Why Faith Fails The Christian Delusion Page 12

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.