This [the 4 elements of Greek alchemy] is not something that just springs up from direct observation, the fire "thing" as observed directly by dwarves is opposed to the water "thing" (along with all the other smothering things).
I agree that the Fire vs. Water, Earth vs. Air oppositions are definitely more open to interpretation & opinion than many, more absolute, oppositions like Gaiety vs. Misery, Food vs. Poison, etc. So I say [again] that the RNG should have differently-weighted odds of certain combinations; Flat-out contradictory domains like Law and Chaos should probably have a 1% chance of being given to the same deity (who assumedly would be interpreted as the god of the Chaos-Order continuum), while those with some grey area could be more in the 5-25% range.
It does not work and never has to have gods simply as souped up mortals. When gods start to be taken literally as just more powerful human beings then the religion is basically decaying and about to be overthrown by a new religion with a less literal, more metaphorical view of their gods humanity.
I'm not going to trouble myself with the academia nuts running rampant in the handful of recent posts above, but rather take a different tack: The Greek playwrights depicted their gods as vain, debaucherous, jealous, lazy, wrathful, and indignant, for all the same reasons that men would be expected to feel such emotions. Moreover, we find that the tradition of writing gods in this way lasted for
hundreds of years, even longer if we include the Romans' wholesale co-opting of the pantheon. This is a far cry from "basically decaying and about to be overthrown". The Norse gods are a similarly flawed and rambunctious lot, and although their sagas are much more difficult to date (Viking bards hardly ever wrote anything down), they do seem to have lasted for a similarly long time.
A religion based upon literal human-like divinities does not work unless those divinities are actually physically present and possess overwhelming power, but in that case why call it a religion at all? That is because the presence of a divinity must be 'felt' in a non-literal sense by the believers in order for the effort expended by the worshippers in sustaining the religion to 'turn a profit' as it were.
The Religion arc will surely give us Priests, but it may not be until the Magic arc that those Priests can cast actual
spells in relation to one or more spheres in their god's domain. One can certainly argue that these spells would not "profit" the god in terms of spiritual energy unless they were performed before a fairly large audience, but that only seems fair. The deity's physical manifestation itself could be looked on as miraculous, and seems appropriate for the anointing of a new priest. Whether or not the god possesses a human-like personality seems irrelevant.
While women do have the ability to carry a pregnancy to term without male help, they are completely unable to become pregnant themselves. Since it is the arrival of a male being that brings pregnancy 'into' a woman, it makes sense to represent pregnancy as a male god that enters it's female devotees *as* the pregnancy itself. As I have pointed out, the matter is indeed 50/50 because a female god of pregnancy can get pregnant making her symbolic *of* pregnancy, nothing really connects her divine pregnancy to that of mortal women.
A . . . female god of pregnancy wins the symbolic war but has less relationship to it's pregnant worshippers than the male god of pregnancy which is able to represent both her relationship to the father that impregnated the woman and the fetus inside the woman at the same time.
As if a female pregnancy goddess couldn't initiate a pregnancy every bit as easily--and making the deity male would raise the question of "if it was the
god who got her pregnant, then what exactly did the
husband contribute?" Personally, I prefer a goddess who visits every conception to bless the union with a tiny spark of new life broken off of her own unborn fetus. She provides neither sperm nor egg, she merely controls the
merging of the two, and protects the fetus during gestation.