Argument from Inconsistent Revelations

Overview

The Argument from Inconsistent Revelations is a family of arguments in the philosophy of religion that appeals to the diversity and mutual incompatibility of religious doctrines grounded in alleged divine revelation. Its central claim is that the existence of many sincere, well-developed, yet doctrinally conflicting religions significantly weakens the rational justification for believing that any one religion’s revelations are uniquely true or reliably divine.

Unlike arguments that aim to refute the existence of God outright, the Argument from Inconsistent Revelations targets the epistemic status of specific revealed traditions—claims that particular texts, prophets, or religious experiences convey authoritative information from God. It is closely related to, but distinct from, the Argument from Religious Disagreement and the Religious Diversity Problem. Where those focus on the fact of disagreement, this argument highlights the special status that each tradition attributes to its own revelations and the difficulty of choosing among them without circularity.

Historically, versions of this reasoning can be found in ancient critiques of rival cults and in early modern freethought literature, where authors pointed to the plurality of religions as evidence against the special claims of any one. In contemporary analytic philosophy, it appears in discussions about the epistemology of religion, often in debates about religious exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism.

Formal Structure and Variants

A simplified formal version centers on revelation as a purported reliable source of religious knowledge:

1. Many religious traditions claim to be based on revelations from God (or the divine), including scriptures (e.g., the Bible, Qur’an, Vedas), prophetic messages, visions, and ongoing guidance.
2. These revelations, as interpreted by their respective communities, yield mutually incompatible doctrines (for example, about the number of gods, the identity of Jesus, the nature of salvation, or the final destiny of human beings).
3. At most one set of these incompatible doctrines can be entirely correct; therefore, most (and possibly all) of the alleged revelations must be at least partly unreliable or misinterpreted.
4. There is no neutral, widely accessible, non-circular method that decisively identifies which revelation (if any) is the uniquely reliable one, especially given that each tradition tends to justify itself by appealing to its own revelation or internal criteria.
5. When a purported source of knowledge gives rise to persistent, unresolved, and deep contradictions, this counts as evidence against its general reliability.
6. Therefore, the phenomenon of inconsistent revelations provides a defeater (or at least a serious evidential challenge) to the rationality of taking any particular revelation as uniquely and authoritatively divine.

Within this basic outline, philosophers distinguish several variants:

• Evidentialist variant: Emphasizes that the evidence from religious diversity reduces the probability that any given revelation is authentic, especially when equally sincere and intelligent people accept incompatible revelations.
• Internalist epistemic variant: Argues that from the point of view of a reflective believer aware of global religious diversity, the awareness of conflicting revelations undermines one’s internal justification for exclusive commitment to a single tradition.
• Comparative probability variant: Maintains that given many mutually exclusive revelation-based systems, the prior probability that any one is correct is low unless special, independent evidence strongly favors it.
• Pragmatic decision variant: Uses inconsistency to argue that faith commitments based on revelation are practically risky or arbitrary when seen against the backdrop of global religious options.

These versions share the intuition that pervasive inconsistency in alleged divine messages challenges the claim that divine revelation, in practice, functions as a clear and reliable guide to religious truth.

Major Criticisms and Responses

The Argument from Inconsistent Revelations is widely discussed and contested. Responses typically fall into several broad strategies.

1. Exclusivist replies

Religious exclusivists accept that only one revelation (or one family of revelations) is fully correct. They may respond:

• Error is expected: Human limitations, cultural filters, and sin may distort or misinterpret genuine revelation, explaining why many people embrace false or partial revelations.
• Asymmetrical evidence: They claim there is specific historical, textual, or miraculous evidence that uniquely supports their tradition (e.g., alleged fulfilled prophecies, miracles, the resurrection of Jesus, the Qur’an’s inimitability), so the presence of rivals does not significantly undercut their own justification.
• Noetic effects of sin or ignorance: Some theological frameworks hold that cognitive and moral failings help explain why sincere seekers can miss the true revelation.

Critics of exclusivism reply that these strategies often rely heavily on internal criteria (such as one’s own scripture) and may appear question-begging from an external, neutral standpoint.

2. Inclusivist and pluralist replies

Inclusivists maintain that one revelation is supremely authoritative but that other religious traditions contain partial truths or preparatory revelations. This allows them to acknowledge diversity without seeing it as entirely inconsistent, reinterpreting rival revelations as imperfect reflections of one ultimate truth.

Religious pluralists (e.g., in some forms of John Hick’s work) reinterpret doctrinal contradictions as culturally conditioned responses to a single, ineffable Ultimate Reality. On this view, revelations differ in surface content but are all symbolic, limited attempts to engage the same transcendent source. The argument’s force is thereby reduced because the supposed incompatibilities are seen as secondary or metaphorical rather than literal contradictions.

Opponents argue that inclusivist and pluralist models may conflict with how many traditions understand themselves (for instance, where exclusivist truth-claims are central) and that they sometimes preserve coherence only by weakening or re-symbolizing key doctrines.

3. Skeptical-theist and mystery-based replies

Some theistic philosophers adopt a skeptical theist stance, suggesting that human beings should not expect to understand why God would permit or even use a diversity of revelations. On this view, the inference from “we see inconsistent revelations” to “revelation is unreliable” is questioned: perhaps divine reasons lie beyond human comprehension.

Advocates of the argument respond that while such appeals to mystery may preserve logical possibility, they do little to address the epistemic challenge: the believer still faces the practical question of which revelation to follow and how to justify that choice rationally.

4. Attacks on the epistemic principles

Another line of criticism targets the underlying epistemic principles in the argument:

• Some reject the idea that widespread disagreement always defeats justification, pointing to other domains (ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics) where deep disagreement does not obviously undermine rational commitment.
• Others argue that the argument is self-defeating if extended too far: philosophical positions themselves face deep disagreement, yet philosophers do not typically treat this as a reason to suspend judgment on all philosophical claims.

Defenders of the argument respond that revelation has special features—it claims to be an authoritative divine communication—and so the existence of multiple, clashing alleged messages from the same divine source is especially troubling in a way that ordinary philosophical disagreement is not.

5. Naturalistic and skeptical uses

From a naturalistic or skeptical standpoint, the Argument from Inconsistent Revelations is often taken as evidence that religions are primarily human cultural products, not responses to a single, objectively revealed truth. On this reading, the global pattern of incompatible revelations is better explained by sociological, psychological, and historical processes than by the hypothesis of a revealing deity.

Theists typically counter that such naturalistic explanations may be compatible with a theistic view (for example, God working through culture, or human distortion of genuine revelation), and so the argument at most shifts the burden of explanation rather than decisively refuting revelation.

Across these debates, the Argument from Inconsistent Revelations remains an important tool for examining how, and to what extent, claims of special divine communication can be rationally justified in a religiously plural world. It functions less as a knock-down refutation than as a sustained invitation to clarify the criteria by which competing revelations are to be evaluated and how believers should respond to the fact of global religious diversity.