Cases of individuals who have claimed to have direct contact with God

Even if ontological, cosmological and teleological arguments fail to make their case, we have not shown that there is no God.  

There are cases, and today more than ever, especially among the Muslims, where knowledge of divine existence is said to be the result of direct encounters (such as visions, auditions and dreams) with the divine.  

One can take the position that such reports relate instances of direct or immediate contact with the divine that call for no inference, argument or interpretation.  This is to claim that such contacts are "transparent," that is, unambiguous, reliable on their face and self-guaranteeing - constituting a kind of immediate experiential knowledge or awareness that is not confined to religious or "sacred" settings, though it is most common there.

It is also to claim that the knowledge that is said to occur in these contexts is properly basic, that is, neither derived nor needing to be derived from any more basic knowledge.

However, let's not get too carried away.  Albeit these are real, there are many that are not.  I would not want to even guesstimate the ratio, but let us understand them with these two caveats.

• An encounter may not be transparent
• the way to understand why making cultural distinctions is useful in figuring out "what something means" in another culture, is to acknowledge that what we call "reality" may have more than one meaning or interpretation, often vastly different. Most human beings have a tendency to believe that what they see is "real," and assume anyone observing or experiencing the same situation would "naturally" describe, react to, or characterise the event in the same way they do. Anthropologists call this propensity "naive realism," or the belief that everyone sees the world in the same way you do. A corollary is that most human beings also assume that there is only one reasonable way to look at the world. However, psychologists and interculturalists have shown that the world rarely looks the same to everyone, and that the culture you are raised in will strongly influence how you will view even the most simple behaviour
• In order to talk about argument patterns and detect the so-called logical fallacies, one has to distinguish the argument as it manifests itself in natural language from its formal representation. This is because the meaning of natural language expressions is 
far from being transparent. One cannot rely solely on the syntactic configurations and
the occurrence of some key-words to guarantee a common ground understanding of
the logical form of natural language expressions. What the formal representation is
called out to do then is to fix an interpretation that is accurate and precise enough to
determine the standards against which an argument can be evaluated. In what follows,
formal representation is understood as meaning interpretation in this sense.
• belief seems to me to be as strong a candidate for an expressivist interpretation, given expressivism about rationality, as prototypical thick moral concepts are given expressivism about morality
• universal generalization must be nomic, supporting subjunctive conditionals, and not merely accidental. It is never a description, an extensional statement whose truth
conditions concern just the actual world. In many instances, it is an interpretation, an intentional
statement whose truth-conditions involve considering other possible worlds
• encourage and facilitate consideration of alternative possibilities, employing different conditional dependencies or registering their absence. This should ideally promote refinement of initial hypotheses and more transparent and productive discussion of inferential reasoning. Disagreements (reflecting divergent standpoints or premises) may well persist, but are now challenged to meet more exacting standards of rational justification.
• A conservative posture here would suggest that taking a contact as transparent should be a hypothesis of last resort - the surviving piece of an extended disjunctive syllogism from which all alternative possibilities have been eliminated.

The Danger of Claiming to Receive Direct Revelation