The God question
The Contradicting Revelations
God has reportedly spoken to humanity many times. The messages rule each other out.
The point in one sentence
The world's revelations, each claimed as God's own communication, assert things that cannot all be true, so most of them must be substantially wrong, and no believer has a neutral method for showing their own is the exception.
The problem, concretely
The Quran states plainly that God has no son and that Jesus was not crucified. The New Testament stakes everything on the Son and the crucifixion. The Book of Mormon declares itself the restoration of the true gospel that both of the others corrupted. Hindu revelation describes a reality with a fundamentally different structure altogether. These are not different emphases; they are direct contradictions on the central claims. At most one lineage of revelation can be substantially right, which means revelation as a category has a false-positive rate somewhere near one hundred percent, by every believer's own accounting of everyone else.
This is distinct from the geography argument elsewhere on this site. That one is about who believes what and where. This one is about the content: the messages themselves, compared side by side, cancel each other out. SEP on divine revelation and SEP on religious diversity
Concede this first
William Alston's reply is the serious one: some domains of reality may simply be very hard to perceive accurately, and widespread disagreement does not strictly prove that nobody is receiving anything real. Eyewitnesses to a car crash contradict each other without the crash being fictional. State that fairly.
Then note what the analogy costs. Crash witnesses disagree on details while converging on the crash. The revelations disagree on the crash: whether God is one or three or embodied, whether there is reincarnation or resurrection, what salvation even is. And these are not glimpses caught in passing; each claims to be God deliberately communicating clearly enough to stake souls on. A perfect communicator whose every attempt at communication is received in mutually exclusive versions is a strange hypothesis next to the simpler one.
When they say
"Other revelations contain partial truth; ours completes them." Every tradition with a scripture says exactly this, in nearly these words. The claim is symmetrical, and a symmetrical claim cannot break the symmetry.
"You test revelation by its fruits." Every tradition produces devoted lives, charity, transformed people, and atrocities. The fruits are also symmetrical. That is why this site keeps returning to checkable claims instead.
Why this should make you question
Whatever process produces revelations, it demonstrably produces false ones at scale, complete with scriptures, witnesses, martyrs, and feelings of certainty. Any particular revelation therefore starts with a base rate problem, and "but this one is mine" is the one argument every single tradition uses.