Trying to formalize the OTF

Via Victor Reppert, I came across another atheistic critique of the OTF by Thrasymachus. Inspired by its superior clarity, I have decided to further clarify my previous objections. Thrasymachus is also replying to a previous reply by Loftus which is better suited to my purposes than his other writings.

Thrasymachus focuses on the OTF as premised by Loftus in this post:

1. Rational people in distinct geographical locations around the globe overwhelmingly adopt and defend a wide diversity of religious faiths due to their upbringing and cultural heritage. This is the religious diversity thesis.

2. Consequently, it seems very likely that adopting one’s religious faith is not merely a matter of independent rational judgment but is causally dependent on cultural conditions to an overwhelming degree. This is the religious dependency thesis.

3. Hence the odds are highly likely that any given adopted religious faith is false.

4. So the best way to test one’s adopted religious faith is from the perspective of an outsider with the same level of skepticism used to evaluate other religious faiths. This ex-presses the OTF.

Loftus uses the phrase "the odds are highly likely" in response to the observation that a deductive equivalent of the above is invalid. But as Thrasymachus points out, it still is not clear that (3) follows from (1)/(2).

First, let me clear some fumes: I am assuming that everyone involved agrees that certainty in religious beliefs is unwarranted. I am also assuming that after this is recognized, the religious beliefs in question can be probabilized. This is not always obvious: some claims are not obviously susceptible to forceful probabilities. The doctrine of the Trinity, for example, has other conceptual issues to clear up before this may be done. Instead of throwing up our hands, we can focus on the subset of putative truths essential to Christianity (C) which can be probabilized, e.g. the Resurrection. It is the probability of these claims in conjunction that is represented by prob(C).

Second, (1) assumes that differing religious people are or can be rational, at least in the sense that their beliefs are internally consistent. Else, we have no need of the OTF, as incoherency arguments would more than suffice.

Now we can see what would be required for (3) to follow from (1) and (2). I will set as a threshold that (3)/(4) translate as requiring, at a minimum, that Christianity is not more likely to be true than not, i.e. 0.5>p(C). Denote the religious diversity thesis by Div, the religious dependency thesis by Dep, and p the prior probability of some unspecified Christian.¹ The odds form of Bayes' Theorem is as follows:

.

To get (3)/(4) as I interpret them, we need

.

In order for this to be the case, we need to know three different quantities. p(C)=1-p(~C), p(Div & Dep|C), and p(Div & Dep|~C). All we can say about p(C) is that it is greater than 1/2, as we are talking about a believer's prior. So we need something at least as strong as p(Div & Dep|~C)>p(Div & Dep|C). But as I pointed out in a previous post, not even this inequality must hold.

At the end of my last post, I asked a question: what would Calvin think of the OTF? It wasn't an idle question. If you are a Christian who believes in the predestination of the Elect and the Fallen world, the fact that your religion is one amongst many is not a surprise. That few have the right faith may not bother you at all. As far as I am aware, nothing about your religion says that it should not appear to an outsider as one among many. Strange then that advocates of the OTF tell you that the existence of other religions discredits your religion. You can reasonably say, "my religion looks like one of many to you? Swell, your point being? We agree about this, and it bothers me not. For chances are that you are not one of the Elect and are not destined for Salvation and understanding. That you and others do not believe as I do does not surprise me in the least; if anything, I would be surprised if outsiders readily understood the Truth and could easily aspire to it, as I understand otherwise."

One can argue against such a person, but the appearance of his beliefs to a skeptic should not itself constitute an argument.

The case is different whenever we look at more common evangelical versions of Christianity, in which it is asserted that God intervenes or has intervened to aid Christianity and that the Holy Spirit works on the consciences of most or all to guide them to Truth. Free will. All that jazz. If a supernatural agency is at work in the Christian sociology of Christianity, then it is surprisingly hidden in the actual sociological details concerning Christianity. Here, the fact that Christian belief is largely a function of geography and parenting is very surprising. To a person who thinks that Christianity is a natural phenomenon, it should not be. I think that this is a very powerful argument against evangelical Christianity.

Notice then that there are at least two possible outcomes of "Christianity is like other religions to an outsider": it is irrelevant to some Christians, and it constitutes a challenging argument to others. So what we can not do is treat the motivations for the OTF as legitimizing it against religions generally, since the observations motivating the OTF are in no way an argument against certain religions. To pretend otherwise is to do nothing more than pomo an important, but narrow, point.

But it gets worse: even in the cases where the requisite inequality does hold, it may not be large enough to require our believer to make further arguments so as to defend his faith. This is because we still need to know what values of p(C) are warranted. Sure, it's less than 1, but is it less than 0.999 or 0.8?

And so we come to the reason why I did not attempt to formalize the OTF much earlier: it simply isn't a probabilistic inference; it is a demand about priors. I think this is why Loftus has yet to put an argument about probabilities in terms of formal probabilities, as far as I can find. This is not a case of updating a prior set of rational beliefs to a new probability by reasoned argument. Instead, it is an attempt to force a reworking of priors based on evidence.² Again, I do not see why Christians need to accept this; intellectual consistency only requires that they account for Div and Dep by calculating their effects on their beliefs through conditioning.

Here we depart from the most accepted form of Bayesianism, i.e. subjective Bayesianism, entirely. We are encountering a curious version of objective Bayesianism. `Normal' objective Bayesians calculate `informationless' priors by equivocating across possibilities. What Loftus appears to want, as I noted in my previous posts, is that we gauge p(C) in something like the following way:

a. p(C)=1/N where N is the number of possible, mutually contradictory religions.
b. p(C)=1/N where N is the number of mutually contradictory religions in human history.
c. p(C)=1/N where N is the number of existing, mutually contradictory religions.
[Each of the above has an analogue where `religions' is replaced by `Christian sects'.]
d. p(C)=x where x is the frequency of the occurrence of Christians with respect to the general population. (Of the country, or world, or something.)
e. p(C)=A/B where B is the number of rational people and A is the number of rational people who are Christians.

And so on. Before moving on, the first response our Christian might deploy to any combination of the above is a simple one: No.

He is presumed to be rational and he can account for (1)/(2) in the usual way. Sorry to wax tautological, but he simply cannot be convicted of irrationality or unreasonableness whenever he is being both rational and reasonable, as judged by standard philosophical criteria. To go further with this, Loftus will have to mount a convincing attack on Bayesianism itself.

And of course we run into the earlier problem yet again; the argument Loftus presents cannot be probabilized. None of the above statements follows, or can follow, deductively or probabilistically, from (1)/(2).

I could continue on about the other problems, especially as they pertain to Loftus' desire to demand priors about religion but not about secular claims, or that this approach would most likely result in a weaker case against Christianity than the traditional arguments, but I've said this already, and Thrasymachus has done a better job explicating it. I could repeat why `skepticism' is not a sort of default, and that positive claims will be necessary to argue against Christianity. (Otherwise, it's the fallacy of probabilistic Modus Tollens all the way down.) Or, I could reiterate some of Reppert's objections; for example, (1) and (2) are not so undeniably true as Loftus suggests, and Christians may account for differing religions using faith-based claims. The Pharaoh's magicians did not perform wonders so great as Aaron's, but they still made a snake out of a staff. Also, demons and sinful nature.

I pause. Is the argument really this straightforwardly awful? How does Loftus defend it?

One...option for the Christian might be to argue that I have not shown there is a direct causal relationship between RDPT (i.e. the Religious Dependency Thesis) (or 1) and the RDVT (i.e., the Religious Diversity Thesis) (or 2). Just because there is religious diversity doesn’t mean that religious views are overwhelmingly dependent on social and geographical factors, they might argue. Reminiscent of David Hume, who argued that we do not see cause and effect, they might try to argue I have not shown it exists between the RDPT and the RDVT. After all, if Hume can say he never sees one billiard ball “causing” another one to move just because they do so after making contact, then maybe there is no direct causal relationship between the RDPT and the RDVT. Is it possible, they might ask, that just because people have different religious faiths which are separated into distinct geographical locations on our planet, that “when and where” people are born has little to do with what they believe? My answer is that if this is possible, it is an exceedingly small possibility. Do Christians really want to hang their faith on such a slender reed as this? I’ve shown from sociological, geographical and psychological studies that what we believe is strongly influenced by “the accidents of history.” That’s all anyone can ask me to show.

Actually, we can ask for a valid argument. This is simply a genetic fallacy. The deductive genetic fallacy remains a fallacy, even if you argue for odds instead of certainties.

What else can I say? Nothing about this argument works, nor could it conceivably be reworked to capture what Loftus wants. There's a reason for this: it isn't actually an argument. It is a symptom of Loftus' assumption that he objectively and most accurately views the world in a culture-transcendent way.

I might have spoken too soon: if a Christian happens to trust Loftus more than God, there may be an opening for the OTF.

One last quibble to anticipate an objection: Loftus may claim that he is not addressing Calvinists, only evangelical Christians. That doesn't change the fact that his argument is not even an argument of that form. For this discrepancy to matter, he must restate his argument so as to account for variations in prior probability and variations in the Bayes factor specific to the religion in which he is interested. That is, he must pursue normal argumentation.

If he does so, I'll be more than happy.

---

1. It has to be this way, as we are interested in whether or not warrant for religion can be retained, not just how a skeptic feels about religion.

2. This is much weirder than anything attempted by normal objective Bayesians. I do not know of any accepted precedent for an approach like this.

Edit 8/8/11: I've been having a blast with acronyms lately. Please plagiarize the hell out of this excerpt from a comment at Reppert's place:

I should mention that I've seen John's post that he's on a blogging break, so I do not expect any response soon.

To be honest, I don't expect a serious response. Here's what he said to Thrasymachus' post back in January:

"I see nothing here I need to respond to."

Oh, my argument is invalid, cannot be reworked to convincingly get what I want out of it, and my approach in general is a failure. Where's the problem?

Staggering. And this is followed by another unhesitant shift:

"You can insert the word “skeptical” for “outsider” if you wish. And being skeptical means doubting or rejecting anything that the sciences say otherwise."

And we return to the uniqueness problems and question-begging again...

So I'll have fun at his expense until he or others get back to me with a real argument. A satisfactory response will do the following things:

1. Restatement: the precise structure and intended conclusion(s) of the OTF must be clearly stated, along with any contested background assumptions.

2. Support: The structure and conclusions of the argument must be corroborated. Is it deductive? If so, state exactly where and why. Is it a probabilistic argument? Then capture the argument using the formal tools of probabilism and defend it. Is it an argument about prior distributions? Then state clearly why it is that a coherent agent must adopt, prior to evidence, a specific distribution based on an observation which can already accounted for by a religious person or may be calibrated in a traditional, probabilistic manner (conditionalization).

3. Comprehensiveness: Clearly state outstanding objections and why they fail or are otherwise innocuous.

I call it the Simple Test For Understanding, or STFU, because proponents of the OTF should STFU already or move on.

Christianity as religion and the OTF

I tersely spelled out some reasons for rejecting the OTF, but as I have since been reminded that lots of contradictory religions exist (thanks), I will take a moment to explain where and how that matters.

Whenever I see proponents of the OTF, I see people who have taken the kernel of a good idea and some worthwhile observations and blown them way out of proportion. There has to be a German or French word somewhere for this very common form of overreaching more specific than `overreaching'. Lacking a word, I'll coin my own:

Pomoing (poh-moh-ing): the tendency to seize on an idea of relatively narrow utility and deform it into a core, foundational, universally-applicable truth, or, the making of a systematic outlook out of a triviality or truism, the unwarranted bloating of ideas. For example, the truism "scientists are influenced by their culture" often becomes "science is a social construct on rational par with other mythologies" in the hands of postmodernists.

The initial idea here is captured in that all-famous quotation: "When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." This, like `do unto others', reads conservatively as trivial advice: you, a theist, may empathize with atheists by understanding why you reject other religions. This common quote is justly common: it is very often difficult to convey to those who have had little to no experience dealing with critics of their faith to know what it means to reject their faith. Quite possibly for the first time, they are being invited to think why their story that they survived a car crash thanks to Jesus might not convince an atheist. They are being invited to look at their faith from an `outsider' point of view. But a key word there is `an'. I do not recognize that there is any single skeptical position. If anything, the advantage of the appeal I just described is that it can be understood by an `insider'. Theists do not have to become `outsiders' to understand the problem, just as we do not have to become `outsiders' of evolutionary theory to understand the weaknesses of a particular argument for evolution.

The OTF relies on this observation as paired with an appeal to fairness, but proponents do not seem to realize that they are being deeply unfair to religion. I do not think that anybody accepts that one should step `outside' of science in their sense because many theories have been discredited, or because there are conflicts in the scientific community, or because geography and parenting are important indicators of whether or not you accept consensus science. I think the appeals to fairness and consistency should leave us facing in the very opposite direction: rejecting the OTF and engaging with the arguments in the traditional manner. The nice part about this is that we can capture the importance of viewing Christianity as one of many mutually incompatible religions without overreaching.

At the end of my last post, I asked a question: what would Calvin think of the OTF? It wasn't an idle question. If you are a Christian who believes in the predestination of the Elect and the Fallen world, the fact that your religion is one amongst many is not a surprise. That few have the right faith may not bother you at all. As far as I am aware, nothing about your religion says that it should not appear to an outsider as one among many. Strange then that advocates of the OTF tell you that the existence of other religions discredits your religion. You can reasonably say, "my religion looks like one of many to you? Swell, your point being? We agree about this, and it bothers me not. For chances are that you are not one of the Elect and are not destined for Salvation and understanding. That you and others do not believe as I do does not surprise me in the least; if anything, I would be surprised if outsiders readily understood the Truth and could easily aspire to it, as I understand otherwise."

One can argue against such a person, but the appearance of his beliefs to a skeptic should not itself constitute an argument.

The case is different whenever we look at more common evangelical versions of Christianity, in which it is asserted that God intervenes or has intervened to aid Christianity and that the Holy Spirit works on the consciences of most or all to guide them to Truth. Free will. All that jazz. If a supernatural agency is at work in the Christian sociology of Christianity, then it is surprisingly hidden in the actual sociological details concerning Christianity. Here, the fact that Christian belief is largely a function of geography and parenting is very surprising. To a person who thinks that Christianity is a natural phenomenon, it should not be. I think that this is a very powerful argument against evangelical Christianity.

Notice then that there are at least two possible outcomes of "Christianity is like other religions to an outsider": it is irrelevant to some Christians, and it constitutes a challenging argument to others. So what we can not do is treat the motivations for the OTF as legitimizing it against religions generally, since the observations motivating the OTF are in no way an argument against certain religions. To pretend otherwise is to do nothing more than pomo an important, but narrow, point.

Question: Was any of the above "based on red herrings, special pleading, begging the question, the denigrating science, and an ignorance that [you] can only attribute to delusional blindness"?

*stifles yawn*

Edit 1 (7/27/2011): "I don't know" is not devoid of content. Back when I was young - ok, more young - a trusted adult once told me, in rather portentous tones, that God amuses himself by watching weather forecasts. I had many such lessons in epistemic humility as a child, and it has taken considerable effort to unlearn them, especially since many skeptics use "I don't know" to pretend to some sort of legitimate defense for having, or pretending to have, no strong opinion about something, especially as a fallback in questioning the strong opinions of others. Just as I have been bored by "you can't be certain" for years, I am now bored by "I'm not claiming to know anything," particularly when it is being employed to bludgeon those with strong, relevant stances.

There is a joke somewhere about the weatherman who is always right. Everyday he says the same thing, "today it will be between -200 and 500 degrees Fahrenheit," or something like that. I'm willing to bet that weatherman will always be right, so long as measurement is conducted in the usual way. I'm willing to bet quite highly that he'll be correct tomorrow. But this weatherman is also completely useless. I'm less confident that the weatherman who tells me that today the temperature will be between 75 and 95 degrees Fahrenheit is correct, so although I am willing to bet that he will be correct, I will wager less than what I wagered on the prediction of useless weatherman.

Skepticism of religion is the same way. What proponents of the OTF appear to say is this: lots of weatherman contradict each other, so chances are that any particular weatherman is incorrect. But I doubt very much that proponents of the OTF, the `skeptics', have, by virtue of their doubting all the weathermen, ceased to have any stance on the weather. What proponents of the OTF appear to not understand is that their tacit assumption that the OTF concludes that their opinions about the weather are very - or even significantly - likely. Sure, they may have a reasonable stance on the weather, but these do not follow from the fact that at least all but one of the mutually contradictory weathermen must be wrong. Even were the methods used to argue for OTF valid and sound - and they are neither, where dimly coherent - they fail to legitimize any conclusion which stipulates that those who do not share your judgments are mistaken. If anything, it suggests that proponents should adopt any number of absurd priors, no obvious one of which being favorable to a skeptical conclusion.

Yes, you have positions. You would make wagers. You are a skeptic, not a purist devotee of the empty set.

If Steve says it will be between 85 and 90 degrees at noon, and Tom says it will be between 70 and 75 degrees at noon, one of them is wrong. If you think that Tom and Steve are smart, informed guys, you might think that the interval [70,90] is the only one on which you would bet highly. You might, for a high potential payoff, be willing to wager more on a small subinterval of [70,90], but you probably would not be willing to risk anything substantial for the interval [500,1000] - even were the payoff tremendous, and even if you think that Steve and Tom know nothing more than you about the weather, or that they are morons. Location and climate depending, you may even have decent reason to be most confident in intervals close to theirs in any case.

Skeptics about religion are the same way. They would still be willing to say things like "I'm willing to bet that religion is a purely human phenomenon," even if they felt only 50% confident that this is the case. (I think it's almost always much higher than that.) `Skeptic' is always an incomplete description. Skeptics of religion always have alternatives to religious explanations in which they have varying degrees of confidence. You can't sensibly claim to have evidence against religious explanations otherwise, since you cannot claim any value for p(`observation'|`[religious view] is false'), for whatever instance of `religious view' you like. That being the case, you can't update odds ratios through Bayes' theorem. In less jargony terms, you can't say something like "this observation diminishes my odds on Christianity." If you are able to say something like that, you have some approximation of p(`observation'|`[religious view] is false') in mind. Given that, you are saying things about elements or instances of `[religious view] is false', e.g. "natural selection and common descent following abiogenesis" as opposed to "creation, microevolution, and designer intervention." You are also saying something about the probabilistic relationship between `[religious view] is false' and `observation'. You are saying something about the probabilistic relationship between the world-as-observed and the occurrence of `[religious view]'.

You have to say a lot to even begin to talk about evidence. Assume that you are not an idealized, purely non-committal skeptic. You're not, and if you were, you would suck at everything normally described as skepticism.

The Outsider Test for Faith

I've entered the fray (jparris8) over at Debunking Christianity, and as those familiar with John Loftus and the blog know, there is no avoiding discussion of `The Outsider Test for Faith' (OTF). I had heard of this before while watching the threads at Victor Reppert's blog, and as I will inevitably have to discuss it again and again, I will save myself and others misery by collecting my thoughts on the OTF in this post.

I will begin by discussing what Loftus describes as the most comprehensive explanation of the OTF on the web.

The question I’ll be addressing today is whether we should adopt a believing or a skeptical predisposition prior to examining the evidence for a religious set of beliefs. I’ll argue that a skeptical predisposition is the preferred one to adopt.

He did say `prior', so I have to say something Bayesian: one can leave aside entirely the question of prior absolute probabilities and focus on a cumulative Bayes factor, i.e. the number by which your old odds ratio on Christianity is multiplied to yield your new odds ratio on Christianity. Granted, this is a very big task, but once done, you can say what initial commitment to Christianity would be required to have confirmed it as `more likely true than not' or to whatever value you feel significant. That analysis would necessarily include evidence concerning contradictory religious beliefs.

But I have a nagging feeling that Loftus wants to do more with the OTF than the above generalization suggests, just as he obviously wants it to be more than a handy thought experiment.

There is overwhelming, undeniable and non-controversial evidence for the test itself that can be found in the sociological, anthropological, and psychological data. I’ll start with some of this data that forms the basis for the test.

Here I have an issue: he is claiming `undeniable' evidence for a norm. As good is/ought distinguishing Humeans, we should be looking out for the goals or desiderata - presumably themselves uncontroversial and undeniable to theists - by which this evidence translates into support for the OTF.

What might this be? In comments and posts, Loftus is ever touting this:

The basis for the outsider test has been stated adequately by liberal Christian philosopher John Hick: “It is evident that in some ninety-nine percent of the cases the religion which an individual professes and to which he or she adheres depends upon the accidents of birth.” That is to say, if we were born in Saudi Arabia, we would be Sunni Muslims right now. If we were born in Iran, we’d be Shi’a Muslims. If we were born in India, we’d be a Hindus. If we were born in Japan, we’d be Shintoists. If we were born in Mongolia, we’d be Buddhists. If we were born in the first century BCE in Israel, we’d adhere to the Jewish faith at that time, and if we were born in Europe in 1000 CE, we’d be Roman Catholics. For the first nine hundred years we would’ve believed in the ransom theory of Jesus’ atonement. As Christians during the later Middle Ages, we wouldn’t have seen anything wrong with killing witches, torturing heretics, and conquering Jerusalem from the “infidels” in the Crusades. These things are as close to being undeniable facts as we can get in the sociological world.

Ok, this is all fine and well (call it and other details the fact of context-dependence): but why does this imply the OTF? I suppose it will have to wait:

Michael Shermer, a former Christian turned atheist, has done an extensive study of why people believe in God and in “weird things.” He argues: “Most of us most of the time come to our beliefs for a variety of reasons having little to do with empirical evidence and logical reasoning. Rather, such variables as genetic predispositions, parental predilections, sibling influences, peer pressures, educational experiences, and life impressions all shape the personality preferences and emotional inclinations that, in conjunction with numerous social and cultural influences, lead us to make certain belief choices. Rarely do any of us sit down before a table of facts, weigh them pro and con, and choose the most logical and rational belief, regardless of what we previously believed. Instead, the facts of the world come to us through the colored filters of the theories, hypotheses, hunches, biases, and prejudices we have accumulated through our lifetime. We then sort through the body of data and select those most confirming what we already believe, and ignore or rationalize away those that are disconfirming. All of us do this, of course, but smart people are better at it.”

Ok, so there are reductive accounts of religious tendencies. Ok, why does this imply the OTF? Damn, I still have to wait:

This whole inside/outside perspective is quite a dilemma and prompts me to propose and argue on behalf of the OTF, the result of which makes the presumption of skepticism the preferred stance when approaching any religious faith, especially one’s own. The outsider test is simply a challenge to test one’s own religious faith with the presumption of skepticism, as an outsider. It calls upon believers to "Test or examine your religious beliefs as if you were outsiders with the same presumption of skepticism you use to test or examine other religious beliefs." Its presumption is that when examining any set of religious beliefs skepticism is warranted, since the odds are good that the particular set of religious beliefs you have adopted is wrong.

Ok, now tell me: why do the apparent cultural dependency of religion and the at least partial success of reductive accounts in explaining common tendencies in religion suggest the OTF?

The OTF is no different than the prince in the Cinderella story who must question forty-five thousand girls to see which one lost the glass slipper at the ball last night. They all claim to have done so. Therefore, skepticism is definitely warranted. This is especially the case when an empirical foot match cannot be had.

Ok, warranted. Not a big deal, what's important is the demand that theists apply the OTF.

The amount of skepticism warranted depends on the number of rational people who disagree, whether the people who disagree are separated into distinct geographical locations, the nature of those beliefs, how they originated, how they were personally adopted in the first place, and the kinds of evidence that can possibly be used to decide between them. My claim is that when it comes to religious beliefs a high degree of skepticism is warranted because of these factors.

These can be factors, but they are not decisive. Anyways, TELL ME ALREADY.

If she refuses to [apply the OTF] then she must justify having such a double standard. Why does she test other religious beliefs differently than her own? For someone to object that what I’m asking is unfair, she has the burden of proof to show why her inconsistent approach to religious faith is justified in the first place.

Pardon me, but assessing `other beliefs' as `outsiders' and our own as `insiders' applies to everyone. About anything. Forget religion. That's not `double standards', that's the necessary product of having beliefs. A `double standard' with respect to the evidence and argument, if it should emerge, should emerge in the normal way... in the course of normal argument. The OTF adds nothing to this.

I suspect I'm not going to get anywhere on the is/ought gap today. And I see I'm not going to get anywhere on the `X is warranted/X is binding on all reasonable people' gap, either. Oh well, I can do other things:

Nonetheless, if after having investigated your religious faith with the presumption of skepticism it passes intellectual muster, then you can have your religious faith. It’s that simple. If not, abandon it like I did. I suspect that if someone is willing to take the challenge of the outsider test, then her religious faith will be found defective and she will abandon it along with all other religious faiths, like it has me.

See, I'm not sure that a positive or negative result for the OTF translates into any probability threshold, and by that virtue it need not translate into any final stance on one's beliefs. This ignores completely the problem of the priors. It ignores completely the incompleteness of evidential calibration that we have. It assumes from the outset that believers should adopt for-the-sake-of-examination probabilities about skeptical alternatives - yes, positive claims - and apply them to religious claims, alternatives which are presumably non-binding to adopt in the first place. Else, why insist on the OTF? The OTF would merely be restating an undeniable state of the evidence, not a norm mysteriously implied by the existence of other religions. So then what happens when believers adopt their former commitments, something which is apparently not intrinsically unreasonable to do?

A believer who failed the outsider test would conclude, and need only conclude, that skeptics of her faith can be reasonable. It would not entail that her beliefs are unwarranted and incapable of reasonable commitment. At all. And I'm not sure what the point of the OTF is if not that.

I now move on to some other objections. As far as I can tell, none of his responses to potential objections substantively address of mine, but he does say interesting things in his response to one objection:

After all, someone can be right if for no other reason than that she just got lucky to be born when and where she did. But how do you rationally justify such luck? This is why I’ve developed the challenge of the outsider test in the first place, to test religious faiths against such luck.

Here, Loftus is definitely saying something about prior distributions. Namely, that believers must equivocate across contradictory religions in assigning prior probabilities, or that they should match the likelihood of the truth of their religion to the `chance' of their believing it.

First big problem: the demand is impossible if you believe that the number of possible religions and/or gods is uncountably infinite. No non-zero probability of each particular god/religion is possible if that number is (countably) infinite.

Second big problem: the initial facts Loftus describes may not be neutral with respect to some initial distribution. The fact that a religion has died out can affect its probability. The fact that Christianity is `a religion amongst others' does not entail that there are no important qualitative differences between Christianity and other religions which could lead someone to reasonably assign it a quite significant prior: we lack coherent descriptions of large numbers of extinct religions or sufficient detail to distinguish them from others apart from relabeling of terms. Of extant religions, many lack coherent, unified systematic treatments like that presented by Christian philosophers who have spent centuries dealing with rational argument.

Third big problem: if the initial confidence in a religion is to be determined by the fact that there are many other religions, and we should equivocate across them, we make very big commitments to features shared by most or all of the important contenders. In particular, the OTF would have us practically assume supernaturalism and some supernatural cosmogony, though any particular version may be initially implausible. I don't think Loftus should be so eager to demand the starting point he does. I think he's sneaking in the assumption that materialistic alternatives dominate this space. If that's the case, we are more than past the importance of the number of alternatives. Unless he's asking us to assume supernaturalism, this sure does look, smell, and taste like an unjust demand that believers assume naturalism.

I could say more. Lots more. (Must personal, subjective background experience count for nothing?) But I really don't see the point, since Loftus never presents a sound, valid argument. Since the conclusion of his argument is that supernaturalism should be part of the outside position, I suppose I can be happy about that.

There is a way of preserving the legitimate core of the OTF without lapsing into absurdities and unreasonable dictations. It's called normal argument. Inconsistent treatments of evidence by believers, where important, will show up there. I do not see how the OTF does anything more than to prolong outstanding confusions. I would even say that it does more harm than good to the rational faculties of those who are introduced to it.

Bonus fun-time exercise: What would Calvin say about all this?

Edit 7/25/11: I cleaned up some of the sentences, added a few phrases, and added the last paragraph. I also want to add another observation:

If we should set our prior odds on Christianity to match those of our being Christians - as calibrated by sociological data - we get a very bad result for skeptics of Christianity. What, for example, should be our prior odds on the Resurrection before arguing over the evidence? Normally, and I think correctly, we calibrate this with respect to the well-documented tendency of dead people to remain dead. But what happens if we set our prior odds to the frequency of belief in the Resurrection? Since Christians argue that the Resurrection was an exceptional event, the fact that we normally observe dead people remaining dead would do nothing to reduce these odds before engaging the texts. If we take as a low estimate that Resurrection-believers account for 10% of the population, then our prior odds on the Resurrection will be absurdly high. I think that Christians can very easily overcome such a prior improbability with even a skeptical account of the New Testament. Yes, I think that Christians can easily pass the OTF as presented, at least with respect to the Resurrection.