Benevolent Creator God?

[R00tKiT]

They simply dismiss prophets as delusional (at best), or charlatans (at worst).

If you dismiss by default any individual who claims being the recipient of some divine revelation, then you will be begging a basic theological question: did God send prophets or not? 

According to you, we're supposed to immediately assign all such grandiose claims to psychopathology. You need to actually make a case for that, or at worst withhold judgement on what religious experiences should mean. We are all somewhat delusional, finite brains like ours can't nail down reality with 100%, modern science already exposed many thresholds of knowledge (the uncertainty principle in physics, for example) that we can never exceed. All people who lived before Einstein were delusional about time and gravity, for example,

So, delusion being an umbrella term for many things, you need to find better reasons to dismiss prophets.

I think you got it backwards.
Mankind has evolved as a social species. Think that chimps, bonobos, gorillas, etc. have all also evolved as social species. This means that humans were social far before being humans.
As mankind evolved and became aware of the world and its own mortality, along with the desire to remain alive, surely many attempts were made to explain the mind, death, and all the physical phenomena around them. Without the right tools for that job, many of those explanations must have been nothing more than guesswork. Some more outlandish, some less.... some stuck around, some were forever forgotten.

As I said before, repeatedly : natural explanations don't preclude supernatural explanations. The fact that we know how and why lightening occurs actually doesn't negate Thor's existence. You are stuck with agnosticism with regards to the supernatural whether you can explain natural phenomena or not.

So, mentioning how our understanding of the world evolved is completely irrelevant to whether there is a creator of this world, or to whether religious interpretations of natural phenomena should be accepted.

As a social species, one would expect those individuals who were more suited to accept the prevailing explanations to be accepted into the society and thus have better chance at surviving and mating. This forms a feedback loop where selection acts in such a way as to prefer individuals that are ever more accepting of those explanations. This acceptance of the unproven, this belief, became embedded in the human brain and we see it today as a particular structure seemingly dedicated to belief.

Although this point of view is interesting, the problem with it, and with other natural explanations of religion, is that they can be seen both ways. It could be that a creator equipped us with brains that are tilted to memetics and feedblack loops, in such a way that religious ideas like the afterlife survive and become widespread.

Wouldn't you expect the contents of a divine message to somewhat click with the brains of the recipients of this divine message- us ? 

From my point of view, if there was to be a powerful being as god is supposed to be, I'd expect that being to be able to communicate with everyone equally and unequivocally. If the guy is said to be so convincing to those who became known as prophets, what's to stop him/it from doing the same to everyone else? Shyness?..I doubt it. So either there is a god who interacts with the whole of humanity and has done so since the beginning of time (which doesn't seem to have happened), or the god is simply not interacting with anyone... or is non-existent.

The question then seems to become why does anyone accept the messages brought forth by the alleged prophets?

Well it's not really clear that God didn't communicate with us at all, there are arguments for the sensus divinitatis, and the observation that we are tilted towards teleology and forming beliefs seems to support them. 

Besides, it's not really necessary for God to communicate with everyone individually. Almost every fact or true proposition you know about the world came to you through other people, except the very few things you get to experience in your lifespan.