Re: The Outsider Test for Faith, Part II
Rothbard posed the question: who are the greater villains with respect to liberty, the unwashed masses or the power elite? His answer was:
First, even granting for a moment that the masses are the worst possible, that they are perpetually Hell-bent on lynching anyone down the block, the mass of people simply don’t have the time for politics or political shenanigans. The average person must spend most of his time on the daily business of life, being with his family, seeing his friends, etc. He can only get interested in politics or engage in it sporadically.
The only people who have time for politics are the professionals: the bureaucrats, politicians, and special interest groups dependent on political rule. They make money out of politics, and so they are intensely interested, and lobby and are active twenty-four hours a day. Therefore, these special interest groups will tend to win out over the uninterested masses. This is the basic insight of the Public Choice school of economics.
There is a similar piece of wisdom awaiting us in the evaluation of the outsider test. The truth is, natural theology, philosophy of religion, proper interpretation of the Bible, the field of comparative religion are far beyond what the masses can do and judge for themselves. They are not professional philosophers and theologians with their noses in books and heads in the clouds. They are too busy living real lives.
Consequently, if this vast majority were to abandon their Christian faith, then they would no better be able to justify their atheism or deism than they had previously been able to justify their Christianity. They would be as helpless as newly minted atheists against a sophisticated defender of the Christian faith like Aquinas or William Lane Craig as they are now against a sophisticated defender of atheism like Loftus. So, what our author demands from people is unrealistic and futile. As a clarion call to some elite group of NTs to get to work, it’s fine. Otherwise, it’s of little consequence.
Another subtle point is that the Christian faith, at least according to St. Thomas, is an infused virtue. It’s created by grace as much as by natural study. It may be impossible to doubt the faith without losing it altogether. In other words, becoming genuinely skeptical of your faith is a dangerous project, because you’ll be defying the influence of grace.
Therefore, it may be advisable for a Christian to adopt the motto “faith seeking understanding.” If Islam and Judaism and so on have notions of grace, the same attitude is recommended. Then it may happen upon a thorough investigation that one eventually converts from one faith to another. Moreover, if trying to “understand” can move you from Christianity to Islam, then it can also move you from Christianity to, say, deism. But this won’t be a violent destructive transition, as Loftus’s radical skepticism must needs entail, but a much more gradual and smooth one.
So, even Loftus’s method is flawed.
Posted: March 26th, 2009 under Philosophy, Religion.
Comments
Comment from Dmitry Chernikov
Time March 28, 2009 at 3:37 pm
> the OTF cannot be undertaken with premises that are sociologically dependent
What are those premises that you think Loftus is using and that you are questioning?
Comment from Eric
Time March 28, 2009 at 7:42 pm
“What are those premises that you think Loftus is using and that you are questioning?”
Dimitry, exactly what those premises are is the question I’ve been asking John.
He seems to me to be making these two claims (inter alia):
(1) Religious beliefs are dubious because of the religious dependency thesis (i.e. because the content of one’s religious beliefs are almost always a function of the time and place in which one lives).
(2) We must, because of (1), approach our religious beliefs from the ‘outside’ to test whether they are reasonable.
Given (1) and (2), the premises that we use to test our religious beliefs from the ‘outside’ cannot themselves be sociologically dependent in the same way, or to the same degree that, according to John’s argument, our religious beliefs are; if they are sociologically dependent in the same way and to a similar degree, then they must be judged to be as dubious as our religious beliefs, and we therefore cannot use them (i.e. the sociologically dependent ‘outside’ premises) to test our religious beliefs. Therefore, if we are to accept John’s argument for the OTF, John must be able to provide us with the ‘outside’ premises with which we are to undertake the OTF, and he must be able both to demonstrate that they are not sociologically dependent in roughly the same way, and to a similar degree, that our religious beliefs are, and he must be able to justify them with arguments that do not themselves rest on premises that are sociologically dependent in the same way our religious beliefs are.
In essence, my argument is that since John’s argument concludes that religious beliefs are dubious because they are sociologically dependent, the premises with which he undertakes the OTF cannot be similarly sociologically dependent (or we get a regress of Outsider Tests); and that he must therefore either elucidate these premises (or show how they might be elucidated), or concede that his argument is self referentially inconsistent (by establishing a standard for religious belief that his ‘outside’ position cannot itself meet).
Comment from Dmitry Chernikov
Time March 28, 2009 at 10:04 pm
I think the only premises that John uses are (1) his “skepticism” of all religions (because you may have come to believe in whatever it is you believe by sheer chance or accident of birth, etc.) and (2) the need to be guided by evidence in forming the articles of your faith. Is your argument then that both skepticism and the requirement of being well justified in your beliefs are themselves sociologically dependent?
Comment from Eric
Time March 31, 2009 at 7:26 pm
Hi Dmitry (sorry for misspelling your name above!)
I think John is going beyond ‘the *skepticism* of the foreigner,’ and the notion that we should proportion our beliefs to the evidence. There is nothing new at all in these two ideas, yet John claims that his Outsider Test is an ‘original’ idea.
Also, it doesn’t seem to be the case that, say, a Muslim is merely skeptical of the claims of Christianity; he has a prejudice against them that goes beyond skepticism. So, to ask a Christian to look at his faith as a Muslim would, or as an atheist would, seems to me to be asking him to go beyond mere skepticism — which is itself quite possible from the ‘inside’ — to something else I’m having a difficult time identifying. (E.g., I don’t think that Richard Dawkins is *only* skeptical of religious belief; this is an extreme example, I admit, but it gets at what I’m asking John to elucidate.) This is part of the reason for my argument: I would like John to identify the premises he’s using, and would like him to defend the notion that they’re not themselves sociologically dependent. I have a hard time understanding not how the skepticism of the outsider is not sociologically dependent , but how his ‘attitude’ towards other beliefs is not sociologically dependent, and it seems to me that this attitudinal aspect of the Outsider Test is an essential part of it. Now, if it’s not, and if the Outsider Test can be reduced to, ‘Ask the questions a skeptic on the outside would ask,’ then I have no problem with it; however, in that sense, it’s hardly original, as John claims it is, and it need not be undertaken ‘from’ the outside (as Origen et al have demonstrated time and time again).
Comment from Dmitry Chernikov
Time April 1, 2009 at 8:56 pm
The Outsider Test is not original; it’s just a startling way of pointing out that many people have not arrived to their religion via careful study and building their beliefs from the ground up. This is not an unexpected fact, as the temperament theory makes plain.
You make a good point that true believers in faith A may be prejudiced toward all other faiths. For example, Peter Kreeft says somewhere that when he was considering Catholicism, he had to either love the Church as a Catholic or hate it as a Protestant. Similarly, a sophisticated Muslim may be so convinced of the superiority of his religion as to hate Christianity. Or an atheist like Dawkins may actively despise Christians, at attitude that goes far beyond mere skepticism. But that’s not a virtue and only strengthens Loftus’s argument. Dawkins is not a paradigm of impartiality and detachment and careful research on Loftus’s view!
However, our author’s argument has the merit of frowning both on mindless religious/atheistic fanaticism and on religious indifference. Even as an atheist he is anything but indifferent to religion.
Lastly, I agree that it may not be possible to become truly skeptical about Christianity, if the Christian faith is a gift from God. That’s why I suggest that as a matter of methodology one retain his faith while seeking honestly and earnestly to “understand” it.
Comment from Eric
Time March 28, 2009 at 12:53 pm
Hi Dimitry
I’ve been reading your blog for some time, but this is my first comment.
I would like to know what you think about this response I posted on John’s blog concerning his Outsider Test for Faith (OTF).
“John, my problem isn’t with some vague notion that we should all be skeptical of our beliefs — of course I’m in general agreement with that (and I particularly like the way Victor put it) — *but with your specific argument for the OTF*. Let me put my argument in the form of a series of ‘assumptions’ that I’ll formulate as questions to you (none of this is meant to be disrespectful in any way; I’m just trying to be thorough).
I’m assuming we agree that you have an argument for the OTF, right?
I’m assuming we agree that your argument attempts to justify the need for the OTF, right?
I’m assuming that your argument makes that attempt at justification by appealing to the religious dependency thesis, which comprises the “sociological (or demographic) data, anthropological data, and psychological data,” right?
I’m assuming that you’re asking theists to question their beliefs because the religious dependency thesis renders them dubious, right?
I’m assuming that any belief or set of beliefs that are similarly dependent on the sociological, anthropological and psychological factors you refer to must be, by parity of reasoning, dubious as well, right?
I’m assuming that you’d agree that it’s absurd to propose that one test a dubious belief (or set of beliefs) with a belief (or set of beliefs) that are just as, or almost as dubious as the belief(s) he’s testing, right?
I’m assuming that if it it is indeed absurd to test beliefs in this way, then the OTF cannot be undertaken with premises that are sociologically dependent in such a way that they are, by parity of reasoning, just as or almost as dubious as the beliefs they’re being used to evaluate, right?
I’m assuming that if the OTF cannot be undertaken with such premises, for the reasons I mentioned above, then it must be undertaken with premises that are not sociologically dependent in such a way as to render them as dubious or almost as dubious as the beliefs they’re being used to evaluate, right?
I’m assuming that since you are claiming that the OTF can be undertaken, that therefore such premises must exist, and that you must have some idea of what they are, right?
I’m assuming that if such premises exist, they can be justified without appeals to premises that are sociologically dependent in such a way as to render them as dubious or almost as dubious as the beliefs they are being used to evaluate (and so on for premises used to justify the justificatory premises themselves, and so on), right?
Finally, I’m assuming that if you cannot provide such premises and justify them without appealing (anywhere down the chain of justification) to premises that are sociologically dependent in such a way as to render them as or almost as dubious as the premises they’re being used to evaluate, then either they don’t exist, and the OTF is self referentially inconsistent, or that you haven’t yet worked the OTF out as completely as its logic demands, right?”