Talk:Argument from inconsistent revelations

message: *Argument_against_any_specific_God - Although I am an atheist myself, an article with this title cannot exist without being POV. Atheist rant. Mrdice 09:21, 2004 Feb 23 (UTC)
**POV Atheist rant. Delete. Optim 09:35, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: That was in the article as originally written.  There are in fact two "points" to be made by this line of reasoning.  The first, that inconsistent revelations, where you damn yourself according to one faith by accepting another, alter the payoff matrix of Pascal's Wager.  The second line of reasoning states that if an all powerful God chooses to reveal a plan of salvation, the revelation should be so unmistakable and convincing that all who consider it know it is from God.  The existence of disagreements about which faith to follow, the possibility of contradictory prayers, and similar contradictions in practice suggest that no all powerful god has revealed a true religion to humans.  -- Smerdis of Tlön 05:30, 2 Mar 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Votes for Deletion

message: I removed the section below because it implies that if someone claiming to be a witness to revelation is found to have told a lie, or made an inaccurate prediction then he did not witness the revelation, and that if he is found to have made an accurate prediction then he did witness revelation. I predicted the colts to win the 2007 super bowl, but that doesnt mean my statements about God are true. The fallacy here is an appeal to authority, I believe.
Removed paragraph:
Believers have a number of stratagems to counter this argument. It assumes, for example, that none of them make verifiable predictions about what can be found in history or science. The presence of a testable proposition in a revelation may provide a way to assess the credentials of the prophet who claims to speak for a deity; an error about an inter-subjectively demonstrable fact casts doubt on the remaining propositions that cannot be verified. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Tritium6 (talk • contribs) 20:05, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Rebuttal is logically inconsistent 

message: Could someone please tidy up the first paragraph, as the first word is above the entire paragraph. Thankyou.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.33.99.227 (talk) 08:37, 7 September 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Errors in layout of article 

message: I think the "systematic description" section should be removed. It doesn't cite any sources, it's mathematically dodgy, and it has only given fruit to silly disputes above ("logical problems" thread).
It's dodgy in light of modern probability theory because it inappropriately gives equal prior plausibility to every model in any arbitrary set (say: catholicism, hard atheism, anglicism, islam, flying spaghetti monster) thereby leading to nonsense conclusions (e.g. hard-atheism is precisely three times less probable to be true than the abrahamic deity). 
The fact is, it's a complete misinterpretation. The argument is not supposed to be direct support for hard atheism. Instead it is supposed to refute a large class of arguments supporting religion. By nullify all those, this argument constitutes indirect support for soft-atheism (and agnosticism). No more, no less.
(Its consequence for the debate is that it purports to reduce the theist to only using arguments that do not favour her own particular beliefs anyway - except ones based on any rare points where her religion is obviously unique from the set of all conceivable beliefs.) Cesiumfrog (talk) 09:14, 10 June 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that trying to explain this argument in mathematical terms both dodges and dilutes the real issue being argued.  But there is some merit to doing so - it may be difficult to get the general idea of the argument without seeing it in some reasonably concrete terms.  I don't think I know enough about this topic to know if the formula, which basically says "They can't ALL be right", is even close to the real argument or not, but that's always been my impression of it: Since each religion was created by its people and is purely a matter of belief, each religion believes it is the CORRECT one, and someone from the outside with no other evidence would have to look at all of the available religions and decide which one was correct, if any, it's logical to conclude that in fact NONE of them are likely to be correct (there's an increasingly small chance of any one of them being the correct one, as the number of faiths increases).  That sort of logical argument is possible to express mathematically, but of course reducing it to that eliminates a lot of the nuances that would likely affect one's choice of belief (whether to believe, what to believe, etc.). — KieferSkunk (talk) — 20:31, 10 June 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that the "systematic description" should be either deleted or seriously edited by someone with a solid handle on the argument. The argument presented in the "systematic description" is not systematic, and it begins with the phrase "in mathematical terms" and the proceeds to use non-mathematical descriptions in its non-systematic exposition of the argument. If the consensus is that the description section should be deleted, then I support deleting the entire article. If the article can be substantially rewritten it may be worth saving since there is indeed some professional literature on this problem. 76.119.208.81 (talk) 22:23, 26 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  hokus systematic description section 

message: Where mentioned, theistic texts that render some version of theism exclusive over all others should cite to passages within those scriptures or major theological works that are apropos to such a point. Similarly, the proposed immunity of deism to this argument should either discuss, link to, or cite a discussion of the problem on this point that deism, henotheism, and polytheism are incompatible with each other but are all compatible with the argument from inconsistent revelation. Thomas Paine discusses but dismisses this point in two or three very brief passages in I think a formally invalid way, and there is some interesting literature in Greek philosophy, especially the latter works of Plato on Socrates, on this point. In short, more citations please!  76.118.32.67 (talk) 12:34, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Deism vs. theism in this argument 

message: There is a glaring logic error in the mathematical description, in that it seems to assume that the correct descriptor must come from the set of descriptors that men know about. But it is entirely possible that 1) the exists a 'God' but 2) no human religion provides a correct descriptor of this entity, and so the presumption of there being a God does not require that this God come from the 1/n set of beliefs held by people, but from the 1/y set of all possible descriptors of a God. DeistCosmos (talk) 17:13, 8 December 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Logic error in mathematical description 

message: Yes the Torah does say not to worship any other gods but as far as I know all of the other gods it names it says are false gods. It certainly says that about Baal and Moloch anyway. 86.42.121.148 (talk) 01:22, 16 June 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dubious 

message: Is the argument from inconsistent revelations the same as the argument from religious confusion, or the problem of religious diversity? Τζερόνυμο (talk) 19:08, 18 May 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: They seem like alternate names for the same argument, yes.Mcc1789 (talk) 04:24, 10 June 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: I think renaming the article could be a good idea. If I plug "argument from inconsistent revelations" in Google scholar, I don't find anything. If I plug in "problem of religious diversity", there is at least a book and several articles (not so with "argument from religious confusion". I think we could help solving the dearth of sources in this article by changing the title and mining the sources about the "problem of religious diversity". MonsieurD (talk) 15:24, 17 July 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  There is also alot of material about the same concept here on Wikipedia. Another reliable and reputable source about a similar problem can be found here. MonsieurD (talk) 19:20, 17 September 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Hmm.. the article says that this is an argument against the existence of god without a source. I don't see how this could end up being about the existence of god. It would be an argument against a wrong god or exclusivistic religion, but not really argument against the existence of god. The plurality of cultures is not an argument for the nonexistence of cultures and the plurality of religions is not an argument against the existence of religions either.Ramos1990 (talk) 23:09, 17 September 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  Hi , I've changed the lede to make it say that it's an argument about the possibility to know if any single religion is the right one. I think that's closer to the idea. Tell me what you think.MonsieurD (talk) 13:27, 18 September 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: It makes more sense, and is more in line with one of the sources you mentioned. But I don't really see how this articles could be related to atheism in the infobox. Furthermore, it does not really seem to be a problem for most religions except the handful of exlcusivistic religion - which is already dealt with by them already (e.g. Christainity, missionaries, apologetics and the Tower of Babel) and does not appear to be a legitimate issue. The fact that very few sources are found for this means that it is not really a stand alone topic in academic literature. At least this article may need to include religious solutions to pluralism that already exist.Ramos1990 (talk) 03:27, 19 September 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Same arguments? Confusion....