discomforting to someone as saying that a potentially abusive authority figure
did the same. If God is perpetually monitoring us, knowing what we are thinking
at every moment, objectivity certainly gives way to anxiety.
People who were never indoctrinated with religious beliefs often fail to
appreciate the consequences of this dilemma. I'm afraid that I don't have much
advice to give to those who are battling with intellectual selfhonesty-other than
to point out the inherent unfairness of a system in which an allpowerful being
mistreats anyone who has the intellectual curiosity to arrive at its existence
through reason rather than through faith. Perhaps you can tell God that you are
going to set his existence aside for a moment in order to see what evidence
would be most convincing to a nonbeliever. Or perhaps you can tell God that
you want to make your faith stronger than ever by passing Loftus's Outsider Test
for Faith (see chapter 4). Ask for forgiveness in advance if you feel you must,
but if the evidence for God is as strong as the religious experts would have you
believe, should it not find you rather easily?
NOTES
1. Michael Sheriner, Why People Believe Weird Things. Pseudoscience,
Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (New York: Henry Holt, 2002),
p. 258.
2. Richard Petty and John Cacioppo, Attitudes and Persuasion: Classic and
Contemporary Approaches (Dubuque, IA: William C. Brown, 1981): pp. 72-73.
3. See Matthew 13:47-50, Mark 9:42-49, and Revelation 14:9-12.
4. See Matthew 13:41-50, 25:31-46; and Revelation 20:11-15.
5. See John 3:16.
6. Petty and Cacioppo, Attitudes and Persuasion, p. 80.
7. Robert Cialdini, Influence.- The Psychology of Persuasion (New York:
William Morrow, 1993), p. 57.
8. Shermer, Why People Believe, p. 296.
9. Petty and Cacioppo, Attitudes and Persuasion, p. 72.
10. Ibid., p. 85.
11. Ibid., pp. 259-60.
12. Johanna Olexy and Lee Herring, "Atheists Are Distrusted: Atheists
Identified as America's Most Distrusted Minority, According to Sociological
Study," American Sociological Association News, May 3, 2006,
http://www.asanet.org/page.ww ?section =Press&name=Atheists
+Are+Distrusted.
13. Petty and Cacioppo, Attitudes and Persuasion, pp. 228-29.
14. Ibid., p. 257.
15. Gallup poll, June 8, 2001, accessed from http://classes.skepdic.com/
gallup2001.pdf on July 18, 2009.
16. Shermer, Why People Believe, p. 26.
17. Cialdini, Influence, pp. 188-90.
18. Ibid., pp. 1, 4, 7, 29, 40, 172.
19. The three most definitive investigations are STEP from American Heart
journal 151, no. 4 (April 2006): 934-42; MANTRA from Lancet 366, no. 9499
(November 2005): 1769-70; and the 2001 Mayo Clinic coronary care unit trial in
Mayo Clinic Proceedings 76, no. 12 (December 2001): 1192-98.
20. Festinger et al., When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study
of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1956).
21. Petty and Cacioppo, Attitudes and Persuasion, pp. 141-42.
22. Ibid., p. 137.
23. J. A. Hardyck and M. Braden, "Prophecy Fails Again: A Report of a
Failure to Replicate," journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 65, no. 2
(August 1962): 136-41.
24. Festinger et al., When Prophecy Fails.
25. Petty and Cacioppo, Attitudes and Persuasion, p. 152.
26. Ibid., p. 155.
27. Ibid., pp. 159-60.
28. Firearms, alcohol, pornography, speech, religion, and so on.
29. Sheriner, Why People Believe, p. 59.
30. Ibid., pp. 299-300.
31. Muzafer Sherif and Carl Hovland, Social judgment: Assimilation and
Con-trastEffects in Communication and Attitude Change (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1961).
32. Drew Westen et al., "The Neural Basis of Motivated Reasoning: An IMRI
Study of Emotional Constraints on Political judgment during the US Presidential
Election of 2004," journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 18 (2006): 1947-58. See
also Drew Westen, The Political Brain. The Role of Emotion in Deciding the
Fate of the Nation (New York: PublicAffairs, 2007).
33. William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics,
3rd ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2008), p. 48.
34. Answers in Genesis, "The AiG Statement of Faith," section 4, article 6,
http://www.answersingenesis.org/hoine/area/about/faith.asp.
35. Petty and Cacioppo, Attitudes and Persuasion, p. 82.
36. See Matthew 10:37-39; Luke 18:9-14; Romans 3:9-28; and so on. See also
Craig, Reasonable Faith, pp. 46-47, 65-86.
37. Paul Bell, "Would You Believe It?" Mensa Magazine (February 2002): 12-
13.
38. Sheriner, Why People Believe, p. 292.
39. Ibid., p. 297.
hat I intend to do in this chapter is to further argue for and defend
my Outsider Test for Faith (OTF) from initial feedback I received about it. This
is just one of several arguments I use in my book Why I Became An Atheist
(WIBA) to demonstrate that the predisposition of skepticism is warranted when
examining the evidence for a religious faith. This feedback came from several
sources including the Midwest regional meeting of the Evangelical Philosophical
Society, where I presented a paper on this topic in March 2009 at Ashland
Theological Seminary.
The most important question of all when it comes to assessing the truth claims of
Christian theism (or religion in general) is whether we should approach the
available evidence through the eyes of faith or with skepticism. Complete
neutrality as sort of a blank-slate type of condition, while desirable, is practically
impossible, since the cultural worldview we use to evaluate the available
evidence is already there prior to looking at the evidence. With the OTF I'll
argue that we should adopt a skeptical predisposition as best as possible prior to
examining the evidence, if we adopt any predisposition at all.
My argument is as follows:
1) Rational people in distinct geographical locations around the globe
overwhelmingly adopt and defend a wide diversity of religious faiths due to
their upbringing and cultural heritage. This is the religious diversity thesis.
2) Consequently, it seems very likely that adopting one's religious faith is
not merely a matter of independent rational judgment but is causally
dependent on cultural conditions to an overwhelming degree.1 This is the
religious dependency thesis.
3) Hence the odds are highly likely that any given adopted religious faith is
false.
4) So the best way to test one's adopted religious faith is from the
perspective of an outsider with the same level of skepticism used to
evaluate other religious faiths. This expresses the OTE
The OTF is primarily a test to examine religious faiths. When I refer to
religious faith here, I'm primarily referring to beliefs that are essential for a
member t
o be accepted in a particular religious community of faith who worship
together and/or accept the same divinely inspired prophetic revelations whereby
one's position in the afterlife depends. The OTF is no different than the prince in
the Cinderella story who must question forry-five thousand people to see which
girl lost the glass slipper at the ball the previous night. They all claim to have
done so. Therefore, skepticism is definitely warranted. This is especially true
when an empirical foot-match cannot solve the religious questions we're asking.
There are at least three legs supportive of the first three premises of my
argument: anthropological studies, psychological studies, and sociological (or
demographic) data. The first two legs have been sufficiently argued for by David
Eller, Valerie Tarico, and Jason Long in their earlier chapters. Daniel Dennett
sums up the psychological data in these words: "One of the surprising
discoveries of modern psychology is how easy it is to be ignorant of your own
ignorance."2 Cultural anthropology shows us that we don't see culture so much
as we see with culture. We swim in a Christian culture. It's hard to argue
Christians out of their faith because they were never argued into it in the first
place. Elsewhere, Eller has argued that "nothing is more destructive to religion
than other religions; it is like meeting one's own anti-matter twin ... other
religions represent alternatives to one's own religion: other people believe in
them just as fervently as we do, and they live their lives just as successfully as
we do ... the diversity of religions forces us to see religion as a culturally relative
phenomenon; different groups have different religions that appear adapted to
their unique social and even environmental conditions. But if their religion is
relative, then why is ours not?"3
The third leg of sociological data is easy to come by. For instance, 95 percent
of people born and raised in Saudi Arabia are Muslim, while 95 percent of the
people born and raised in Thailand are Buddhist. If you were born in India, you'd
likely be a Hindu. If you were born in Mexico, you'd likely be a Catholic. In fact,
we were all raised as believers, to a large extent. We were taught to believe
whatever our parents told us. If they said there is a Santa Claus, then he existed
until they said otherwise. If we were told there was a god named Zeus, we
would've believed it. The sociological data is vast, and I've already documented
some of it in WIBA.4 All three legs converge to provide overwhelming,
undeniable, and noncontroversial support for the OTF by showing that when it
comes to religious faith, an overwhelming number of believers adopt and defend
what they were raised to believe by their parents in their respective cultures.'
Religious faiths are not chosen by us. They are given to us. We inherit them.
They are caught-not taught. In most cases we rarely stray far from what we were
raised in but merely move around among versions of the same general religion,
and even when we make a more radical change, we rarely do so after conducting
a thorough study of the comparative evidence. So the question the OTF
addresses is how we should test the faith given to us, or any new faith we may be
considering instead. The problem is that social conditions provide us with the
initial control beliefs we use from that moment onward to incorporate all known
facts and experiences. That's why they're called control beliefs. They are like
blinders. From the moment they are put on, we pretty much see only what our
blinders will let us see. What else can best explain why there is still a Mormon
church even though DNA evidence now shows us that Native Americans did not
come from the Middle East, as the Mormon Bible claims?6
Valerie Tarico describes the process of adopting and following blinding-
beliefs that are subsequently defended by intelligent people. She claims, "It
doesn't take very many false assumptions to send us on a long goose chase." To
illustrate this, in The Dark Side-How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love and
Truth she tells us about the mental world of a paranoid schizophrenic. To such a
person the perceived persecution by the CIA sounds real:
You can sit, as a psychiatrist, with a diagnostic manual next to you, and
think: as bizarre as it sounds, the CIA really is bugging this guy. The
arguments are tight, the logic persuasive, the evidence organized into neat
files. All that is needed to build such an impressive house of illusion is a
clear, well-organized mind and a few false assumptions. Paranoid
individuals can be very credible.?
Given these facts, the central thesis of the OTF is a challenge to believers to
test or examine their own religious faith as if they were outsiders with the same
presumption of skepticism they use to test or examine other religious faiths. Its
presumption is that when examining one's own religious faith, skepticism is
warranted, since the odds are good that it is false. Remember, brainwashed
people do not know that they have been brainwashed. We know that billions of
people have been brainwashed to believe, if you grant that they have been misled
by their parents and culture. So you must take seriously the real possibility that
you are one of them. If you really want know if you've been brainwashed to
believe, then taking the OTF is the best and probably the only way to know the
truth about your own religious faith, since there seems to be no reasonable
alternative.
If believers refuse to take the OTF, then they must justify having such a
double standard. Why are they more critical of other religious beliefs than they
are their own? For believers to object that what I'm asking is unfair, they have
the burden of proof to show why their inconsistent approach to religious faith is
justified in the first place.
If after having investigated one's own religious faith with the presumption of
skepticism it passes intellectual muster, then the believer can have his or her
religious faith. It's that simple. If not, abandon it. I suspect that if believers are
willing to take the challenge of the OTF, they will find that their faith fails the
test; consequently they will abandon it, along with all other religious faiths, like
I did. Any loving god who requires us to believe correctly, when instead we have
this extremely strong tendency to accept what we were raised to believe,
especially if he'll punish us if we end up being wrong, should surely make the
correct religious faith pass the OTF If God exists and he doesn't care which
religion we accept, that kind of god might survive the OTF, but then we would
end up believing in a nebulous god with no definable characteristics, perhaps a
deistic god or the "god of the philosophers." But this god is much too different
from the God of any full-blown Christianity or any specific revealed religion
though, and can be safely ignored.
In a way, adopting the OTF is like following the Golden Rule, or so argues Dr.
James McGrath, associate professor of religion at Butler University,
Indianapolis, IN. He claims this is the way to assess the likelihoo
d of Christian
miracles in history:
One doesn't have to be committed in advance to history's inability to deal
with miracles in order to begin to realize that one cannot claim Christianity
is grounded purely in history while other traditions are at best shrouded in
myth. One simply has to apply the most basic Christian principle to one's
investigation of the competing claims: The Golden Rule. And so what does
it mean to do history from a Christian perspective? It means doing to the
claims of others what you would want done to your claims. And perhaps
also the reverse: doing to your own claims, views and presuppositions that
which you have been willing to do to the claims, views and presuppositions
of others. Once one begins to attempt to examine the evidence not in an
unbiased way, but simply fairly, one cannot but acknowledge that there are
elements of the Christian tradition which, if they were in your opponent's
tradition, you would reject, debunk, discount, and otherwise find
unpersuasive or at least not decisive or compelling.8
I've investigated my faith as an insider with the presumption that it was true.
Even from an insider's perspective with the Christian set of control beliefs, I
couldn't continue to believe.9 Now, from the outside, it makes no sense at all.
Christians are on the inside. I am now on the outside. Christians see things from
the inside. I see things from the outside. From the inside, it seems true. From the
outside, it seems bizarre. As Stephen Roberts quipped: "When you understand
why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss
yours."10
WHAT DOES THE OTF REQUIRE OF BELIEVERS?
Believers should approach all religious faiths equally with the same level of
skepticism. Look closely at how evangelical Christians, for instance, dismiss the
distinctive beliefs of Muslims or Mormons and with it their religious
worldviews. They use two different methods. One faulty method is to argue that
since what they believe is true the other religious faiths are false. Other faiths
either don't address the right questions or the questions they do address are not
answered satisfactorily when compared to their own answers. Such a method is
faulty. It first presumes what they believe based on what they were raised to
believe, so it begs the question.
The other method Christians use is on much firmer ground. They use David
Hume's evidentiary standards for examining miraculous claims to the faiths they
reject. They also deconstruct these other religious texts by assuming human
rather than divine authors. They adopt a methodological naturalist viewpoint to
test these other extraordinary claims and find them wanting. That best represents
the skepticism from the outside using tests that are very well defended as not
being sociologically dependent but rather scientifically dependent. I'm arguing
that Christians should transfer that same skepticism toward Trinitarian,
incarnational, resurrection faith and see what they get. I argue they won't get
much.
To the Christian theist the challenge of the OTF means there would be no
more quoting the Bible to defend the claim that Jesus' death on the cross saves
them from sins. As an outsider you wouldn't believe such a claim just because
you read it in some ancient text. The Christian theist must now try to rationally
explain it. No more quoting the Bible to show how it's possible for Jesus to be
100 percent God and 100 percent man with nothing left over. The Christian
theist must now try to make sense of this claim, coming as it does from an
Why Faith Fails The Christian Delusion Page 10