I have not posted much in this thread. But I'll summarize my position anyway.
Deism is clearly not the same as atheism. Roughly speaking, deism is theism without the crazy. It is a respected position, one that is reasonably well respected by many theists and many atheists.
Many scientists who are Christian have beliefs that are close to those of the deist. That is, they take God as having created the cosmos, and as getting it right from the start so that he did not have to continually interfere. They usually believe a little than vanilla deism. It can perhaps be described as deism plus Jesus.
For myself, I don't have a problem with deists, theists, etc, as long as they avoid trying to impose their beliefs on others. That is to say, I respect freedom of thought.
Jesus was a liberal hippie