ancient superstitious people who didn't have trouble believing Paul and Barnabas
were "gods in human form" (Acts 14:11, 28:6). The Christian theist must not
assume prior to examining the evidence that there is an answer to the problem of
horrendous suffering in our world, either. And she'd be skeptical of believing in
any of the miracles in the Bible, just as she would be skeptical of any miraculous
claim in today's world supporting other religious faiths. Why? Because she
cannot start out by first believing the Bible, nor can she trust the people close to
her who are Christian theists to know the truth, nor can she trust her own
anecdotal religious experiences. She would want independent evidence and
reasons for these beliefs.
At the very minimum, a believer should be willing to subject her faith to
rigorous scrutiny by reading many of the best-recognized critiques of her faith.
And she should look at Christian arguments the same way others do-as an
outsider. Whether it comes to Plantinga's Reformed Epistemology, William Lane
Craig's argument for the "inner witness of the Spirit," divine hiddenness
arguments, Pascal's Wager, or William James's argument for faith, the Christian
believer must think of them just as an outsider would. Just think how it would
sound to evangelical Christians if Mormons claimed their faith was "properly
basic," or that the inner witness of the Spirit self-authenticates their faith? Just
think how it would sound to Christians if Muslims explained the lack of belief in
Allah because Allah was a hidden God? The "many gods" objection to Pascal's
Wager destroys the wager's force since we must first decide among the various
gods which one to wager on. And William James's argument for faith can be
used to justify any religion at all. Many of these types of arguments can be easily
dismissed if you evaluate them as an outsider would.
The OTF also challenges believers to critically examine the social conditions
of how they came to adopt their particular religious faith in the first place. That
is, believers must consider who or what influenced them to believe and whether
those initial reasons were good ones. Would they have become Mormons
instead, had a joyous, friendly Mormon group approached them at that same
vulnerable time in their lives? Most of us do not have good initial reasons to
accept a religious faith.
Take for example Dr. William Lane Craig's conversion testimony as presented
on his Web site ReasonableFaith.org (Question 78: "Your Personal Testimony").
Craig is considered the leading Christian apologist in our generation by many
people today. Craig tells us he felt "empty" inside with no purpose and he didn't
see anyone as "genuine," even himself. Yet he really did want meaning in his
life. And he wanted to love and to be loved by others. One day he met a girl who
"was always so happy it just makes you sick!" She told him she was happy
becauseJesus saved her and thatJesus loved him too. This hit him "like a ton of
bricks." That "thought just staggered me," he wrote, "to think that the God of the
universe should love me, Bill Craig, that worm down there on that speck of dust
called planet Earth! I just couldn't take it in." So he began reading the New
Testament from cover to cover and was "absolutely captivated by the person
Jesus of Nazareth." And he began worshipping with other people who were
happy just like this girl. In that group he found the meaning and love that he
craved. So he cried out to God in prayer and found what he was looking for. He
looked up at the Milky Way and thought, "God! I've come to know God!"
From reading his story I don't think Bill had good initial reasons to believe,
just like I didn't. His personal story stresses his need for happiness, love,
significance, and meaning. And he found these things simply because of a
wonderful story that was told to him by a happy person during a vulnerable time
in his life. He initially read the Bible uncritically along with some other
Christian books. But how does someone properly investigate whether a claim is
true or not? He or she doesn't do it by only reading the literature of the people
who advocate it. He or she does it by also reading the best critiques of the people
who disagree with it, and Dr. Craig now knows this. By now he also knows there
is a lot of hypocrisy and unhappiness among church people. Bill has had
problems with church people by now and he surely suffers like most of us do
from bouts of anger toward others and unhappiness. Does this subsequent
experience cause him to doubt the initial youthful rush of friends and the
happiness he felt at the time? I suspect so, or it should. By now he also knows
that the need for significance and meaning isn't a good reason for accepting a
religious story, since there are many to choose from. I'll bet he can also pick up
those very same Christian books he first read and find several large holes in their
arguments.
So would Bill have believed in the first place if he knew then what he does
now? Remember, back then he didn't believe. He was an "outsider." I dare say
that if he knew what he does now and hadn't already chosen to adopt his faith, he
would not have believed in the first place.
I'm asking believers to change their assumptions and/or become agnostics.
This is what I call the "default position." If someone claims he or she cannot do
this, then do what Rene Descartes did with a methodological or hypothetical
doubt (although I'm not suggesting his extreme type of doubt). Hypothetically
consider that you believe mainly for emotional and not intellectual reasons, just
like people who have the fear of heights are afraid to stand at the edge of a
precipice for emotional, not intellectual, reasons. They intellectually know
people go up to the top of skyscrapers and come down safely. So they must face
their fears. They must get to the first floor and look around. When comfortable
they must go up to the second floor, and so on until they get to the top.11 This
may take some time. Julia Sweeney, a former Saturday Night Live comedian,
faced her fears when she put on her "No God Glasses" for a moment to look
around at the world as if God did not exist. Then she put them on for an hour a
day. Try this. As she faced her fears, she "began to see the world completely
differently" Eventually she was "able to say good-bye to God."12
ANSWERING SEVEN OBJECTIONS
I've already answered several objections to the OTF in WIBA (pp. 72-77), so I
don't need to answer them again, except as different ways of stating those same
objections that have come to my attention, or as I've come up with additional
answers to them.
ONE
Do I consider myself "lucky" to have been born in an era and in a place in which
the rise of modern science and rational inquiry has progressed to the point where
I have the necessary critical-thinking tools to argue for the OTF? Can I offer a
"rational justification" for this luck? If not, why am I justified in advocating the
OTF based upon this privileged position in time?
In answer I would have to say that yes, I was indeed lucky to have been born
when and where I was born to know what I do in order to offer the OTF as a
critique of religious faith. We have experienced an explosive growth of scientific
knowledge that produced the modern world. Unless I could have come up with
this vast amount of knowledge myself, then I wouldn't know any different than
others if I was born in 1000 BCE. So the rational justification for this luck is to
be found in the solid advancement of science itself.
The only thing we can and should trust is the sciences. Science alone produces
consistently excellent results that cannot be denied, which are continually
retested for validity. I'm claiming religious beliefs learned on our mama's knees
are in a different category than the results of repeatable scientific experiments,
and that this claim is both obvious and noncontroversial. We can personally do
the experiments ourselves. When it comes to religious faiths, there are no
mutually agreed upon reliable tests to decide between them, and this makes all
the difference in the world. Besides, as David Eller has argued, Christians are not
opposed to modern science anyway.13 They adopt its methods and conclusions
in a vast majority of areas except a few limited ones concerning their faith. So
the question is why they adopt such a double standard with regard to science.
Why do they accept the results of science the vast majority of the time but
subsequently reject them with regard to their faith?
TWO
It's objected that there are people, lots of them, who choose to be Christian
theists who were born and raised in parts of Asia and the Southern Hemisphere,
where Christianity is growing phenomenally.14 These people are ousiders who
can and do escape their culturally adopted faith.
When it comes to these converts, however, my opinion is that most of them do
not objectively weigh the evidence when making their initial religious
commitments. They mainly change their minds due to the influence and
believability of the evangelist and/or the wondrous nature of the religious story
itself, just like Bill Craig did. In these parts of the globe, people already share
much of the same social, economical, political, and superstitious viewpoints that
the ancient biblical people shared anyway, so it should be no surprise that the
Gospel is being accepted there.15
These new converts in different cultural contexts have no initial way of truly
investigating the proffered faith. Which evangelist will objectively tell the ugly
side of the Bible and of the church while preaching the good news? None that I
know of. Which evangelist will tell a prospect about the innumerable problems
Christian scholars must solve? None that I know of. Which evangelist will give
potential prospects a copy of a book like this one to read along with a copy of a
Christian apologetics book and ask them to truly examine it before deciding?
Again, none that I know of. Only if they do will I sit up and take notice. Until
then I am not impressed.
THREE
Related to objection two above are recent polls showing many Americans are
leaving the faith of their parents. If correct, this is supposed to undermine the
sociological basis for the OTF somehow. The 2008 Pew Forum Poll tells us that
"28 percent of American adults have left the faith of their childhood for another
one. When we include people who switched from one Protestant denomination
to another the number would jump to 44 percent."16
But this poll data does not undermine the sociological data at all. Americans
are embracing syncretism, pluralism, and pragmatism when it comes to religion.
American culture is changing, so it should not surprise us in the least that they
are also changing their religious faiths. If someone lives and breathes in a
pluralistic culture then he or she will be a pluralist, you see, even if raised
otherwise by his or her parents. More and more believers are treating religion
like they do diet and sex. Variety is the spice of life when it comes to these
things. So also is religion to them. Americans don't think there is much of a
difference between many of the sects within Christianity, and some think that
way about religions in general. So it stands to reason believers will switch
church affiliations to attend where their friends do in churches that have more to
offer them with programs that meet their practical needs. They'll switch churches
for a warmer pew with a better church building to hear better music and a better
sermon. After all, the moral message still seems to be the same, and that's what
more and more Americans think the value of religion provides anyway.17
In any case, the fact is that these newly chosen faiths are still not passing the
OTE So this is just another instance of unwarranted conversion to what happens
to be culturally available.
FOUR
It's objected that just because rational people disagree about an issue, that does
not justify skepticism about any particular opinion of it. In other words, it has
been argued that the mere existence of disagreement between rational people
does not automatically lead us to be skeptical about that which we think is true.
On the contrary, I think it can and it does. The amount of skepticism
warranted depends not only on the number of rational people who disagree, but
also whether the people who disagree are separated into distinct geographical
locations, the nature of their beliefs, how their beliefs originated, under what
circumstances their beliefs were personally adopted in the first place, and the
kinds of evidence that can possibly be used to decide between the differing
beliefs. My claim is that when it comes to religious faiths, a high degree of
skepticism is warranted precisely because of these factors.
Richard Feldman, professor of philosophy at the University of Rochester, NY,
argues that when there are two "epistemic peers" who have a "genuine
disagreement" about "shared evidence," the reasonable thing to do is to "suspend
judgment" about the issue. Under these conditions "one should give up one's
beliefs in the light of the sort of disagreement under discussion." If, however,
"one's conviction survives the `confrontation with the other'... this seems more a
sign of tenacity and stubbornness than anything else."18 By contrast, the more
that rational people agree on an issue then the more probable their shared
opinion is true. Even though we know that everyone can be wrong, this is still
the best we can do. No one bets against gravity, for instance, because there is
evidence for it that was learned apart from what we were taught to believe in our
separate, geographically distinct locations.
This is why I liked Bill Maher's movie Religulous.19 It's obvious from
watching the many different (and even bizarre) religious opinions expressed in
it, that any given one of them is false. By putting them on an equal playing field
they all appear to be false, which is what the OTF is meant to force us to
consider. How do you know your religion isn't the false one and theirs the true
one? Only by passing the OTF can you know.
FIVE
Believers may object that the skeptici
sm required of the OTF is selfdefeating. A
selfdefeating argument is one that is internally inconsistent with itself and,
therefore, is by definition false. They'll rhetorically ask as does Alvin Plantinga:
"If the pluralist had been born in (say, Morocco) he probably wouldn't be a
pluralist. Does it follow that... his pluralist beliefs are produced in him by an
unreliable belief-producing process" too?20 If not, why does the pluralist (or
skeptic) think he can transcend his culture but a Christian theist cannot?
In answer I think it's extremely difficult to transcend our culture because it
provides us with the very eyes we use to see with, as Eller argued in chapter 1.
But precisely because we know from anthropology, psychology, and the
demographic data that this is what cultures do to us, it's possible for us to
transcend the culture we were raised in. What we've learned is that we should be
skeptical about that which we were led to believe even though we can't actually
see anything about our beliefs to be skeptical about.
And so it's not selfdefeating to argue on behalf of skepticism. Not by a long
shot. Skepticism is not a belief system. It's an approach to truth claims, and a
reasonable one at that. Skepticism is the hallmark of an adult who thinks for
herself. I see nothing selfdefeating about this at all. If after approaching a truth
claim with skepticism it passes muster, then the skeptic has good reasons to
accept it. And so the reasonable skeptic does indeed accept many claims to be
true. No one can be skeptical of everything. It's just that we should be skeptical
to some degree about everything we were taught to accept unless we can confirm
it for ourselves. That confirmation process is not Cartesian though, and we
cannot confirm everything we accept as true.
Skepticism is best expressed on a continuum, anyway. Some claims will
warrant more skepticism than others. Some claims we should be extremely
skeptical about ("I saw a pink elephant;" "the CIA is dogging my steps"), while
others on the opposite side will not require much skepticism at all ("there is a
material world," "if you drop a book it will fall to the ground," "George
Washington was the first president of the United States of America"). I'm
arguing that religious faiths warrant the same level of skepticism that other
similar beliefs require, like beliefs in the elves of Iceland, the trolls of Norway,
and the power of witches in Africa. They must all be subjected to the same levels
of skepticism given both the extraordinary nature of these claims and how some
of these beliefs were adopted in the first place.
Consider some odd sort of phenomena, and let's say there are only seven
known theories to explain it, some more probable than others. Skeptics may
deny outright three of them and weigh the others in the balance. Then they might
conclude one theory is the best explanation for it. But they also acknowledge
they could be wrong, and even that there might appear an eighth theory to
explain it that no one has thought of yet. Believers may only consider one
particular theory, the one they were taught to believe, and they may pronounce it
to be true beyond what the evidence calls for, even though there are other
theories that have some degree of probability to them as well. True believers act
with a high degree of certainty that they are correct, as Valerie Tarico has argued
in chapter 2. They may not even consider the other theories at all, or if they do,
they do so to refute them.
That's the difference. There is a huge difference between affirming a truth
claim and denying one. The hard part, as someone quipped, isn't in smelling a
rotten egg, it's in laying a good one. The OTF calls us to be egg smellers with the
same level of critical olfactory senses that we use to detect other rotten religious
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