John Loftus recently came out with a book called The Outsider Test for Faith. I’ve composed my own version of the test in the form of a questionnaire:
1. Do you want to be the kind of person who finds out the truth no matter what?
2. If you do, then here’s a thought experiment: Pretend that reincarnation is real. You have many lives in different time periods and different cultures, and each time you don’t have any memory of your past life. One of your lives is in India, where you’re raised as a Hindu. One is in China, where you’re raised as a Buddhist, and so on. In each life you will be raised in a different religion, and each life you will have a strong feeling that that religion is true even though it is not. We know that things will be this way for you because people have strong beliefs about the religions they are raised to believe, and typically believe what their parents tell them or what they find in the surrounding culture. Just talk to someone of a different faith to see this for yourself. To continue the thought experiment: your beliefs will be so strong that you will feel justified in making excuses and rationalizations for your beliefs whenever anyone argues that your faith is false. We know this is how people operate: talk to people who have different faiths and you’ll see what I mean. Here’s the BIG question: If you want to be the kind of person who finds the truth no matter what, what character traits can you adopt that would help you find the truth in each and every one of your reincarnations?
3. Here’s the character traits that I have come up with:
Open minded but very skeptical – This will allow you to be open to finding the right religion (or non-religious viewpoint) no matter in each of your lives because being open allows you to receive the truth when you hear it, but being skeptical allows you to weed out falsehoods when you hear them, so it’ll allow to see that the religion you were raised in is false.
Doesn’t make excuses for a belief when it is shown to be false. This is really, really important. There are people out there who believe the Earth is flat, and when they are confronted with evidence that it is round, they make excuses. We’ve taken pictures from outer space that show the Earth is round, but they ignore this obvious falsification by pulling out a made-up excuse that NASA faked the pictures. Of course, such an excuse is not plausible, and any belief that can only be supported with implausible excuses is itself implausible.
Uses common sense, scientific evidence, logical reasoning and other reliable methods of finding the truth to assess not only other religions but your own as well.
In the case of common sense, one must realize that their own subjective feelings may be warped/strongly biased when using it to judge your own religion, so in order to avoid this bias you must use thought experiments in order to get around such a bias. Example: Muslims believe that the Qu’ran has many fantastic predictions about historical events that prove it is true. But how many people outside of muslims find these predictions to be impressive? If a muslim were to think about a holy book from a different religion having the same sort of evidence, would he find it convincing and convert to that religion?
Investigates a large variety of belief systems.
Do you agree with all of these? Would you add or subtract any of them?
4. In the reincarnation thought experiment, you should agree that the methods I’m proposing are sensible and that you ought to adopt them in every life you have, including your present life. But the conclusion still follows whether you have many lives or just one. So you must adopt these methods in your present life. So your work is cut out for you, you agree to all of the above, and you have to start using to evaluate your present belief system. Let me know what the results are. My results, of course, are that no religion is capable of passing the outsider test for faith. Most of the reasons that muslim/christian/jewish apologists give are not enough to justify their faith, much less justify to a critically-minded person who has no prior commitment to the faith.
