raining to elaborate and organized structures, moral norms, dogmas etc.
Things that have been gods, have stopped being considered as such. Some of them very tangible things that nobody can deny them their existence. Fire, the ocean, storms and whatnots, ancient people had no need to put a "person" in control over those, the forces themselves were unknown and scary enough. Well, fire hasn't changed much but by a huge majority the fire itself isn't regarded as anything divine (your faith's God(s) can be controlling the fire, but that is different).
When considering creationism, I think it's safe to say that the events as described in any known religious record, are not correct. Intelligent Design theory wouldn't need to be around if the majority of people were fine with taking the creation myths literally. We have to go back to a "force" creating the laws of nature rather than that force rolling up a sun, or one of those forces being the sun itself (and the sun is vital, so Sun gods have been all over the place).
I do consider myself atheist, and frankly that is very unlikely to change even if the existence of a force that creates universes like ours is absolutely proven. A few scenarios:
- created by a non-sentient force. Like something that creates universes like we create CO2. This is the closest to today's fire-atheism vs. ancient people worshipping fire. That force which creates universes, or at least one universe and its laws, is nobody's god. It never dictated holy books or did revelations. IMO a strong believer would cope with such an unaware and undemanding entity a lot harder than an atheist. I'm certainly not going to worship that force. Just be wowed at what stuff exists.
- created by a sentient, non-intervening force. Maybe a huge experiment for observations. Maybe it's not even observing. That isn't any religion's god either. It doesn't demand certain behaviour, doesn't judge, doesn't do anything once the universe is there. It would be like discovering the super aliens that are not out to rule and kill us.
- created by a sentient, intervening force. This is the Intelligent design more or less. Something created the universe, it has let us know the rules, it expects us to worship. And the problem to me is that the creation myths can't be true, so that part of this god's faith is false. Did that god continuously reveal more and more sophisticated creation stories and sides of itself (because, seriously, the gaps between a fire god, a scandalous Greek gods society and self-sacrificing Jesus are huge). Or was it a team? Did they tell a different story in different parts of the world? Are all religions and their gods true? Or is it just one and everyone else is making stuff up because for some reason that creator only chose to tell some, conveniently not scattered around the world?
Another possibility is that people needed an explanation of where they were and who they were and myths came around. That is proven behaviour of humans. So I take the logical approach that humans come up with explanations that are not true when lacking knowledge, that humans can believe a lot of things they are told when lacking knowledge, that religion has been used for social control and it's good at that, and that of course we lack any evidence even about further interventions putting the creation aside.
We cannot disprove much about the current gods. The ones like the sun has been disproved however. The ones now are a lot more elusive seeing as we don't know where they are or what they are or whether we can see/sense/measure anything about them.
Recap - While I don't think our world was crafted in its mechanisms (planned or unplanned), even if one day we had no doubt about that being the case, I absolutely don't believe that this creator has anything to do with people's various gods.
