So like a god in my universe would have an elaborate infrastructure of administrators, spokespeople and high level clergy and perhaps once every 200 years the actual deity makes an appearance ...
Seems about right. Bureaucracy hits the deities as much as it hits the PCs and the governments.
Do you have gods who show up and interact with the players in a divine intervention manner, or are they silent and not seen but grant powers?
Gods making direct appearances are rare in my philosophy, and generally manifest as the result of some major story arc having happened. The Pact World pantheon (I play in the Pact Word setting) is replicated across the galaxy and beyond in endless variation, where the variation sometimes strays into whole new deities or totally different concepts.
But the Gods turning up directly should be rare and I particularly enjoy having the Gods mediated through fast-food kiosk-like easy-access belief, where massive temples are a rarity but little local "shrine ports" or "kiosks" are common.
My campaign has some issues because it's based historically on Earth which has a very limited pantheon
Or does it? Don't underestimate Earth's inventiveness. For example, every God that everyone ever conceived in a fictional setting could become a "real" god at some future point, with enough followers to feed it as a "real" thing. Think of things like the Church of the Subgenius, Dudeism or Jedi-ism, all of which started as larks before people lost track of the line between irony and reality.
For that matter, there's nothing to stop you introducing D&D and Pathfinder deities from the same route. Deities that started out as fictions and later acquired substance. There's nothing to stop your general framework from functioning in that instance.
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There are atheists in the Paizo Universe. In Pathfinder, Golarian had Rahadoum, an entire nation that had given up on gods and religious conflict as bad news, and forbade their worship. (As a result, they've suffered pretty much every 'natural' disaster one can imagine, because gods can be vindictive bastards.)
Most of the time, deities won't matter to your party. Mystics could have connections to philosophies rather than to deities. But I do like the idea of the importing the Chinese bureaucracy of heaven to your world, making every god only reachable through layers and layers of bureacracy. Do also remember that Earth currently has many gods. The Hindu religion has many, many deities, each with their own specialties and spheres of interest. I've always thought that Triune would fit easily into the Hindu pantheon, which is pretty good at adapting new gods within its framework.
I happen to like the Starfinder setting -- so many races and story hooks in the Pact Worlds -- but you can do similar things in the Earth solar system if you would like that kind of diversity.
Reading between the lines though, I think that your main concern is that you want religion to matter more to your characters more than a mere mechanical benefit. Is that correct? If so... I think that Starfinder's Pact Worlds setting does a fabulous job of that. I love that the priest theme means that anyone can be a priest, no matter what their class. There are mechanic priests of Trune, which is awesome. There are deeply abiding faiths with followers -- anytime you visit the Sun, you have to deal with Sarenrae's faithful -- but there's also a lot of people going about their own business because the gods have better things to do than interfere with humans most of the time.
Hmm
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I play off much of the powerful outsiders and deities as if they were an elder civilization or some kind of multi-dimensional beings (which canonically they are) rather than just a god in the fantasy sense. In a way it’s more a matter of tone, more cosmic being from a marvel comic than the Lord of Light from Game of Thrones. Star finder actually details out some places where you can interact with deities directly; Triune’s city, The Avatar of Hylax, Carsai the King’s citadel.
In my current campaign the party is dealing with the relics of a solar that a mi-go had removed from its body and placed the blood and brain into its jars and the heart into a ophidian creature as part of a wide ranging plot from the dominion of the black. They aren’t dealing with this in a religious sense, more of a mysterious plot from elder civilizations to destroy the Pact Worlds and the drift, and it is paced and presented more like a Guardians of the Galaxy story rather than Lord of the Rings.
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Starfinder as a whole scales down the gods a bit compared to Pathfinder. They're still around and we know it, but mystics don't need to pray to a god to gain power. Some of them do, others don't.
It's also worth considering that the claim that gods make to peoples' lives is smaller than we're used to on earth. No god claims credit for creating the whole universe or for giving all of life meaning. (Okay, Asmodeus does make such claims, but we don't really believe him.)
I think a lot of people would still have a favorite deity to pray to - a merchant might pray mostly to Abadar. But they'll also turn to other deities if they're faced with a problem that seems more in their portfolio. If our mechant's mother falls sick with an obscure and incurable disease, the merchant might make some big donations to the church of Sarenrae's charities in the hope of some help. Or he might try to appease Urgathoa, hoping she'll stay her hand; although he doesn't like Urgathoa, he thinks she could help.
If you die, you get judged and sent to a plane in keeping with your beliefs but also your alignment. People who weren't very religious, but were decent sorts, might still make it to a nice upper plane. In the very early days of Pathfinders there was all sorts of talk of Pharasma doing mean things to atheists, but Paizo has gradually walked that back and nowadays irreligious people still go to an afterlife somewhere appropriate.
So it's totally possible for someone to be strongly motivated by religion; but also for someone to be rather casual about it. Just because someone knows the gods exist doesn't mean his whole life has to revolve around them.
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Reading between the lines though, I think that your main concern is that you want religion to matter more to your characters more than a mere mechanical benefit. Is that correct? If so... I think that Starfinder's Pact Worlds setting does a fabulous job of that. I love that the priest theme means that anyone can be a priest, no matter what their class. There are mechanic priests of Trune, which is awesome. There are deeply abiding faiths with followers -- anytime you visit the Sun, you have to deal with Sarenrae's faithful -- but there's also a lot of people going about their own business because the gods have better things to do than interfere with humans most of the time.Hmm
Yes. I want religion to be the driving motivational force in the campaign. That doesn't necessarily mean the PCs will buy into that, but the NPCs will be. I say that because how much more religious would earth be if there was zero doubt the gods they prayed to actually existed and had meaningful interventions in their lives?
I wouldn't call the people "atheists" who have turned their back on the gods in the Starfinder setting. They don't doubt the existence of the gods, they just don't want to do their bidding. (I'm assuming, I'm not familiar with the setting)
I'm given to understand that the original usage of the word athiest actually referred to individuals in the ancient greek world who acknowledged that the gods existed, but didn't find them worth following. I personally find that to be a perfectly valid if not universal definition for atheist within the context of a fictional world where the gods exist.
You can split that hair a few different ways, really. Some "atheist" may believe the gods "exists", but quibble over the definition of the word "god"; sure, Iomedae exists, you can plane-shift to heaven & meet her. And sure, she can kick your rear if you annoy her or answer a trivia question wrong(kind of unreasonable with the gap & all, if you ask me), but hey, I'm a level 2 mechanic; that level 20 technomancer is no less capable of laying the smack down on me; should I worship him, too? They aren't gods, they're just powerful extraplanar individuals. They're born, they live, they eventually die.
Where as another individual might not dispute that the gods are gods, the just don't personally feel any call of faith or spiritual resonance with them, their church, their dogma & doctrine, and choose to follow their own path & conceive.
Then you might have people who actively doubt the gods exist. People who only believe what they see with their own eyes. Sure, you can planeshift to heaven &, in theory, meet Iomedae, but of course it isn't that easy & even if it was, 99.999999999999999951 percent of people are never going to do that. Maybe the gods exist, maybe they don't, I don't know. I just know that a lot of people say a lot of things & most of them are selling something.
You could even take that a step further & have a subculture of people who believe that gods, alternate planes, the drift, all of it is fake, an elaborate conspiracy to control the populous. No small number of people believe the debunked & disproven notion that the Earth is flat & that there's a massive conspiracy to suppress that knowledge; isn't hard to imagine how such a movement could pop up in the Pact Worlds regarding other aspects of the universe that we all take for granted with our near omniscient view of the setting.
Rahadoum would be termed maltheists in our world