THE OUTSIDER TEST FOR FAITH

by John W. Loftus

The most important question of all when it comes to assessing the truth claims of
Christian theism is whether we should approach the available evidence through the
eyes of faith, or of skepticism. Complete neutrality, while desirable, seems to be
practically impossible, since the worldview we use to evaluate the evidence is
already there prior to looking at the evidence. So the question I’ll be addressing
today is whether we should adopt a believing or a skeptical predisposition prior
to examining the evidence for a religious set of beliefs. I’ll argue that a
skeptical predisposition is the preferred one to adopt.

My Outsider Test for Faith (OTF) is just one of several arguments I use to
demonstrate that when examining the evidence for a religious set of beliefs the
predisposition of skepticism is warranted. There is overwhelming, undeniable and
non-controversial evidence for the test itself that can be found in the
sociological, anthropological, and psychological data. I’ll start with some of
this data that forms the basis for the test. Then I’ll describe the test, provide
some examples of what it demands of the believer, and defend it from six major
objections.

There is a great deal of discussion among Christian apologists over Bayesian

“background factors,” which play a significant role in assessing the truth of
Christianity in general, the likelihood of the resurrection of Jesus, the
probability of miracles, and the problem of evil. But the most important
background factor of all for cognitively assessing the truth claims of religious
faith is one’s sociological and cultural background.

The basis for the outsider test has been stated adequately by liberal Christian
philosopher John Hick: “It is evident that in some ninety-nine percent of the
cases the religion which an individual professes and to which he or she adheres
depends upon the accidents of birth.” That is to say, if we were born in Saudi
Arabia, we would be Sunni Muslims right now. If we were born in Iran, we’d be
Shi’a Muslims. If we were born in India, we’d be a Hindus. If we were born in
Japan, we’d be Shintoists. If we were born in Mongolia, we’d be Buddhists. If we
were born in the first century BCE in Israel, we’d adhere to the Jewish faith at
that time, and if we were born in Europe in 1000 CE, we’d be Roman Catholics. For
the first nine hundred years we would’ve believed in the ransom theory of Jesus’
atonement. As Christians during the later Middle Ages, we wouldn’t have seen
anything wrong with killing witches, torturing heretics, and conquering Jerusalem
from the “infidels” in the Crusades. These things are as close to being undeniable
facts as we can get in the sociological world.

Had we lived in ancient Egypt or Babylon, we would’ve been very superstitious and
polytheistic to the core. In the ancient world, we would’ve sought divine guidance
through divination, tried to alter circumstances through magic, and believed in
the dreaded evil eye.

There are a whole range of issues that admit of diversity in the moral and
political areas as well, based to an overwhelming degree on the “accidents of
birth.” Caucasian American men would’ve believed with President Andrew Jackson in
manifest destiny, our God-given mandate to seize Native American territories in
westward expansion. Up through the seventeenth century we would’ve believed that
women were intellectually inferior to men, and consequently we wouldn’t have
allowed them to become educated in the same subjects as men, much less to vote.
Like Thomas Jefferson and most Americans, we would’ve thought this way about black
people as well, that they were intellectually inferior to whites, while if we were
born in the South, we would’ve justified slavery from the Bible. If in today’s
world we were born in the Palestinian Gaza strip, we would hate the Jews and
probably want to kill them all.

These kinds of moral, political, and religious beliefs, based upon cultural
conditions, can be duplicated into a lengthy list of beliefs that we would’ve had
if we were born in a different time and place. Voltaire was right: “Every man is a
creature of the age in which he lives, and few are able to raise themselves above
the ideas of their time.”

Social conditions provide us with the initial control beliefs we use from that
moment on to incorporate all known facts and experiences. That’s why they’re
called control beliefs. They are somewhat like blinders. From the moment we put
them on, we pretty much see only what our blinders will let us see, because reason
is mostly used to serve them.

Michael Shermer, a former Christian turned atheist, has done an extensive study of
why people believe in God and in “weird things.” He argues: “Most of us most of
the time come to our beliefs for a variety of reasons having little to do with
empirical evidence and logical reasoning. Rather, such variables as genetic
predispositions, parental predilections, sibling influences, peer pressures,
educational experiences, and life impressions all shape the personality
preferences and emotional inclinations that, in conjunction with numerous social
and cultural influences, lead us to make certain belief choices. Rarely do any of
us sit down before a table of facts, weigh them pro and con, and choose the most
logical and rational belief, regardless of what we previously believed. Instead,
the facts of the world come to us through the colored filters of the theories,
hypotheses, hunches, biases, and prejudices we have accumulated through our
lifetime. We then sort through the body of data and select those most confirming
what we already believe, and ignore or rationalize away those that are
disconfirming. All of us do this, of course, but smart people are better at it.”

Christian philosopher Robert McKim concurs in some respects. He wrote: “We seem to
have a remarkable capacity to find arguments that support positions which we
antecedently hold. Reason is, to a great extent, the slave of prior commitments.”
Hence the whole notion of “an independent rational judgment” is suspect, he
claims. This is not to deny that Christian apologists defend their faith with
reasons. Of course they do. These apologists, if they’re good at what they do,
will be smart people. But as Michael Shermer also reminds us, “smart people,
because they are more intelligent and better educated, are able to give
intellectual reasons justifying their beliefs that they arrived at for
nonintelligent reasons.”

Psychiatrist Dr. Valerie Tarico describes the process of defending unintelligent

beliefs by smart people. She claims, “it doesn’t take very many false assumptions
to send us on a long goose chase.” To illustrate this she tells us about the
mental world of a paranoid schizophrenic. To such a person the perceived
persecution by the CIA sounds real. “You can sit, as a psychiatrist, with a
diagnostic manual next to you, and think: as bizarre as it sounds, the CIA really
is bugging this guy. The arguments are tight, the logic persuasive, the evidence
organized into neat files. All that is needed to build such an impressive house of
illusion is a clear, well-organized mind and a few false assumptions. Paranoid
individuals can be very credible.” In her opinion this is what Christians do and
best explains why it’s hard to shake the evangelical faith. Of course, I don’t
expect Christians to agree with her that this is what they do, but then they
cannot deny that people of religious faith do this. What else can best explain why
there is still a Mormon church now that DNA evidence conclusively proves Native
Americans did not come from the Middle East?
I’ve investigated my faith from the inside as an insider with the presumption that
it was true. Even from an insider’s perspective with the Christian set of control
beliefs, I couldn’t continue to believe. Now from the outside, it makes no sense
at all. Christians are on the inside. I am now on the outside. Christians see
things from the inside. I see things from the outside. From the inside, it seems
true. From the outside, it seems almost bizarre. As Mark Twain wisely said, “The
easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly teaches me to
suspect that my own is also.”

This whole inside/outside perspective is quite a dilemma and prompts me to propose

and argue on behalf of the OTF, the result of which makes the presumption of
skepticism the preferred stance when approaching any religious faith, especially
one’s own. The outsider test is simply a challenge to test one’s own religious
faith with the presumption of skepticism, as an outsider. It calls upon believers
to "Test or examine your religious beliefs as if you were outsiders with the same
presumption of skepticism you use to test or examine other religious beliefs." Its
presumption is that when examining any set of religious beliefs skepticism is
warranted, since the odds are good that the particular set of religious beliefs
you have adopted is wrong.

The OTF is no different than the prince in the Cinderella story who must question
forty-five thousand girls to see which one lost the glass slipper at the ball last
night. They all claim to have done so. Therefore, skepticism is definitely
warranted. This is especially the case when an empirical foot match cannot be had.

The amount of skepticism warranted depends on the number of rational people who
disagree, whether the people who disagree are separated into distinct geographical
locations, the nature of those beliefs, how they originated, how they were
personally adopted in the first place, and the kinds of evidence that can possibly
be used to decide between them. My claim is that when it comes to religious
beliefs a high degree of skepticism is warranted because of these factors.

Surely someone will initially object that this is quite draconian in scope. Why
take such an extreme stance? It’s because that’s how religious people approach all
of the other religious faiths but their own. If someone claims she cannot do this
because no one can test anything without assumptions of some kind, then this test
challenges the believer to switch her assumptions. If she simply cannot do this,
then let me suggest doing what René Descartes did with a methodological (or
hypothetical) doubt, although I’m not suggesting his type of extreme doubt.
Hypothetically consider your faith from the perspective of an outsider.

If she refuses to do this then she must justify having such a double standard. Why
does she test other religious beliefs differently than her own? For someone to
object that what I’m asking is unfair, she has the burden of proof to show why her
inconsistent approach to religious faith is justified in the first place.

I’ll grant that what I’m asking is a tough thing to do. That’s because, as
anthropologist Dr. David Eller argues, our culturally inherited beliefs are what
we use to see with. We don’t see culture. We see with culture. Our culturally
inherited beliefs are much like our very eyes themselves. We cannot easily pluck
out our eyes to look at them. But we must attempt this if we truly want to examine
that which we were taught to believe. Only the honest the consistent and the brave
will ever do this.

To the Christian theist the challenge of the outsider test means there would be no
more quoting the Bible to defend the claim that Jesus’ death on the cross saves us
from sins. The Christian theist must now try to rationally explain it. No more
quoting the Bible to show how it’s possible for Jesus to be 100% God and 100% man
with nothing left over. The Christian theist must now try to make sense of this
claim, coming as it does from an ancient superstitious people who didn’t have
trouble believing Paul and Barnabas were “gods in human form” (Acts 14:11; 28:6).
The Christian theist must not assume prior to examining the evidence that there is
an answer to the problem of horrendous suffering in our world either. And she’d be
initially skeptical of believing in any of the miracles in the Bible, just as she
would be skeptical of any claims of the miraculous in today’s world supporting
other religious faiths. Why? Because she cannot start out by first believing the
Bible, nor can she trust the people close to her who are Christian theists to know
the truth, nor can she trust her own anecdotal religious experiences, since such
experiences are had by people of all religious faiths who differ about the
cognitive content learned as the result of these experiences. She would want
evidence and reasons for these beliefs.

The outsider test also challenges believers to examine the social and cultural
conditions of how they came to adopt their particular religious faith in the first
place. That is, believers must ask themselves who or what influenced them and what
the actual reasons were for adopting their faith in its earliest stages.
Christian, just ask yourself whether the initial reasons you had for adopting your
faith were strong ones. Just think about the problems you’ve experienced in your
churches along with the intellectual problems you wrestle with in meetings like
these. If you could go back in time knowing what you know now about how Christians
behave in the church would you still choose to believe? And those initial
arguments that convinced you to believe would surely be thought of by you as
simplistic and unworthy of your consideration today. Just ask yourself if you
would’ve become a Mormon instead, had a joyous friendly Mormon group approached
you at that same vulnerable time in your life. Most all of us, most all of the
time, do not have good initial reasons to accept our religious faith, which from
that time forward acts like a set of blinders with regard to how we see the
evidence. We just end up believing what we were taught to believe by people we
trust in a Christian dominated culture.

At the very minimum, a believer should be willing to subject her faith to rigorous
scrutiny by reading many of the best-recognized critiques of her faith, most of
which are written by other professing believers. Evangelical faith, for instance,
can be thought of as a small branch out on a limb called Christianity which is
attached to a huge tree called religion. The debate should start by settling the
question of which Christianity represents true Christianity in our world today.
Then too today’s Christian faith bears little resemblance to the theologies and
the ethics of the Christianities in the past, and it will bear little resemblance
to future Christianities because the Christian faith is like a chameleon, ever
changing with the progression of knowledge. But once that debate between
Christians is settled, if that’s even remotely possible, the next debate is
between Christianity and all other religions on the planet. I claim evangelicals
cannot win the first debate, much less the second one. Cultural anthropologist Dr.
David Eller is right: “Nothing is more destructive to religion than other
religions; it is like meeting one’s own anti-matter twin.” (p. 233).

Nonetheless, if after having investigated your religious faith with the

presumption of skepticism it passes intellectual muster, then you can have your
religious faith. It’s that simple. If not, abandon it like I did. I suspect that
if someone is willing to take the challenge of the outsider test, then her
religious faith will be found defective and she will abandon it along with all
other religious faiths, like it has me.

Answering Six Major Objections:

One: Religious believers will all object that the OTF does not show their
particular religion to be false simply because it’s an overwhelming sociological
fact that we believe based upon when and where we were born. William Lane Craig
asks, “How does the mere presence of religious worldviews incompatible with
Christianity show that distinctively Christian claims are not true? Logically, the
existence of multiple, incompatible truth claims only implies that all of them
cannot be (objectively) true; but it would be obviously fallacious to infer that
not one of them is (objectively) true.” He’s right about this, as are Muslims and
Mormons who can say the same thing with regard to their respective faiths. After
all, someone can be right if for no other reason than that she just got lucky to
be born when and where she did.

But how do you rationally justify such luck? This is why I’ve developed the
challenge of the outsider test in the first place, to test religious faiths
against such luck. If the test between religious faiths is based entirely on luck,
then what are the chances, based on luck alone, that the particular sect within
Christian theism that one adheres to is correct?

Two. It’s objected that there are small minorities of people who choose to be
Christian theists who were born and raised in Muslim countries and that people can
escape their culturally adopted faith. This is true. But these are the exceptions.
Christian theists respond by asking me to explain the exceptions. I’m asking them
to explain the rule. Why do religious beliefs dominate in specific geographical
areas? Why is that?

When it comes to these converts, my opinion is that most of them do not

objectively weigh the evidence when making their initial religious commitments.
They mainly change their minds due to the influence and believability of the
evangelist and/or the wondrous nature of the religious story itself. They have no
initial way of truly investigating the proffered faith. Which evangelist will
objectively tell the ugly side of the Bible and of the Church while preaching the
good news? None that I know of. Which evangelist will tell a prospect about the
innumerable problems that Christian scholars like yourselves wrestle with in
meetings like this? None that I know of. Which evangelist will give a prospect a
copy of a book like mine along with a copy of a Christian apologetics book, and
ask her to read them both before making a decision? Again, none that I know of.

Three. It’s objected that merely because rational people disagree about something
does not justify skepticism about a particular claim. On the contrary, I think it
can and it does. The amount of skepticism warranted depends on the criteria I
mentioned earlier. Rational people don’t bet against gravity, for instance,
because there is evidence for it that was learned apart from what she was taught
to believe in a geographically distinct location. She can personally test it. I’m
claiming religious beliefs are in a different category than the results of
repeatable scientific experiments, and that this claim is both obvious and non-
controversial. Skepticism is best expressed on a continuum, anyway. Some belief
claims will warrant more skepticism than others. I’m claiming that religious
beliefs warrant probably the highest skepticism given the sociological facts. At
the risk of offending believers here, religious beliefs, like beliefs in the Elves
of Iceland, the trolls of Norway, and the power of witches in Africa, must be
subjected to the highest levels of skepticism given both the extraordinary nature
of these claims and how some of these beliefs are adopted in the first place.

Four. Someone may object that my argument is self-defeating. They’ll ask: “Do my
cultural conditions overwhelmingly ‘determine’ my presumption of skepticism? If
so, then, as Alvin Plantinga questions, are my beliefs “produced by an unreliable
belief-producing process” too? If not, then why do I think I can transcend culture
but a Christian theist can’t transcend her culture?” In answer I think it’s
extremely difficult to transcend our culture because, as I mentioned before, it
provides us with the very eyes we use to see with. But precisely because we know
from anthropological and psychological studies that this is what culture does to
us, it’s possible to transcend the culture we were raised in.

[Example] We know that people do not truly see or hear reality as it is. What we
see is filtered by our eyes. What we hear is filtered by our ears. We see and hear
only a very limited amount of data in the world. But if we saw and heard the whole
electromagnetic and sonic spectra we’d basically see and hear white noise. We know
this even though we can’t actually see or hear the white noise for ourselves. We
also know that the ground we walk on is moving like a swarm of bees on the
microscopic level. So it’s this scientific knowledge about the world which leads
us to be skeptical about that which we see and hear.

The same thing is can be said when it comes to anthropological and psychological
studies that show we should be skeptical of that which we were led to believe,
even though we can’t actually see anything about our beliefs to be skeptical
about. And the OTF is as sure of a test as we can come up with to examine our
culturally adopted beliefs.

The truth is that my argument is not self-defeating at all. It suggests we should

doubt what we believe. It’s not self-defeating to say the odds are that we are
wrong. After all, we’re talking about the odds here. Agnostic philosopher J. L.
Schellenberg deals with this same type of criticism in these words: “Now this
objection can be sound only if my arguments do indeed apply to themselves, and it
will not take much to see that they do not.” For there is a huge difference
between defending a religious set of beliefs as the one and only correct set, and
denying that a set of religious beliefs is justified. His claim is that the
adherents of any given religious set of beliefs “have not successfully made their
case; it bides us to continue investigation . . . because skepticism is always a
position of last resort in truth seeking contexts.”

Five. In arguing that one’s religious faith is overwhelmingly adopted by the

“accidents of birth,” have I committed 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.

I don’t think the genetic fallacy is as much of a big deal as people think it is,
especially in religious contexts. If someone has a paranoid belief about the CIA
spying on him and we find that the genesis (or origin) of his belief comes from
him taking a hallucinogenic drug like L.S.D., then we have some really good
evidence to be skeptical of his paranoid belief, even though we have not actually
shown his belief to be false in any other way, and even though by doing so someone
could say we have committed the genetic fallacy. So in a like manner if we can
determine that the origins of the earliest Christianities were created purely by
ancient superstitious human beings, we have good grounds for skepticism. But even
more to the point, if all of our beliefs are completely determined by our
environment then that’s the case regardless of the fact that by arguing for this
it commits the genetic fallacy.

Still, there is no genetic fallacy here unless by explaining how believers first
adopt their faith I therefore conclude that such a faith is false. I’m not arguing
that these faiths are false because of how believers originally adopted them. I’m
merely arguing believers should be skeptical of their culturally adopted religious
faith because of how they first adopted them.

Six. One final objection asks whether this is all circular. Have I merely chosen a
different metaphysical belief system based upon different cultural factors? I deny
this, for I have very good initial grounds for starting out with skepticism based
upon the sociological, anthropological and psychological facts. Methodological
procedures are those tests we use to investigate something. How we go about
investigating something is a separate issue that must be justified on its own
terms, and I have done so here. Someone cannot say of the outsider test that 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 from the facts. One must first
dispute the outsider test on its own terms.