Where David Marshall Goes Wrong, Part 3

This is Part 3 of my response to David Marshall's criticisms of the Outsider Test for Faith (OTF). Part 1 can be read here, with a link to Part 2.

Once again I'll blockquote what he wrote.
Additional problems.

"We swim in a Christian culture. It's hard to argue Christians out of their faith because they were never argued into it in the first place. Elsewhere, Eller has argued that 'nothing is more destructive to religion than other religions.'" (82)

This is doubtful on three counts. First, many Christians were "argued into" their faith, including many who grew up in Christian homes.
These arguments take place inside a Christian culture. There are a few hard to explain-away cases, I’ll grant. But I’m not trying to explain away anything. The rule is what I’m arguing for, that people adopt the faith of their culture. How do you explain away the rule? That there might be exceptions only shows there are few rare cases where people are convinced to believe who were raised as outsiders. What I would like to know is whether or not these converts were taught equally about all the religions before they decided, whether they were given a copy of your books along with mine and then asked to decide, whether they were fully informed about the history of theology and the history of the church before being asked to decide. I already know why people believe. They need to do so. People are mostly egocentric. We want to think the world revolves around us, that there is an eternal God who loves us, that we will live for an eternity in bliss, that we can see our loved ones again, that there is some supernatural being outside this world who can help us when we’re in need as we pray.

It’s called the Psychological Pull of the Christian Story.

I would think that we should be skeptical of that which we prefer to be true.
Second, my impression is that those who convert from argument are usually harder rather than easier to deconvert.
Once people make up their minds, yes that is probably true. As humans we have a deep need to save face. So we dig ourselves in deeper in order to do so when confronted with reasons against a choice we made. This is what cognitive dissonance theory predicts depending on the level of commitment people have toward their choices.

Here’s a mundane example of what I’m talking about.
Third, Eller is wrong in his sociology. In fact, India, likely the most religious country in the world, is also among its most diverse. Religions have vied with one another there for thousands of years. In Nigeria, Christians and Muslims are about evenly divided, with some animists -- and I am told almost everyone believes in God. In Singapore, large numbers of Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, Free-Thinkers,and Muslims do not destroy religious faith, but create a "hot-house" atmosphere where a variety of religions thrive. The same seems true of Taiwan and Hong Kong, where I lived for some six years altogether. In fact, Eller seems exactly wrong: as sociologist of religion Rodney Stark argues, the more competition there is in religion, the healthier for religion the market seems to become.
Hmmm. I don’t know about India. I do know about America. And as far as I can tell it might be like India. America is dominated by Christianity of some sort or another, although, it’s also clearly a pluralistic nation. Cultures blend with each other in time. That I also know. Nonetheless, as I said before "the smaller the culture then the more influence that culture has on us. Parents and siblings have the greatest influence on us.”
"When it comes to religious faith, an overwhelming number of believers adopt and defend what they were raised to believe by their parents in their respective cultures." (83)

True, usually, more or less. Religious belief is often tied to tribal identity, and sometimes conversion "out" is harshly punished. But tens of millions of Chinese have converted to new religions in recent years.
People change with the times and the cultures. These are new times and cultures are changing with them. But again, "the smaller the culture then the more influence that culture has on us. Parents and siblings have the greatest influence on us.”
Looking at my experience, all four the siblings in my family now identify themselves as Christian. But two of us went through periods of doubt. It's true none of us would consider converting to, say, Islam -- for the obvious reasons. But I've met many western Buddhists who were born into Christian or skeptical households. I've also known hundreds of converts to Christianity -- including my wife, who grew up Buddhist.
This is anecdotal evidence I am not privy to examining because I don’t have all the relevant facts.
And a lot of people convert within religions, from one sect to another. My Grandmother was a Pentacostal, my Dad was a Calvinist; I am neither, though appreciate some of both. So there is more changing of views that Loftus credits, especially in free societies.
The most often change of religion is within the same household of faith into a different sect of that same religion. And most people change religions because of the perceived influence of the people around them. They do not study out all of the things I mentioned earlier. They make irrational decisions based upon the likeability and perceived believability of the person whose faith they decide to accept. They all share a faith based reasoning so what’s the difference, really? Until they adopt a science based reasoning I don’t see them changing that much at all. Religions are all founded on that type of reasoning.
"The other method Christians use is on much firmer ground. They use David Hume's evidentiary standards for examining miraculous claims to the faiths they reject. They also deconstruct these other religious texts by assuming human rather than divine authors. They adopt a methodological naturalist viewpoint to test these other extraordinary claims . . . " (86)

One should not "assume" that the Qu'ran or Book of Mormon is not divinely inspired: read them and find out!
What? Then read Ron Hubbard’s works with an open mind too, or attend that guy’s church in Texas to find out whether he really is Jesus, visit Lourdes and see for yourself if miracles take place. In fact, I recommend this. Do it. Check out as many religion based claims around the world as you can in your lifetime. Read all of the religious texts and the works written about them. It will show you they all share a faith based reasoning. Then you’ll see why that is a wrongheaded approach to religion.

As far as being open-minded goes watch this video.
Loftus also seems to be assuming that a book must EITHER have a "human" OR a "divine" author. This may be his fundamental (ist) mistake.
Not at all. I am merely looking for any traces that there is a divine mind at all behind the human authors. It’s not there. I see nothing in the Bible, for instance, that could not be written by children of those times, nothing. It’s nothing but the religious musings of an ancient superstitions group of agency detectors at work.
"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.)

Luke didn't believe Paul and Barnabas were "gods;" rural hicks in Lystra did. (Paul and Barnabas had cured a fellow townsman who had been lame since birth -- one can understand why this impressed the people who knew him!)
I think I disabuse David of this kind of argument in my book, Why I Became an Atheist in the longest chapter where I argue that ancient people were superstitious to the core using just the Bible to prove it. If they were rural hicks then who were the apostles, who were the Ephesians (Acts 19:23-41, cf The Riot in Ephesus), who were the people on the Island of Malta (Acts 28”1-6), or the sailors in the fictional book of Jonah, or even the Athenians themselves (Acts 17:16-28).The list goes on and on. We could talk about mandrakes, the Egyptian magicians in Moses’s day, the so-called power of dreams, the casting of lots, the evil eye, the pool of Siloam, magic handkerchiefs, and so on and so forth.
The ancient Greco-Roman world also contained many sophisticated, skeptical people, some of whom became Christians.
But most did not. We have no record that Herod or Caiaphas or Pilate or the Roman soldiers (well, one) or most of the Jews converted at all, and you’d think the NT writers would tell us if they did.
"The 'many gods' objection to Pascal's Wager destroys the wager's force since we must first decide among the various gods which one to wager on." (87)

Problems:
(a) Pascal had already given many reasons to believe in Jesus. The Wager was not made in a vacuum, as skeptics often assume.
Sure, but how is that relevant to the Wager? And he had said: “I look on all sides and see nothing but obscurity; nature offers me nothing but matter for doubt. . . . A hundred times I have wished that God would mark his presence in nature unequivocally. . . [but] all who seek God in nature find no light to satisfy them. . . . Nature confounds the skeptics, and reason confounds the dogmatists. . . . You can avoid neither skepticism nor dogmatism; but alas, you can live with neither.”
(b) God is not comparable to polytheistic gods. Athena or even Zeus do not control one's destiny after death. Anyway, Greek intellectuals had already largely come to recognize that these deities were just masks for a single all-powerful Creator.
This is how religions have evolved starting out with polytheism just like Yahweh, El, Baal and Marduk in Mesopotamian cultures did, although most of these gods evolved out of existence in the West. Had the Greek civilization lasted throughout the centuries just as Christianity has done then Zeus would probably have taken on the characteristics of a monotheistic god too. It’s a simpler view of a supernatural being. But the biblical god started out as a member of a council of gods.

To see this argued for I highly recommend Thom Stark’s book, The Human Faces of God, for starters.
(c) Anthropology shows that awareness of the unique Supreme God is common in many cultures around the world. So it is not at all arbitrary which god you believe in.
Similarities show nothing except that concepts of god have gravitated toward monotheism because such a concept is a simpler one. This again is how religions evolve. They either evolve or die. No religion in a world community could hope to have a big enough god anymore unless that god is the only god. As people became more aware of other city-states their god had to encompass their religions too. So god concepts grew bigger as the world got bigger. There is nothing problematic about this at all. Religions evolve.
On William Lane Craig:

"So would Bill have believed in the first place if he knew then what he knows now? . . . I dare say that if he knew what he does now and hadn't already chosen to adopt his faith, he would not have believed in the first place." (88)

Why, then, does Craig regularly defeat atheist opponents in debate? (As neutral, and even atheist, observers often admit?) If the most learned atheists in the Western world can't convince a non-Christian audience Craig's arguments are wrong in public debate, why shouldn't Craig buy his own winning arguments?
Non-sequitur. He’s been debating people regularly since high school days when he was on a debate team. He has practically mastered the art. The real debate takes place in the arguments and books regardless of his skills as a debator. That you even bring this up is ignorant, sorry.
"The one thing we can and should trust is the sciences. Science alone produces consistently excellent results that cannot be denied . . . We can personally do the experiments ourselves." (89)

Questions:

(a) Doesn't mathematics produce "consistently excellent results?" Or must we define "science" to include "math?"
Math is the language of science developed by observing how the world works. If the world didn’t work this way then there would be no scientists to discover this math because the world had to work this way in order for them (and us) to exist.
(b) Doesn't human testimony, when used carefully, produce good results? Most of what we know about the world comes from what reliable people, like teachers and authors of textbooks, tell us. In some cases, we risk our lives based on a single bit of testimony -- at an intersection, I sometimes ask my wife if a car is coming. On a runway, pilots may ask an air traffic controller if it is safe to land.
There is a huge difference here with regard to extraordinary claims. If your wife had said, watch out for an invisible pink elephant who is about to plow you over, then what would you do? Faith based reasoning grants testimonies about such entities like angels, demons, gods and goddesses, all coming from the ancient past where we no longer have access to the people to independently verify their claims. That’s not too reliable at all without sufficient evidence commensurate with these claims.
(c) Does vision count as science? Go to a football game, and would you rather have eyes, or a good science text in braille?
Yes, the five senses count as science. In fact science is based on them.
Science is based on logic, philosophy, mathematics, the sense, and peer interaction. Math and logic and even vision more immediate than biology or physics.
What? Are you a scientist David? No. don’t answer that question. We can already tell you are not quite easily by how uninformed you are about it. One word: Experimentation. They test claims with experiments to see the results. Yes other things are involved, but in a word it's done by experiments.
Other ways of knowing things -- ask a travel agent, your most honest friend, the teacher -- are also consistently useful, especially when we make use of multiple sources of information, and test its reliability in various ways. Some forms of science are more reliable than some sources of testimony, but few are as reliable as math or simply logic. And there's a tradeoff -- what you gain in reliability, you often lose in breadth. One cannot live by science alone.
Science based reasoning works. It has given us the modern world. When properly understood there can be no objection to it. The alternatives produce ignorance and special pleading types of claims.
(d) What modern experiments can you do personally, as Loftus suggests? Do you have a particle excellerator in your den? Can you check the mass of extrasolar planets on your bathroom scale? In the real world, we are in practice forced to trust the claims scientists make for the same reasons we trust our teachers: they strike us as credible.
Such ignorance I cannot deal with. Here are the top seven ways the sciences debunk Christianity.

Why is it that almost to a person believers must denigrate the sciences, or in David's case scientists themselves who are out to deceive us all to believe (think: Mad Scientist). Ahhhh, I know. It’s that faith based reasoning they so proudly wear just like the emperor with no clothes, who proudly walked down the street wearing that same garb.

My final Part 4 response can be found here.

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