I think the most likely situation is that everyone's religious myths are false. But the second most likely is that everyone's religious myths are true, and the least likely is that one is true and the rest are false. I've never actually seen anyone advocate for the second position before.
> But the second most likely is that everyone's religious myths are true... I've never actually seen anyone advocate for the second position before.
You have to expand your understanding of "truth" when it comes to religious myths to make that work, because of course some contradict on their face.
But yeah, I have seen it advocated in several ways. From the sort of liberal platitude "all religions are just different paths to the same underlying diety", to a certain kind of neo-pagan constructivist "We make religions true by believing in them." I lean toward the latter.
Certainly, more people have advocated for the first position than I have.
You’ve heard the allegory of blind men in a dark room trying to describe an elephant to each other, right? Each one holds a different part of the animal. The person holding a leg thinks it’s a tree, the one holding the tail thinks it’s furry, and so on. They can all be right while calling each other wrong.
What definition of "right" are you using? Words have meaning. It sounds cool to say everything can be true but it's rubbish. The man who thinks the elephant leg is a tree is wrong. Is this so difficult to understand?
"Right" in this case means that the evidence each man has gathered is all correct, even if it appears to contradict the stories that others are telling. The conclusions are wrong, but their mode of interacting with the elephant is consistent.
The whole idea of divinity is that it is beyond us. Many cultures say they have knowledge of the divine, but each culture interacts with it differently. And if the thing they are interacting is really some 11-dimensional being, why not both?
So you can conclude that it's a bunch of shared delusions, because it appears to be uncorrelated. But what if it's not? Sometimes, it does seem correlated. Here is where the leap of faith is. (It's always hidden in there somewhere.) What if, instead, they're describing different aspects of the same font of divinity?
Sorry but this is just an example of word mush. It's not complicated. The men are blind. They are not reliable witnesses. The probability of them being correct about any observation they make is very low.
It just sounds cool. Blind men, elephants etc. Mystical woo.
What is important about any model is it's ability to predict the future. The blind men are evidently unable to do this and thus are independently worthless as oracles.
Of course the men could pool their experiences and admit they were wrong about individual predictions and using prior knowledge about objects known in the world would be able to come to the conclusion about the elephant.
However as an allegory about the divine this fails because there is no prior evidence to conclude that there are any such divine objects exist. We don't know what a divine object is.
You then will end up falling back to some variation of Pascal's wager where an infinite value multiplied by zero evidence somehow produces something you sell shares in.
