Nascent Thinker | Contemplations Along The Way

Outsider Test for Faith Examined

Recently I began think­ing about John Lof­tus’ Out­sider Test for Faith (OTF), and I have seri­ous doubts that it’s the ‘tool’ he believes it is. As a reminder (or intro­duc­tion), the OTF asks believ­ers to, “test [their] beliefs as if [they] were an out­sider to the faith [they] are eval­u­at­ing”… That “if your faith stands up under muster, then you can have your faith. If not, aban­don it…” In other words, the OTF asks reli­gious believ­ers to test their beliefs as objec­tively as pos­si­ble, with the pre­sump­tion of skep­ti­cism.¹ My ini­tial thoughts are as follows:

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(1) If as a Chris­t­ian (or a Jew, or Mus­lim, etc.) I take the OTF and find my beliefs lack­ing, and as a result of tak­ing the OTF reject these beliefs, then to what posi­tion will I ‘con­vert’? Sup­pos­ing my aim was to ver­ify the claims of the Chris­t­ian reli­gion, then I will … (Read more)