I personally see deism as a bunch of atheists who are afraid to call themselves atheists. Or, perhaps they keep believing in a god because of societal or familial pressures to believe in one, but they rightly don't think that any gods interact in any way with anything that happens on earth. They believe this because they don't see any cause & effect with regards to prayer, or why a loving god would allow natural disasters, but they just haven't made the next logical step to realize that there's no reason to even believe in a god which created the universe but doesn't do anything with it. A god which exists but doesn't control anything in the universe is basically the same as no god existing. Since there's no evidence that this ambivilant god exists, then there's no reason to believe in it, especially since we're close to explaining how the universe came to be without a god creating it.
Christian apologetics is the art of rolling a dog turd in sugar and selling it as a donut.
