Argument.
The argument from inconsistent revelations can be formulated as follows:
P1. If God exists, we would expect faithful seekers of God to produce compatible revelations
P2. But faithful seekers of God produce incompatible revelations
C. Therefore God does not exist
Response.
This argument resembles the problem of evil in that it has both a logical and an evidential formulation. The logical problem claims that the mere existence of incompatible revelations is flatly inconsistent with the existence of God. The evidential problem claims that the degree of incompatibility we observe is unexpected on the hypothesis of God and therefore counts against His existence.
The logical version is weak. The fact that people produce conflicting religious claims does not entail that no God exists. Countless individuals claim revelations, and no one—atheist or theist—believes all such claims are genuine. A simple and obvious solution is that some revelations are true and many are not. Logical incompatibility among all purported revelations therefore poses no contradiction.
William Alston has commented on the nature and difficulty of revelations:
Why shouldn’t there be realms, modes, or dimensions of reality that are so difficult for us to discern that widespread agreement is extremely difficult or impossible to attain even if some veridical cognition of that realm is achieved…It may be that God makes basic truths about Himself readily available to all persons, regardless of race, creed or color… Thus I would suggest that the facts of religious diversity are at least as well explained by the hypothesis that there is some transcendent reality with which some or all religions are in touch, though of course they cannot all have it exactly right.1
On this view, disagreement is not surprising; it is exactly what we would expect given human limitations.
Regarding the evidential problem, this argues that the current situation we find ourselves in is simply inconsistent with what we would expect God to want or allow. It is argued that it is much more likely that the situation we find ourselves in (with regards to incompatible revelations) is because God does not exist.
As the burden of proof is on the proponent of this argument, it is necessary to show that not seeing any good reason for God allowing the current number of incompatible revelations is the reason why there probably are no good reasons for God allowing the current number of incompatible revelations.
This of course is a noseeum inference, which is not convincing unless we are able to successfully search the entire area, and would expect to see something if it was there.
But how confident are we in the inference that God has no good reason to allow so many incompatible revelations? Theists should rightly be skeptical about this claim for the same reasons as the issues with the problem of evil. William Alston has explained the problems with believing we are in a position to see any goods if there were any:
1. Lack of data. This includes, inter alia, the secrets of the human heart, the detailed constitution and structure of the universe, and the remote past and future, including the afterlife if any.
2. Complexity greater than we can handle. Most notably there is the difficulty of holding enormous complexes of fact-different possible worlds or different systems of natural law-together in the mind sufficiently for comparative evaluation.
3. Difficulty of determining what is metaphysically possible or necessary. Once we move beyond conceptual or semantic modalities (and even that is no piece of cake) it is notoriously difficult to find any sufficient basis for claims as to what is metaphysically possible, given the essential natures of things, the exact character of which is often obscure to us and virtually always controversial. This difficulty is many times multiplied when we are dealing with total possible worlds or total systems of natural order.
4. Ignorance of the full range of possibilities. This is always crippling when we are trying to establish negative conclusions. If we don’t know whether or not there are possibilities beyond the ones we have thought of, we are in a very bad position to show that there can be no divine reasons for permitting evil.
5. Ignorance of the full range of values. When it’s a question of whether some good is related to E in such a way as to justify God in permitting E, we are, for the reason mentioned in 4., in a very poor position to answer the question if we don’t know the extent to which there are modes of value beyond those of which we are aware. For in that case, so far as we can know, E may be justified by virtue of its relation to one of those unknown goods.
6. Limits to our capacity to make well considered value judgments. The chief example of this we have noted is the difficulty in making comparative evaluations of large complex wholes.2
The theist does not need to argue that God does have good reason for allowing incompatible revelations, only that we do not have sufficient reason to think that God does not have sufficient reason. Perhaps God does have good reason, perhaps if all revelations were compatible then each person would be less inclined to act in faith or seek personal revelation and a direct relationship with God and instead just follow the crowd who have all received the same revelation. Perhaps God is more concerned with the person’s commitment to the revelation rather than to correcting the content itself.
We should of course expect to see inconsistent claims of revelation, however it is a heavy burden to carry to say that God probably does not exist because we should see more consistent revelations than we currently do.