Epicurus, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The gods exist. We have a prolepsis (preconception) of them that arises naturally and universally from images (eidolas) streaming through the world; this prolepsis is a criterion of truth. The gods are blessed and immortal: the blessed-and-immortal does not undertake trouble itself nor cause trouble to others, and is therefore neither swayed by anger nor by favor.
They live in the intermundia or metakosmia, the spaces between the worlds, in a state of perfect tranquility. They do not punish; they do not reward; they did not create the world; they do not concern themselves with human affairs. The popular religious picture — vengeful, jealous, intervening, demanding sacrifice — projects human anxiety onto the divine and misses what divinity is.
The proper religious posture is reverence for the divine as the perfect exemplar of the tranquil life we ourselves seek; not fear, not bargaining, not propitiation. The relationship between the literalist position (the gods are physically real beings) and the ethical-exemplar interpretation has been disputed since antiquity, and the texts admit both readings.12
And since it is agreed that the gods are most blessed, but no one can be blessed without virtue, nor can virtue exist without reason, nor can reason exist except in a human form, one must concede that the gods have human appearance.. But that appearance is not [really] a body, but a quasi-body, nor does a god have blood, but quasi-blood.The testimony of Cicero, pp. 52–53
This is wishful thinking, not argument.. For you do not say that the atom moves from its place and swerves because it is struck from outside, nor that there is in the void Text 15.24-Text 16.45 through which the atom moves any trace of a cause for it not to move in a straight line, nor is there any change in the atom itself which would cause it not to maintain the natural motion of its weight.The testimony of Cicero, p. 51
The most ambiguous Epicurean position in the surviving texts and the locus of an ongoing modern scholarly debate. Cicero's De Natura Deorum is the most extensive ancient critique, charging that a god who does nothing is no different from no god at all (effective atheism). The modern literalist reading takes the prolepsis-evidence seriously and locates the gods physically in the intermundia. The modern esoteric reading developed by A.A. Long and David Sedley in The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cambridge 1987) reads the gods as 'realist' interpretations of universal mental images, ethical exemplars rather than mind-independent existents. The texts genuinely admit both.