My argument is that we must examine any belief learned on our mama's knees
with the skepticism of outsiders, unless we can verify it for ourselves. The
amount of skepticism warranted depends on several factors, as I previously
mentioned. So Reppert is correct to apply the OTF to ethics and politics as well,
although we might better call this the Outsider Test for Beliefs (or OTB) at this
point. Indeed, one of the principle causes of social strife, confusion, and misery
is a failure to examine our own moral and political beliefs skeptically and
critically. That includes the rightness of democracy or the wrongness of rape.
But I know of no skeptical person in today's world who would ever want to
morally justify rape. Beliefs like the acceptability of rape (and honor killings)
are based on religious faiths and ancient texts, so they must be scrutinized with
the skepticism of the OTB because the nature and origin of those beliefs are
religious in nature. The same thing goes for claims that challenge democracy.
Only religious believers in today's world are defending the notion of a theocracy,
both in Muslim countries and the Christian Reconstructionists in America. So
subjecting such a theocratical political system to the OTB would be to undercut
such a belief, especially when we consider the harm it does to human beings.
The truth is that there are a great many political and moral beliefs we think are
essential to a human society but are not necessary at all. Democracy is one of
them. People have done fairly well without democracy from the beginning when
a dominant male lion or ape had free reign with a harem of females and ruled
over the others, although we've subsequently learned democracy is much better.
That being said, Richard Carrier countered Reppert's conclusions (via e-mail):
Reppert's error appears to lie in neglecting the role of information in
decision making: any rational sixteenth-century man who was given all the
information we now have (of the different outcomes of democratic vs.
nondemocratic nations over a long period of time) would agree with us that
democracy is better. Hence, democracy passes the OTB. Similarly any
rational would-be rapist who acquired full and correct information about
how raped women feel, and what sort of person he becomes if he ignores a
person's feelings and welfare, and all of the actual consequences of such
behavior to himself and his society, then he would agree that raping such a
woman is wrong. Hence, our ethic against rape will also pass the OTB. It's
just that people in those societies haven't subjected their ethical and
political views to an adequate application of the OTB, which is a fact that
actually discredits their views, not the OTB.
Reppert finally argued that "a certain natural conservatism with respect to
changing our minds about matters of worldview, or any other issue for that
matter, is both natural and rational.... If we have to be skeptics about all of our
sociologically conditioned beliefs, I am afraid we are going to be skeptics about
a lot more than just religion."
Well, it's certainly the case that accepting epistemic conservatism is natural
with respect to us not wanting to change our traditionally handed-down beliefs.
It's so natural that we will go to some extreme lengths to defend what we were
led to believe. But we should only accept what we were led to believe if what we
believe has been derived by a highly reliable method for grasping the truth. Only
then is epistemic conservatism warranted. Conversely, when our traditionally
handed-down beliefs have not been derived by a reliable method, then epistemic
conservatism has no demonstrable warrant. In short, religious traditions that
have never passed any measure of the OTF deserve no conservative respect at
all. So I see nothing about this conservatism that is justified, otherwise at some
extreme level we'd still believe in Santa Claus or tooth fairies. The rational thing
to do is to grow and learn and think and investigate and follow the arguments
and evidence wherever they lead. This is what we should do despite wanting to
cling to traditionally accepted beliefs that cannot be reasonably justified.
MY FINAL ARGUMENT
In the end, Reppert wrote: "If what it is to be skeptical is just to entertain
skeptical questions about one's beliefs, to subject them to scrutiny, to take
seriously possible evidence against them and to ask what reasons can be given
for them, then I have been performing the outsider test since 1972." But has he?
I don't think so at all. I don't think any revealed religion can pass the OTF.
Just review with me what Eller, Tarico, and Long have argued in their earlier
chapters. Eller argued from cultural anthropology: "Christians are not easily
argued out of their religion because, since it is culture, they are not ordinarily
argued into it in the first place." "Christians," he continues, "like other
religionists, are not so much convinced by arguments and proofs as colonized by
assumptions and premises. As a form of culture, it seems selfevident to them;
they are not so much indoctrinated as encultirated."
Tarico argued from the findings of psychology: "It is easy for us to distort the
evidence in our own favor, in part because we aren't so great with evidence in
general. One of the strongest builtin mental distortions we have is called
confirmation bias." She argues that "Once we have a hunch about how things
work, we seek information that fits what we already think."
Long argued that "we humans are only partly rational. Bias is our default
setting, and most of the distortions happen below the level of conscious
awareness." And Long refers us to Michael Shermer's extensive research on why
people believe in God and weird things. Nine out of ten people say that other
people are influenced by nonrational factors to believe in weird things, and yet
these same respondents turn around and say that they are the exceptions to this.
How is it possible for nine out of ten respondents to be the exceptions to what
nine out of ten of them recognize to be the rule? Logically they cannot all be
correct about this. Either 90 percent of them came to their conclusions rationally,
which we KNOW is not the case from psy chological studies, or the respondents
are simply deceiving themselves and are no different than other people. As
human beings we have what Shermer calls an intellectual attribution bias,
"where we consider our own actions as being rationally motivated, whereas we
see those of others as more emotionally driven. Our commitment to a belief is
attributed to a rational decision and intellectual choice; whereas the other
person's is attributed to need and emotion."30 And Shermer goes on to explain
that "[s]mart people, because they are more intelligent and better educated, are
better able to give intellectual reasons justifying their beliefs that they arrived at
for nonintelligent reasons," even though "smart people, like everyone else,
recognize that emotional needs and being raised to believe something are how
most of us most of the time come to our beliefs."31
So upon what basis do nearly all believers around the world, including
Reppert, think they are the exceptions if this is the case? They CANNOT all be
the exceptions! Believers are simply in denial when they claim their religious
faith passes the OTE Psychology has repeatedly shown us that people, all
people, seek to confirm what they believe, and we also have an intellectual
attribution bias to explain away what we intuitively know to be true. We do not
come to our conclusions based solely on rational considerations. Because of
these biases, believers should be just as skeptical that their particular religious
faith passes the OTF as they do when other believers in other different religions
claim the same thing.
So rather than subjecting his own religious faith "to scrutiny" as Reppert
claims to have done, if he had instead subjected his own faith to the same level
of skepticism he subjects the other religious faiths he rejects, that would be more
impressive to me. Instead, Reppert, like most all Christians, has adopted St.
Anselm's motto, "faith seeking understanding" (fides quaerens intellectum).
Theirs is a faith that calls upon believers to subsequently understand, confirm,
and defend what they believe. But such a faith attitude is not conducive to
testing what one believes, so long as he or she has faith in the first place. In fact,
most Christian thinkers from Tertullian to Luther to William Lane Craig have all
disparaged reason in favor of faith. Faith is the warp and woof of Christian
theology and apologetics, and it can ONLY increase the level of confirmation
bias people already have. Maintaining faith is the antithesis to examining
whether or not one's faith is true. Until believers repudiate such a faith stance,
they cannot claim with a straight face that their faith has passed the OTF. Let me
express this same thought within the language game of Christianity: Faith is not
something Christians can have while seeking to examine the religion that was
given to them, since that is not how they approach any of the other religions they
reject.
NOTES
1. It might be that our religious, moral, and political beliefs are culturally
relative, which is something David Eller's argument leads us to think in chapter
13 of this collection. But one need not go this far to make this case, since even if
humans can and do rationally transcend their respective cultures, it changes very
little about the odds of doing so.
2. Daniel Clement Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural
Phenomenon (New York: Viking, 2006), p. 32.
3. David Eller, Atheism AdvancedFurther Thoughts of a Freethinker
(Cranford, NJ: American Atheist Press, 2007), p. 233.
4. See WhyJBecameanAtheist (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2008) pages
67-69. Some sociologists even go so far as to make the claim that reality itself is
a social construct in what is called the "Sociology of Knowledge" thesis. There
is a great amount of literature on this subject, but one place to start is the classic
by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality:
A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books,
1966). See also Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological
Theory of Religion (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1990).
5. Stephen Maitzen uses the "uneven distribution of theistic belief around the
world" against Christians who argue on behalf of divine hiddenness. In arguing
for the best explanation of this data he claims theistic answers to this problem
"are less plausible" than naturalistic ones: "[E]ven judged on their own terms,
theistic explanations of the geographic lopsidedness of belief look farfetched
compared to naturalistic explanations." See Stephen Maitzen, "Divine
Hiddenness and the Demographics of Theism," Religious Studies 42 (2006):
177-91, and Stephen Maitzen, "Does Molinism Explain the Demographics of
Theism," Religious Studies 44 (2008): 473-77. But I'm making a different case
with regard to global religious diversity itself. I'm arguing that because of it we
should approach all religious faiths with the skepticism of an outsider.
6. I thank William Lobdell for pointing this out to Inc in his book LosingMy
Religion (New York: Collins, 2009), pp. 280-82. For this evidence, see Simon G.
Southerton, Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans DNA, and the Mormon
Church (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 2004).
7. Valerie Tarico, The Dark Side.- How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love
and Truth (Seattle: Dea, 2006), pp. 221-22.
8. See his blog post: "Miracles and the Golden Rule" at http://
exploringourinatrix.blogspot.coin.
9. As such, I also maintain Christian theism also fails the Insider Test for
Faith, since even as an insider I couldn't continue to believe. On this, see the
blog http://failingtheinsidertest.blogspot.com/.
10. Found on Common Sense Atheism's Web site, http://commonsense
atheism.com/.
11. For this I thank Jason Long's work in The Religious Condition (New York:
iUniverse, 2008), pp. 74-77.
12. Julia Sweeney, Letting Go of God, Disc 2, Track 6, "What If It's True?"
Indefatigable, 2006.
13. Eller, Atheism Advanced, pp. 202-207.
14. Philip Jenkins, professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania
State University, tells us of this explosive growth in his book The Next
Christendom. The Coming of Global Christianity, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007).
15. See Philip Jenkins, The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in
the Global South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). This is something
Eller's first chapter in this book, "The Cultures of Christianities," shows:
missionaries actually modify their marketing specifically to exploit local cultural
assumptions to leverage belief, so their success elsewhere is more about the
religious dependency thesis, and is not evidence against it.
16. See the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, "US Religious Landscape
Survey," http://religions.pewforum.org/.
17. See Michael Horton, Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the
American Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2008); Roger Finke and
Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in
Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992); and
Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, The Future of Religion:
Secularization, Revival, and CultFor-mation (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1985).
18. See Richard Feldman, "Reasonable Religious Disagreements," in
Philosophers without Gods, ed. Louise M. Antony (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007).
19. I was a respondent on a panel at the annual meeting of the Society of
Biblical Literature in November of 2009 concerning Bill Maher's movie
Religulous. To read my paper, run a search on my blog for "My Comments at
The SBL on Bill Maher's Movie Religulous," to be found here:
http://debunkingchristianity .blogspot.com/2009/11/my-comments-at-sbl-
today.html.
20
. In James E Sennett, ed., The Analytic Theist-An Alvin Plantinga Reader
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), p. 206.
21. Timothy Keller, The Reason for God Belief in an Age of Skepticism (New
York: Riverhead Books, 2008), p. xviii.
22. Ibid., p. 20.
23. Ibid., p. xix.
24. Quoted from William Lane Craig, "Reasonable Faith: Question 68,
Subject: The Witness of the Holy Spirit," http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/.
25. William Irwin, ed., "The Matrix Possibility," in The Matrix and
Philosophy Welcome to the Desertof the Real (Chicago: Open Court, 2002), p.
30. For the demon and dream conjectures and more about the Matrix possibility,
see my blog post "Is It Faith? The Demon, Dream, and Matrix Conjectures,"
www.debunkingchristianity .blogspot.com.
26. David Eller, NaturalAthei.rm, pp. 132-33. For more, read chapters 5 and
11 in his book Atheism Advanced.
27. Atheism Advanced, p. xvi.
28. On this, see Richard Carrier, "Defending Naturalism as a Worldview: A
Rebuttal to Michael Rea's World without Design," the Secular Web, 2003, http://
www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/rea.html.
29. Reppert's aims were to help me clarify it, for which I'm thankful, and to
also offer some criticisms of it. See his blog, http://dangerousidea.blogspot.com,
and run a search for "outsider test," which will produce several posts devoted to
it (in reverse chronological order). We also interacted via e-mail.
30. Michael Shermer, How We Believe The Search for God in an Age of
Science (New York: W. H. Freeman, 2000), pp. 85-86.
31. Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things-Pseudoscience,
Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (New York: A.W.H. Freeman,
2002), p. 299.
ntil the middle of the nineteenth century most biblical scholars
maintained that the religious literature of ancient Israel was unique. However, as
the nineteenth century progressed into the twentieth it brought with it increasing
knowledge of ancient Near Eastern languages and literature that led biblical
scholars to acknowledge that Israel's religion, scriptures, and view of the cosmos
mirrored those of her neighbors.
This change came about because of discoveries that revealed what time had
kept hidden for thousands of years, namely, the meanings of ancient Egyptian
hieroglyphics (etched on walls, stelas, and coffins) and Mesopotamian cuneiform
scripts (baked on clay tablets). Their meanings were unknown until
archeological discoveries and linguistic breakthroughs revealed them in the
1820s and 1850s respectively.1 Moreover, from the 1800s until today,
archeologists have uncovered tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets that are
older than the oldest surviving texts of the Hebrew Bible. George Smith, a
pioneer in the study of Mesopotamian myths, published The Chaldean Account
of Genesis in 1876. Today, scholars from both Catholic and Evangelical
Protestant backgrounds agree that ancient Near Eastern views of creation shed
considerable light on descriptions of creation found in the Bible. One need only
point to the recent spate of books that discuss the many ways Genesis 1 fits into
its ancient milieu.'
Typically, ancient Near Eastern cosmological writings depict heaven (or sky)
and earth (dry, flat land) as the two halves of creation, and they describe ways in
which the sky came to be held securely above the earth. They also demonstrate
concern that the boundaries of the sea be "set" securely to maintain the dry land,
and they imagine what may lie above the sky, beneath the earth, and at its
"ends."
The ancients also expressed concern that their particular kingdom and way of
Why Faith Fails The Christian Delusion Page 13
