Religious revelations are inconsistent

The argument

The argument for the existence of God known as Pascal's Wager states that nonbelievers should change their minds even if only for precautionary reasons — the expected cost of disbelief being large and the cost of belief small. One common reply is that, given the proliferation of different religions, it is extremely unlikely that anyone will bet on the right God. The wager assumes a choice between believing and not believing, when the actual choice is among a great many mutually exclusive options, most of which must be wrong. This is one instance of the argument from inconsistent revelations at work. The observation the argument rests on is not contested. There is an enormous variety of religions, and of denominations within them, many of whose claims are logically incompatible with one another — not merely different in emphasis but such that the truth of one entails the falsity of the others. Each is reported as revealed, and each is held with conviction by people who have the same evidence available to them. The argument from inconsistent revelations does not intend to be a deductive syllogism for the nonexistence of God, but rather a probabilistic one, and the distinction matters. It does not claim that incompatible revelations prove there is no deity; it claims that they make the existence of one less likely than it would otherwise be. From the existence of multiple incompatible faiths it can be argued that probably no deities exist — or that, if they do, they do not care for humanity. The alternative is harder to sustain: a deity that both exists and wished to be known would have to have miserably failed at establishing a religious tradition that was clearly epistemologically superior to its rivals. The state of the world's religions is what one would expect if no such being were making the attempt.

Context

This argument informally states that no particular theology or version of God is believable, since arguments for the existence of God apply generically to many religions.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that inconsistent human revelations tell against the reliability of specific revealed traditions or their interpreters, not against the existence of a deity as such. A God could exist while humans get the details wrong — a possibility consistent with deism, or with the sibling "we can't know" position — so the evidence supports scepticism about particular revelations rather than atheism. They add that the argument's key assumption, that a caring God would have established one "clearly superior" tradition, is contestable. A deity might permit diverse, fallible human attempts or value free response, in which case religious disunity would not count against its existence at all.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] The assumption that a caring God would establish one "clearly superior" tradition is contestable; a deity might permit diverse, fallible human attempts or value free response, so disunity need not count against its existence. [Rejecting P3] Inconsistent revelations tell against specific revealed traditions or human interpreters, not against any deity's existence; at most they support agnosticism, not the stronger claim that God does not exist.