A few hundred years ago the deist option seemed plausible to a lot of people. (Martin Gardner, a writer I admire a lot, developed a contemporary version of a de

A few hundred years ago the deist option seemed plausible to a lot of people. (Martin Gardner, a writer I admire a lot, developed a contemporary version of a deist view.) This view agrees with what you described up until "if so then some religion has to be true": it affirms that we have reason to believe in a creator (and in some accounts, in divine providence of various sorts) but doesn't expect a divine revelation, or doesn't endorse any claims that we've received one. I remember that Descartes argued that the creator was logically required to be benevolent and that part of that benevolence would then entail getting in touch with humanity and letting us know something about the divine nature. But other thinkers took various other angles on this, including the idea that the divine benevolence is already complete even without revelation, or that revelation occurs in a non-public or even incommunicable way, or still other possibilities. Atheists and deists have both been very preoccupied with the idea that different revealed religions are all extremely plausible to people who are brought up in or around them (in modern times, even different schisms of revealed religions have this characteristic). In the deist account, this might be a reason to doubt that any of them is uniquely intended by the creator to be a revelation to all humanity, since which one people believe is for almost everyone a matter of luck. (Even if one account of revelation is more compelling than others, most people will never have the social conditions to verify this for themselves.) There are lots of theological accounts about why God might allow only some people to discover the true revelation, but a deist (and atheist) alternative is that it's also reasonable to think that that wasn't God's plan.