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Discussing the merits of the article itself: is the stuff about prayer really relevant? It seems to be starting a whole new argument, one that doesn't actually rely on conflicting revelations. For example two Christians who both believe exactly the same thing about God could be praying for contradictory things (such as to get the same job). I'm not saying the prayer question isn't an issue, but that it's a different issue. DJ Clayworth 15:20, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Added an additional point to the argument. I was torn between the bold statement of the argument (which I went with) and a weaselly 'some critics of the argument say'. If anyone can improve on my phraseology please do so. DJ Clayworth 15:27, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)
In an effort to keep this page extant because I think it is a valuable part of philosophy, I've revised a lot of grammar, punctuation, and cleared up some points. However, I didn't touch the part on prayer and the paragraphs following it. I agree with others in that the article does not benefit from the inclusion of the problem of prayer, that is suitable for a different article, and the following text does not make sense to me. I can't tell what's being referred to, and I didn't want to revise it for fear of changing the intended meaning. Simply put, do the final paragraphs deal with the title article, or the opposition to it? Would the original author please clarify this? Comments? TimothyPilgrim 16:10, Mar 22, 2004 (UTC) Delete the math section atleast. An equation can't determine salvation or the true path to God. That makes no sense. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.58.250.209 ( talk) 18:58, 17 March 2011 (UTC)
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).
I see two logical problems with this argument. One is that it seems to be saying all revelations can't be true and then implies because of that none should be believed to be true. However isn't this the fallacy of the Excluded middle since its certainly possible that one is true and all the rest false?
Secondly, you could apply the probability argument to atheism or agnosticism as well, since you could argue choosing them is also probably in incorrect choice. I can't be the first to realize these things so is there any sources that make these cases that could be included in the article as it needs a balance in my opinion? 67.161.205.170 ( talk) 09:06, 17 April 2009 (UTC)
But, as this is supposed to be about improving the article- I don't know of any major sources which have voiced these objections. I'm an atheist, and while I reckon a counterarguments section would be good, I'm yet to find any major figures who've specifically attacked this argument. When I next get a chance, I might have a look (but that could be a while). In the meantime, you could probably Google the argument and search through the first few pages- you'd be surprised what it can turn up. 122.106.160.244 ( talk) 12:45, 18 April 2009 (UTC)
This equation, by the way, also represents the chances of all the "belief in God" faiths as well, because from the standpoint of probability, all those believers in God might be wrong, and atheists could be correct. So basically we are back to 1/n, where n is equal to all the inconsistent faiths including atheism. Just so it's not as confusing, we can say that d = n+1; this yields an atheism-inclusive probability of 1/d that any one faith, including atheism, is correct.
I'm REALLY late to this party (the original comment starting this discussion was back in 2007), but I just wanted to point out that whether the arguments themselves are flawed, the purpose of the article is simply to document the argument and its basis. I certainly agree that there are logical fallacies in these arguments, and further that logic and faith are frequently mutually exclusive. But regardless of the validity of the argument or the logical sets that are incorrectly included or excluded, I think this article does a good job of explaining the argument as a whole, and how it is often applied to the topic of atheism. Keep in mind as well that it is one of several major arguments against the existence of God, and those other arguments address the issue from other standpoints. — KieferSkunk ( talk) — 19:46, 16 May 2011 (UTC)
"Either there is a god (religion of all types) or there isn't (atheism), therefore an atheist has a 1 in 2 chance of being right." Wrong. Hinduism, Shintoism and as far as I know all folk religions are polytheist so either there are gods, there is a god or there are no gods at all. To say that there are 2 possibilities so one is as likely as the other might be sound mathematically but the mechanics of theology or philosophy are different. Say I play along with the mathematical approach; as I've demonstrated there are 3 possiblities and not 2 so an atheist has a 1/3 chance of being right...and therefore a 2/3 chance of being wrong. "That is, if there are 50 different possible gods a believer has only a 1 percent chance of picking correctly." Dead wrong again and this time mathematically unsound. There are far more gods than religions; as I've pointed out already there are polytheistic faiths; take Shintoism where there is a god in everything; if Shintoism is false then there are a limited number of gods and since Amaterasu is a goddess in Shintoism only then if Shintoism is false then Amaterasu and all of the other deities exclusive to Shintoism don't exist. In other words there isn't an equal chance of God, Amaterasu and Fujin existing. If Shintoism is false then neither Amaterasu nor Fujin exist as they are only gods in the Shinto religion while God is unaffected as he is the deity of the Abrahamic faiths. 86.42.121.148 ( talk) 22:37, 15 June 2014 (UTC)
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)
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)
I have removed "in mathematical terms" from the opening to this section because:
I have rephrased "faiths" to "interpretations of that God" to improve the neutrality of the article and because any systematic presentation of an argument should use as few different major terms as possible; it is easier to see the flow of the argument if the word "god" appears in each step.
I have removed its statement that "each of these faiths has a corresponding Hell" because:
I have changed "in practice" to "since" because "in practice" means "within the context of real-world activity," not "in the real world" and "since" is the more succinct statement of this intended rule. I have also removed language about picking religions "at random" and clarified the sentence to more clearly state that the point of the argument is that, a priori, religions appear on their face to contradict, but not that the choice between religions is a pure crapshoot, but rather that the argument as currently formulated proceeds from a priori terms without considering any other claims.
I also strongly recommend that someone with access to professional sources add how this argument is I believe intended, as a negative reflection on God's goodness to allow religions about him to proliferate so rapidly and so inconsistently. 76.119.208.81 ( talk) 22:40, 26 June 2011 (UTC)
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)
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)
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)
Is the argument from inconsistent revelations the same as the argument from religious confusion, or the problem of religious diversity? [1] Τζερόνυμο ( talk) 19:08, 18 May 2018 (UTC)
Hi folks,
@ Ramos1990: has deleted a large part of [ this edit] for the following reason : "Source does not treat the argument at all since this is an argument used against the existence of god - not an argument for pluralism or against pluralism. for pluralism stuff it belongs in the pluralism page".
I think he's wrong. The content I added has nothing to do with being for or against pluralism, but tries to derive the consequences of pluralism, namely, what is a believer to do with the fact that other people from other religions have just as good reasons to believe in their religions than him?
To me, this is exactly the argument from inconsistent revelation. By adding this content, I was trying to anchor this Wikipedia article into an actual debate within philosophy, which is a problem with this article. If you plug "Argument from inconsistent revelations" in Google Scholar, you get nothing by that name. It's a a good, intuitive name, but it doesn't correspond to how people refer to the problem/argument in the litterature.
This was already discussed [ here].
So, what should we do with this article? Is the content I added relevant or not? Should we rename the article? If we don't we will have to deal with the fact that we can't find sources for this article which correspond to its title on Wikipedia-- MonsieurD ( talk) 12:44, 2 April 2022 (UTC)
This redirect does not require a rating on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Discussing the merits of the article itself: is the stuff about prayer really relevant? It seems to be starting a whole new argument, one that doesn't actually rely on conflicting revelations. For example two Christians who both believe exactly the same thing about God could be praying for contradictory things (such as to get the same job). I'm not saying the prayer question isn't an issue, but that it's a different issue. DJ Clayworth 15:20, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Added an additional point to the argument. I was torn between the bold statement of the argument (which I went with) and a weaselly 'some critics of the argument say'. If anyone can improve on my phraseology please do so. DJ Clayworth 15:27, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)
In an effort to keep this page extant because I think it is a valuable part of philosophy, I've revised a lot of grammar, punctuation, and cleared up some points. However, I didn't touch the part on prayer and the paragraphs following it. I agree with others in that the article does not benefit from the inclusion of the problem of prayer, that is suitable for a different article, and the following text does not make sense to me. I can't tell what's being referred to, and I didn't want to revise it for fear of changing the intended meaning. Simply put, do the final paragraphs deal with the title article, or the opposition to it? Would the original author please clarify this? Comments? TimothyPilgrim 16:10, Mar 22, 2004 (UTC) Delete the math section atleast. An equation can't determine salvation or the true path to God. That makes no sense. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.58.250.209 ( talk) 18:58, 17 March 2011 (UTC)
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).
I see two logical problems with this argument. One is that it seems to be saying all revelations can't be true and then implies because of that none should be believed to be true. However isn't this the fallacy of the Excluded middle since its certainly possible that one is true and all the rest false?
Secondly, you could apply the probability argument to atheism or agnosticism as well, since you could argue choosing them is also probably in incorrect choice. I can't be the first to realize these things so is there any sources that make these cases that could be included in the article as it needs a balance in my opinion? 67.161.205.170 ( talk) 09:06, 17 April 2009 (UTC)
But, as this is supposed to be about improving the article- I don't know of any major sources which have voiced these objections. I'm an atheist, and while I reckon a counterarguments section would be good, I'm yet to find any major figures who've specifically attacked this argument. When I next get a chance, I might have a look (but that could be a while). In the meantime, you could probably Google the argument and search through the first few pages- you'd be surprised what it can turn up. 122.106.160.244 ( talk) 12:45, 18 April 2009 (UTC)
This equation, by the way, also represents the chances of all the "belief in God" faiths as well, because from the standpoint of probability, all those believers in God might be wrong, and atheists could be correct. So basically we are back to 1/n, where n is equal to all the inconsistent faiths including atheism. Just so it's not as confusing, we can say that d = n+1; this yields an atheism-inclusive probability of 1/d that any one faith, including atheism, is correct.
I'm REALLY late to this party (the original comment starting this discussion was back in 2007), but I just wanted to point out that whether the arguments themselves are flawed, the purpose of the article is simply to document the argument and its basis. I certainly agree that there are logical fallacies in these arguments, and further that logic and faith are frequently mutually exclusive. But regardless of the validity of the argument or the logical sets that are incorrectly included or excluded, I think this article does a good job of explaining the argument as a whole, and how it is often applied to the topic of atheism. Keep in mind as well that it is one of several major arguments against the existence of God, and those other arguments address the issue from other standpoints. — KieferSkunk ( talk) — 19:46, 16 May 2011 (UTC)
"Either there is a god (religion of all types) or there isn't (atheism), therefore an atheist has a 1 in 2 chance of being right." Wrong. Hinduism, Shintoism and as far as I know all folk religions are polytheist so either there are gods, there is a god or there are no gods at all. To say that there are 2 possibilities so one is as likely as the other might be sound mathematically but the mechanics of theology or philosophy are different. Say I play along with the mathematical approach; as I've demonstrated there are 3 possiblities and not 2 so an atheist has a 1/3 chance of being right...and therefore a 2/3 chance of being wrong. "That is, if there are 50 different possible gods a believer has only a 1 percent chance of picking correctly." Dead wrong again and this time mathematically unsound. There are far more gods than religions; as I've pointed out already there are polytheistic faiths; take Shintoism where there is a god in everything; if Shintoism is false then there are a limited number of gods and since Amaterasu is a goddess in Shintoism only then if Shintoism is false then Amaterasu and all of the other deities exclusive to Shintoism don't exist. In other words there isn't an equal chance of God, Amaterasu and Fujin existing. If Shintoism is false then neither Amaterasu nor Fujin exist as they are only gods in the Shinto religion while God is unaffected as he is the deity of the Abrahamic faiths. 86.42.121.148 ( talk) 22:37, 15 June 2014 (UTC)
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)
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)
I have removed "in mathematical terms" from the opening to this section because:
I have rephrased "faiths" to "interpretations of that God" to improve the neutrality of the article and because any systematic presentation of an argument should use as few different major terms as possible; it is easier to see the flow of the argument if the word "god" appears in each step.
I have removed its statement that "each of these faiths has a corresponding Hell" because:
I have changed "in practice" to "since" because "in practice" means "within the context of real-world activity," not "in the real world" and "since" is the more succinct statement of this intended rule. I have also removed language about picking religions "at random" and clarified the sentence to more clearly state that the point of the argument is that, a priori, religions appear on their face to contradict, but not that the choice between religions is a pure crapshoot, but rather that the argument as currently formulated proceeds from a priori terms without considering any other claims.
I also strongly recommend that someone with access to professional sources add how this argument is I believe intended, as a negative reflection on God's goodness to allow religions about him to proliferate so rapidly and so inconsistently. 76.119.208.81 ( talk) 22:40, 26 June 2011 (UTC)
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)
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)
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)
Is the argument from inconsistent revelations the same as the argument from religious confusion, or the problem of religious diversity? [1] Τζερόνυμο ( talk) 19:08, 18 May 2018 (UTC)
Hi folks,
@ Ramos1990: has deleted a large part of [ this edit] for the following reason : "Source does not treat the argument at all since this is an argument used against the existence of god - not an argument for pluralism or against pluralism. for pluralism stuff it belongs in the pluralism page".
I think he's wrong. The content I added has nothing to do with being for or against pluralism, but tries to derive the consequences of pluralism, namely, what is a believer to do with the fact that other people from other religions have just as good reasons to believe in their religions than him?
To me, this is exactly the argument from inconsistent revelation. By adding this content, I was trying to anchor this Wikipedia article into an actual debate within philosophy, which is a problem with this article. If you plug "Argument from inconsistent revelations" in Google Scholar, you get nothing by that name. It's a a good, intuitive name, but it doesn't correspond to how people refer to the problem/argument in the litterature.
This was already discussed [ here].
So, what should we do with this article? Is the content I added relevant or not? Should we rename the article? If we don't we will have to deal with the fact that we can't find sources for this article which correspond to its title on Wikipedia-- MonsieurD ( talk) 12:44, 2 April 2022 (UTC)