How do you count things like gods and spirits that you cannot see or touch or otherwise sense?
Not everything is countable. If I understand quantum theory correctly, it is not possible to count the number of electrons in a particular atom at a particular time; you can only measure the average ratio of electrons to protons and neutrons for a collection of atoms of a given kind. The ability to count things depends on strong criteria for deciding when "a thing" is really "two things" or "just one thing". I don't thing our culture as such criteria for spirits or gods.
Yes I know, as a scion of the People of the Book, I'm supposed to believe in monotheism. If I choose atheism (no god) I am damned, but remain (perhaps) a man of reason. Yet if I believe in more than one god, I am not only damned, I'm ignorant and superstitious, since I violate both church and science.
Since the time I realized I no longer believed in the literal truth of the Bible, I've been unable to understand what criteria are to be used to determine whether phenomena of divine origin are the work of a single deity, the product of divine collaboration among many gods, or the vector sum of mutually antagonistic gods. And yet the answer seems to have been such a major point of contention. Try to make a Muslim understand how the Christian Trinity is still monotheism.
How do we count spirits?
For example, take my mind. (Please!) Although like most of you I have a strong sense of having a single consciousness (and there are good evolutionary arguments why this should be the norm among complex animals). But there are numerous reports of people with multiple personalities. If a divinity had multiple personalities, would it be one god or many? Freud and others have postulated multiple components (id, ego, superego, subconscious, etc.) Is the mind one or many? Back when I frequently had to solve technical design problems, it often happened that my "subconscious" worked on the problem while I consciously attended to other things, and later delivered a solution in the form of an eureka experience, as though it happened all at once. Is the subconscious the same spirit as my mind or my conscious mind?
But since I am unpersuaded both by the conclusive arguments for the existence of a god, and by the conclusive arguments against god, if I ask an honest question whether there are aspects of this world that make it reasonable to hypothesize a divine (or spiritual) origin, what criteria would I use to decide whether a positive answer implies that there is one deity (as monotheistic religions proclaim), two deities (as dualistic religions, such as Manichaeism, proclaim), or more (as pantheisms proclaim)?
I ask again: how do you count gods? Maybe if I can figure out how to count, I can answer the question of how many gods there are.
Namiste.