Richard Carrier, James Lindsay, on the OTF

Richard Carrier writes:
James Lindsay has been doing some great blogging on how to apply Bayesian reasoning to model John Loftus’ Outsider Test for Faith (or OTF).

Formulating and extensively defending the OTF is Loftus’ greatest contribution to the philosophy of religion and atheism. His best and most thorough treatment appears as chapter four in The Christian Delusion (a book I always recommend anyway as it contains lots of great chapters by great authors; and two by me). He is writing a whole book on it now. It should be out this year (I’ve seen advanced drafts and it’s good; I’ll blog it when you can buy it). The OTF is featured at Iron Chariots (which provides examples of looser expressions of the concept throughout history) and Loftus discusses it often at Debunking Christianity.

The basic idea is that you can only have a rational faith if you test it by the same standards you apply to all other competing faiths; yet when you do that, your religion tests as false as the others, and the same reasons you use to reject those become equally valid reasons to reject yours. Though this idea has been voiced before, Loftus is the first to name it, rigorize it, and give it an extensive philosophical defense; moreover, by doing so, he is the first to cause a concerted apologetic to arise attempting to dodge it, to which he could then respond. The end result is one of the most effective and powerful arguments for atheism there is. It is, in effect, a covering argument that subsumes all other arguments for atheism into a common framework. Link

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