Contingency, Science, and the OTF

No John, you're missing the point. What we have is a failure to communicate. In my view the question of who "I" would be in another culture is difficult to raise meaningfully because not only does the religion of choice change, but also the freedom to question one's beliefs differs. So saying that I would be a Muslim in a Saudi society doesn't mean a whole lot because the freedom to so much as question Islam is not granted. What makes someone in a Muslim or a Mormon culture me? Possible world semantics has the problem of identifying either persons or counterparts across possible worlds. When people make statements like "If you had been born in Saudi Arabia you would have been a Muslim," we need an account of the counterpart relation. 

My next point is that I have been influenced by a lot of other things besides my upbringing. My home church exposed me both to liberal Methodist theology and conservative evangelicalism. So it was not monolithic; it was a mixed bag. Lots of people grow up Christians and leave the fold, sometimes because of unbelief, and sometimes just they drift away without really thinking very hard about it. I was NEVER an unquestioning believer and I always took anything that seemed to me like brainwashing very ill. So the meaningful question is whether someone coming out of the Saudi Islamic community who questioned their religion as much as I did would come out as a Muslim. And the answer seems to me to be that a questioner like me would not be welcome in the Saudi community. I would be forced either to stop questioning or leave the fold. So there is no Saudi counterpart to me in any sense that is meaningful to the justification of my religious beliefs. My religious beliefs were, right from age 18, consistently exposed to criticisms from, I won't say all sides, but by many sides. It's anybody's guess how I would have evaluated the evidence had my ideas been formed in some other intellectually open environment. 

So I never said that I would still be a Christian philosopher like myself if I had grown up in the Saudi culture. You are reading me in a delusional way, I hate to say it, when you say that. 

You also missed my point about bad experiences. The point is that there are contingencies in all of our backgrounds, and if contingencies are sufficient to call beliefs into question, then your beliefs would be just as questionable as mine. But contingencies, in and of themselves, are not sufficient to call beliefs into question. 

So you, thinking your way from inside Christianity, assuming that it was true, concluded that it was all false. Fine, I am sure this was a serious intellectual effort. However, nothing guarantees that our intellectual journey will reach the right destination. It isn't humanly possible to consider all the relevant parameters. We call it as we see it, but nothing guarantees our infallibility, even if we end up crossing the aisle. Otherwise, Antony Flew's journey to theism or C. S. Lewis's journey from atheism to theism to Christianity would be proof that theism and Christianity are true. The idea that you MUST have reasoned correctly because you left the fold, and were motivated not to leave just doesn't hold water. 

But then you say, well, what we have to do is to go by the sciences. But whose sciences? The science of Francis Collins, or the science of P. Z. Myers? The science of John Polkinghorne, or the science of Victor Stenger? The science of Michael Behe, or the science of Richard Dawkins? Questions of religion are not strictly speaking scientific questions (unless one operates with an expanded notion of science, an idea that I am not unfriendly to, actually, but other people scream bloody murder when I suggest it), so you have to extrapolate from the sciences in order to get any kind of results. And then you have to ask questions as to why matter exists, or, further, why science exists. I have argued that if "scientific" naturalism is true, then it is not possibly true that humans literally add, subtract, multiply, divide, and take square roots of numbers. Hence if scientific naturalism is true, then science itself cannot exist. As I see it, the Christian world-view is the scientific world-view. Modern science was founded on the Christian watch, and presupposes a rational universe and rational minds to understand that universe that we would have no reason to believe in unless there is a God. 

The fact that you think that my recitation of something that is pretty much standard philosophy of science is some kind of tirade against science shows that you don't understand the very science that you claim to believe in so strongly. Richard Swinburne's philosophical theology is the most comprehensive attempt to bring scientific thinking to religious questions, but I know you don't like his conclusions. You see, when you say "follow science," what I fear is that a "heads I win, tails you lose" game is being set up. If I point to something in science that supports religion, you say "That's not science." If you point to something in science that refutes religion, then it is science.