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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