eggs. The denial is the easy part, since there are many possible theories to
explain a phenomena. The hard part is to affirm which one of them is the correct
one.
The skeptic has the more reasonable position, by far, and it simply is not
selfdefeating at all. There are just too many ways to be wrong. Simply trusting in
what you were taught is a method we know to be unreliable, especially since so
many sincere people in the world believe in different religions. Since you came
to believe the same way they did, you should be skeptical that you've made the
right choice, precisely because you are skeptical that they did.
Furthermore, when it comes to the OTF someone cannot say I ought to be just
as skeptical of it as I am about the conclusions I arrive at when I apply the test,
since I have justified this test independently of my conclusions. From what we
know of the case, the three legs that support the OTF more than justify it.
Six
A similar objection to the one above is that all of us have a set of presuppositions
that provides a framework for seeing the world as a whole, called a worldview.
In other words, there isn't a presuppositionless way of looking at the world from
a neutral, "outside" standpoint. In this sense, it's argued, atheism is a worldview
based on faith, and therefore atheists should take the OTF too, or as Pastor
Timothy Keller argues, they "must doubt [their] doubts." He claims: "All doubts,
however skeptical and cynical they may seem, are really a set of alternative
beliefs. You cannot doubt Belief A except from a position of faith in Belief B."
Writing to skeptics, he proclaims: "The reason you doubt Christianity's Belief A
is because you hold unprovable Belief B. Every doubt, therefore, is based on a
leap of faith."21 Skeptics have faith, he opines, whenever they accept something
that is "unprovable," and all of us "have fundamental, unprovable faith
commitments that we think are superior to those of others."22 So this is why he
thinks atheists likewise "must doubt [their] doubts."23 What can we make of
this?
In the first place, even if I grant for the sake of argument that skeptics have
faith assumptions when they cannot prove something they believe, then what
method does Keller propose to distinguish between that which is provable from
that which is unprovable? Surely he doesn't mean to say that if we cannot be
absolutely certain of something all we have left is blind faith, or that everything
that is unprovable has an equal epistemological merit. Christians like him want
to claim that skeptics have unproven beliefs, and then they try to drive a whole
truckload of Christian assumptions and beliefs through that small crevice. If
that's what he's doing, then Mormons and Muslims could write the same things
he did, and then drive their own truckload of assumptions and beliefs through
that small crevice too. And then we would still be in no better position to judge
between faiths. What I'm proposing with the Outsider Test for Faith is a way to
distinguish between what we should accept from what we should not. I'm
arguing there isn't a better test when it comes to religious beliefs. So again, what
better method is there?
In the second place, I do not accept Keller's definition of faith. He's
manipulating the debate by using a language game in his favor. I reject his game.
I know as sure as I can know anything that there is a material world, and that I
can reasonably trust my senses. And I conclude that the scientific method is our
only sure way for assessing truth claims. These things I know to be the case.
They are not beliefs of mine. William Lane Craig objects by using hypothetical
conjectures to show otherwise-that scientifically minded skeptics have an
equivalent kind of faith. Dr. Craig wrote:
[M]ost of our beliefs cannot be evidentially justified. Take, for example, the
belief that the world was not created five minutes ago with builtin memory
traces, food in our stomachs from meals we never really ate, and other
appearances of age. Or the belief that the external world around us is real
rather than a computer-generated virtual reality. Anyone who has seen a
film like The Matrix realizes that the person living in such a virtual reality
has no evidence that he is not in such an illusory world. But surely we're
rational in believing that the world around us is real and has existed longer
than five minutes, even though we have no evidence for this.... Many of the
things we know are not based on evidence. So why must belief in God be so
based?24
But there is no epistemic parity here at all! For example, when it comes to the
possibility that I'm presently living in a virtual, Matrix world, rather than the real
world, that scenario cannot be taken seriously by any intelligent person. The
story is extremely implausible. I see no reason why there would be any
knowledge of the Matrix by people living in it, since the Matrix determines all of
their experiences ... all of them. So how could taking a virtual red pill while in
the Matrix get someone out of it and into the real world in the first place? As far
as Neo knows the red pill could have been nothing more than a hallucinogenic
drug anyway. And even if Neo came to believe a real world lies beyond his own
virtual, Matrix world, how could he know that the socalled real world isn't just
another Matrix beyond the one he experienced? Neo would have no good reason
for concluding he knows which world is the really real world at that point. The
really real world could be beyond the one he experienced after taking the red
pill, or beyond that one, or beyond that one, and so forth.
If all we need to be concerned with is what is possible rather than what is
probable we couldn't claim to know anything at all. We would end up as
"epistemological solipsists." So as David Mitsuo Nixon has argued with respect
to the Matrix: "The proper response to someone's telling me that my belief could
be false is, `So what?' It's not possibility that matters, it's probability. So until
you give me a good reason to think that my belief is not just possibly false, but
probably false, I'm not changing anything about what I believe or what I think I
know." 25
In fact, believing we're in a Matrix would be a much closer parallel for
believing in God than Craig may realize. Craig is actually giving us a reason to
doubt an ad hoc, unevidenced assumption like God. For if it's silly to believe in
the Matrix, it should be silly to believe in God. As I've argued before, Christians
repeatedly retreat to the position that what they believe is "possible," or "not
impossible," rather than what is probable. Just because all of these things are a
remote theoretical possibility doesn't mean he can conclude that what he believes
is probable. A possibility is not a probability. The inference does not follow. It's
a huge non sequitur.
So words like faith and belief just don't do justice to the things we reasonably
accept. David Eller has argued, "knowing is not believing." He claims that if
believers "can drag down real knowledge to their level
and erase any distinctions
between the true and the false, the known and the merely felt or believed or
guessed, they can rest comfortably in their own undeserved self-certainty."
According to him "knowledge is about reason" while "belief is about faith." He
says, "the two are logically and psychologically utterly different and even
incompatible." 26 He simply refuses to play this religious language game, and a
game it is. Given his argument, the usual philosophical definition of
"knowledge" as "justified true belief" should be discarded in favor of "justified
true conclusions," or "justified true acceptances." The word faith must be
reserved to apply in this context to beliefs that cannot be empirically tested and
aren't needed to explain anything, like ghosts, angels, demons, and gods.
In the third place, it's patently false to say atheism is a religion or a worldview,
which Keller and other Christians do. "If atheism is a religion" as David Eller
quips, "then not collecting stamps is a hobby." 27 The fact is that no one can
predict in advance what atheists think about politics, economics, environmental
issues, or social ethics. In fact, not much can be said about all atheists just
because they're atheists. There are Marxists, Freudians, existentialists, and the
"New Atheists" of our generation. There are even atheistic religions, like
Buddhism, Jainism, Daoism, Confiu-cianism, and yes, even a religionless
Christian atheism.
If a worldview encompasses everything someone claims to know and/or
believe, as it does, then atheism is no more a worldview than is Christian theism,
since Christians themselves have a wide variety of opinions about a wide variety
of issues down through the centuries. Bare-bones creeds like the Apostles Creed
or the Nicene Creed are not in themselves expressions of a worldview. They say
little about how Christians should interpret those creeds, whether they can still
be Christians if they reject portions of those creeds, how Christians should think
about economic and political issues outside of those creeds, and how to behave
based on those creeds.
Worldviews are dynamic rather than static things, anyway. They are constantly
changing with additional education and experience. Some of the ideas once
adhered to as part of a total worldview have been rejected upon further
investigation, while others have become firmly grounded as the evidence
confirms them. Since worldviews are dynamic rather than static, one need not be
a total "outsider" to test his or her faith. Believers merely have to take seriously
the real possibility they are wrong and then subject a few minor beliefs of theirs
to skepticism. Successfully doing so may subsequently lead to being skeptical
about some of their major beliefs until they end up rejecting their religious faith
as a whole. An outsider perspective then is one that can be described as a place
just a bit outside one's present total perspective.
Fourthly, even if it's true that an atheist should take the OTF, this doesn't give
believers any excuse to avoid taking the OTF themselves. All of us should at
least start by standing on the minimal common ground that we share. We can
agree on some rock-solid conclusions impervious to doubt, like the cogito of
Descartes ("I think therefore I am") and/or logical laws and mathematical truths.
We can agree on the evidence of the senses, and the scientific conclusions based
upon the evidence of the senses, like gravity. Beyond that are such things as a
small core of solid ethical and historical conclusions we can accept. This
minimal common ground is what I consider the "outside" standing place for us to
test the many other ideas we were raised to believe. From this common ground
we can all proceed to take the OTE28
Finally, atheists do indeed take the OTF. That's why atheists are atheists in the
first place. An atheist is someone who merely rejects the claim that supernatural
entities exist, whether it's a god, or gods. Atheists do not think believers have
produced enough evidence for their extraordinary supernatural claims. It's
widely accepted that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence to
support them, especially when the evi dence should be there and is not. And
religious claims are indeed extraordinary, since believers accept at least one
thing more than the atheist does: that a god exists in addition to the universe.
Such an additional claim requires more by way of justification due to Ockham's
razor.
Keep in mind that when it comes to the religious or nonreligious options in
front of us, the choices are emphatically not between any one particular situated
cultural form of Christianity and atheism. The choices are myriad. This fact
makes agnosticism the default position. The odds of just happening to have the
correct worldview are no better than one in the total number of available
worldviews accepted by people around the globe. So the odds are that we are
wrong. When we all equally apply an outsider test to our own answers to
existence every one of us should be agnostics about all such metaphysical
affirmative claims-all of us. We should all doubt our doubts. But agnostics
already do this. The double negative way Keller expresses these things does not
lead to faith. It leads to agnosticism. Therefore, anyone, and I mean anyone
including myself, who leaves the default agnostic position and affirms an
answer, any answer, has the practical burden of proof, especially in our
religiously diverse world where people disagree with each other.
By contrast, what extraordinary claims are atheists making? Is it an
extraordinary claim for atheists to say with Carl Sagan that, "the cosmos is all
that is or ever was or ever will be"? It may seem that way to believers, and so
this must still be shown to be the best explanation of the available evidence in
discussions with them. But it's not an extraordinary claim at all. Atheism is a
reasonable conclusion arrived at by the process of elimination due to taking the
OTE By finding the evidence lacking for the extraordinary claims that
supernatural entities exist, the atheist simply concludes these claims are false.
And if these entities don't exist, then Carl Sagan's conclusion is all that remains.
I am an atheist because that's the direction agnosticism pushed me. I rejected one
supernatural entity after another, leaving the only reasonable answer: atheism.
SEVEN
One last objection is that I'm committing the informal genetic fallacy of
irrelevance. This fallacy is committed whenever it's argued that a belief is false
because of the origination of the belief.
But this charge is irrelevant and false. In the first place it's irrelevant since the
origination of certain kinds of beliefs is indeed a relevant factor when assessing
if those beliefs are probable. Take for example a person who has a paranoid
belief about the CIA spying on him, and let's say we find that it originated from
taking a hallucinogenic drug like LSD. Since we have linked his belief to a drug
that creates many other false beliefs, we have some really good evidence to be
skeptical of it, even though we have no
t actually shown his belief to be false in
any other way. So when many false beliefs are produced at a very high rate by
the same source we have a good reason to doubt any beliefs arising out of that
same source. I'm arguing that the source of most people's religious faith is an
unreliable one, coming as it does from the geological accidents of birth. It
produces many different and irreconcilable religious faiths that cannot all be
true.
This charge is also false. I allow that a religion could still pass the OTF even
despite its unreliable origins, so I'm committing no fallacy by arguing correctly
that those origins are demonstrably unreliable. At best there can only be one true
religion in what we observe to be a sea of hundreds of false ones, which entails a
very high rate of error for how believers first adopt a religion. Hence, believers
need some further test to be sure their faith is the correct one. That is not a
fallacious conclusion, nor is the skepticism that it entails. I'm not arguing that
religious faiths are necessarily false because of how believers originally adopt
them. I'm merely arguing that believers should be skeptical of their culturally
adopted religious faith because of it.
VICTOR REPPERT'S OBJECTIONS
Christian philosopher Victor Reppert has offered some initial criticisms of the
OTE29 He claimed it would be cheating "to have a test and just mark our
religious beliefs as the beliefs to be tested," so he offered other examples that I
might consider testing in the same way. Reppert first objected that since we were
brought up in the West to accept an external material world, should we also
subject what we were taught about this to the OTF too? After all, if someone
born in India should take the OTF who was brought up believing the world of
experience is maya, or an illusion, then why shouldn't Westerners do likewise?
I must admit this is an interesting suggestion. However there is a distinction
here that makes all the difference. I was not just taught to think there is an
external world. I experience it daily. In fact, to deny this would require denying
everything I personally experience throughout every single day of my life. And
denying this would deny science-the very thing that has produced the modern
world through testable experience. I think it's a categorical mistake to equate the
nonverifiable religious view that there is no external world with the scientific
view that there is one. (George Berkeley's similar view was inspired by his
religious commitment to solve the mind/brain problem). So I would argue that
people born in India would have to subject their own religious upbringing to the
OTF, whereas the consensus of scientists has already passed the OTF, in that it
has survived the scientific method. After all, in the face of all the evidence we've
accumulated, saying there is an external world causing our experiences is not an
extraordinary claim. But denying it is.
Reppert further asks whether any moral and political beliefs would survive an
outsider test: "I think that rape is wrong. If I had been brought up in a certain
culture, I'm told, I would believe that rape is okay if you do it in the evening,
because a woman's place is at home under her husband's protection, and if she is
gone she's asking for it. So my belief that rape is wrong flunks the outsider test."
He also thinks that "representative democracy is a better form of government
than monarchy." He wrote: "If I lived in sixteenth-century Europe, or in other
parts of the globe, I probably would not believe that. So my belief in democratic
government flunks the outsider test." And yet, he claims, just because they both
flunk the test, he still has no reason to think differently than he does.
Why Faith Fails The Christian Delusion Page 12
