Thursday, June 30, 2011

Piscatory barricade


Almost all of the objections to the Outsider Test for Faith (OTF) are red herrings placed in the road to sidetrack us from getting at the truth.


In that event, I wonder why the state patrol doesn’t strew the freeway with red herrings when it tries to set up a roadblock. On second thought, seems to me a driver could simply run over the red herrings and continue on his way. I mean, aren’t they pretty flat to begin with?

Or perhaps he had in mind stacking cans of red herrings. Would they be welded together to form a solid barrier?  

In my book, Why I Became an Atheist, I contrasted the insider’s perspective (IP) with the outsider’s perspective (OP), which can be explained like this: The insider believes in a particular religious sect. The outsider does not. The insider has faith. The outsider doubts. The insider makes extraordinary claims. The outsider makes no claims. The insider has a belief in search of data. The outsider looks at the data to determine the probability of a claim. The insider takes a leap of faith beyond the probabilities. The outsider doesn’t claim more than what the probabilities can show.
 
The IP represents a person who has faith. The OP represents a person who does not have faith. The IP represents faith-based reasoning. The OP represents science-based reasoning.

i) By his own admission, the OTF presupposes a hostile characterization of religion. That’s not a neutral, even-handed characterization. Rather, the OTF already prejudges religion.

And in so doing, it assumes what it needs to prove.

ii) Moreover, even in his own self-serving description, it’s not true that the outsider makes no claims. Loftus is making several substantive claims about religion to justify the OTF. 

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