Basic Fairness, Unbelief by Default, and the OTF

John: I never said this was simply a debate between Christianity and atheism. These are probably the leading options in our culture, and so sometimes you have to debate one issue at a time.

The website that I have been discussing with respect to the Outsider Test was a site in which Christianity and Islam were compared. To give the short answer to Arizona Atheist, the site may not itself be completely even-handed between those two religions, but the evidence it provides in the area of documentary evidence and of archaeological evidence, shows that the evidential situation with respect to each religion is different, and that Christianity has some advantages that Islam lacks. So an "outsider" would clearly, I think, rate the evidential situation for Christianity better than Islam. Someone coming in with the same level of skepticism for each religion could pick Christianity. And since I don't think any other books can match the Bible or the Qu'ran on those criteria, the case could be made for Christianity as opposed to all other faiths. With some religions I'm not sure they even have apologetics.

As I said, the OTF is an onion. On one layer there is what we might call the Basic Fairness Doctrine, that says we shouldn't try to give other religions as fair a treatment as we give our own. We should attempt to compare, as fairly as we can, the believability of religions. To use McGrew's terms, this is the heuristic use of the OTF, and I don't object. However, such fairness isn't easy, but we all have to work on it. It means making sure that we are looking at the inconvenient truths for whatever view we adopt, and it applies generally to Christians, Muslims, atheists, Buddhists, etc.

However, as the OTF is typically presented, it attempts to give a kind of special default status to the denial of religion, and in doing so it starts to engage in anti-religious special pleading. Then we start getting the diagnostic use of the OTF, where we look at what we think is true in the area of, say, Biblical studies, and then we conclude that anyone who comes out a believer somehow isn't performing the duties prescribed in the "heuristic" side of the OTF.

When I give my more detailed response to Arizona Atheist, I am going to look at an argument by Robert Price, and ask whether anybody could possibly take that argument seriously who was not infected with what I would call a hostility bias toward the New Testament.

You like to bring up psychological and sociological evidence suggesting that, epistemologically, we're all sinners. Fine. But then you presume that you can become a saint just by rejecting religion, as if confirmation bias comes to an end once you get out the church door and leave the fold. Not fine.