If I had been born in Saudi Arabia, would I have been a Muslim? Hell, no!

From a comment by Chris on the Secular Outpost:

A naturalist/atheist views all of the above in an entirely consistent manner: none of it is believable. Theists do not view it consistently. They view one set of beliefs as true; the others are not. Yet there's no difference in the nature of the evidence - none whatsoever. If Victor, with his same mindset, had been born and raised in Saudi Arabia, he would almost certainly be a Muslim, and he would dismiss all accounts of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection, while maintaining that he was still a prophet and a divine being who would return to judge the world. Assuming I also maintained my mindset when I was 'reborn' in Saudi Arabia, then I would still be a naturalist/atheist (albeit a very circumspect one), and I would still dismiss the miracle-evidentiary value of the Koran, Bible, Diamond Sutra, etc., just as I do today. So a theist would accept a similar 'type' of evidence, but a completely different 'set,' whereas a naturalist would maintain a consistent view of both type and set no matter what culture he/she was born into. That seems like a more defensible position.


This is an assertion, typical of the outsider test rhetoric, that I would, if I had the same intellectual dispositions, be  a Muslim if I were born in the Islamic world. The person saying this, of course, doesn't know me at all.  First, this simply denigrates all of the efforts that I made since I grew up to evaluate the reasons for and against being a Christian.  The evidence bases for the two religions are different, and I think someone of my education and scholarship would have noticed the difference. In fact, when I looked at comparison of the evidence bases for these religions a few weeks back I commented that if the evidence bases were reversed between the two religions I would have some serious doubts. (That particular site probably overstates the case for Christianity, but there does seem to me to be a real difference). 


Second, the Islamic community seems to have actively discouraged philosophy since the Middle Ages. You have figures like Avicenna, Averroes, and al-Ghazali, but after that I don't see much contribution to philosophy. So the likelihood of the Islamic community producing a philosopher like myself doesn't seem as likely as the Christian community producing a philosopher like myself. 


Third, in thinking about my intellectual development, I was always a pretty severe questioner. I can imagine Christian settings that would have severely tempted me to leave the fold, particularly those who suppressed questions. I experienced some of that (I remember attending a conference by Bill Gothard where he told people that if they wanted to take a philosophy course that would be OK, but don't major in it), but I was able to find Christians of considerable intellect, equal to anything I saw in the atheists I knew, who were not afraid of questions. C. S. Lewis helped a lot, my friends Bob Prokop (a commentator here) and the late Joe Sheffer were helpful when I was an undergraduate, my seminary professor Don Saliers, who helped me find my own voice in dealing with the issue of Catholicism (Don is most famous for being the father of Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls), Christian grad students at Illinois, and the philosophers at the Society of Christian Philosophers' conference all helped to provide an the intellectual community that allowed me to become a Christian philosopher. I think a more question-suppressive intellectual atmosphere might have induced me to leave the fold. I find it funny that Loftus uses the word "brainwashed" about me, because the ABSENCE of brainwashing tactics amongst these people made it much easier to sustain my faith. I think of it as God taking care of my intellectual needs throughout my life, but if you don't think there is a God, you probably are going to have to describe it differently. 


If I had grown up in a Christian community that preached a lot of hell-fire, if I had asked a lot of questions and been told to stop asking them, and if looking in a more liberal direction I had found nothing but a lot of Bultmannian existentializing, I think there is a good chance that I would have left the fold. 


But the main thing I want to note is that in order to have a real equivalent of me in some other religion, you have to have a question-friendly atmosphere. There are Christian groups don't even provide that. I don't think I would have found that in Saudi Arabia, since the predominant form of Islam there is reactionary. When Salman Rushdie wrote Satanic Verses, which as I understand it is a novelized account of the giving of the Qur'an to Muhammad which diverges from orthodox Islam, the mullahs in Iran put out a contract on him. I don't recall a hit being ordered by the Vatican on Dan Brown after the Da Vinci Code. I'm not saying that an Islamic equivalent of myself is impossible, but I think if I had been a Muslim I either would have become a Muslim fideist and probably never gone into philosophy, or I would have left the fold.