If you’re talking about deism, that’s historically been a halfway house to atheism, since it entails an aloof creator that few people are interested in worshiping.

A benevolent god would be expected to intervene when his creation goes awry. If the universe is only wound up like a clock for God to watch, that would suggest there’s no freedom and that everything that unfolds was intended by God, including the great extinctions, the Nazi Holocaust, serial killings, diseases, and secularization (the rational turning away from God).