Reply to Loftus on the Outsider Test

Loftus' response is here. 

I am afraid your response fails pretty miserably. I said that if you are going to have a test you have to have one that eliminates confirmation bias whether or not it is pro-faith or anti-faith. Faith can cause people to be biased, but so can other things, included bias against religious claims. At least, my experience suggests this to me. When people attack religious beliefs without doing any work on even trying to understand the religious beliefs they are attacking, that is what I call bias.

If you think faith is the only way in which you can have bias, and if you are an atheist, you cannot have bias, then that seems awfully biased to me.

Are all the biasing cultural influences in favor of the religion of one’s society? There is a considerable religious plurality in our society. And even amongst people who are supposedly religious start getting concerned when people get really serious about following their own religion.

This song was written by a couple of country singers from Alabama, the Louvin Brothers. Does this sound like people who are being pressured by their culture to follow Christianity?

My buddies tell me that I should've waited 
They say I'm missing a whole world of fun 
But I still love them and I sing with pride 
I like the Christian life 

I won't lose a friend by heeding God's call
For what is a friend who'd want you to fall 
Others find pleasure in things I despise 
I like the Christian life

My buddies shun me since I turned to Jesus 
They say I'm missing a whole world of fun 
I live without them and walk in the light 
I like the Christian life 

I won't lose a friend by heeding God's call
For what is a friend who'd want you to fall 
Others find pleasure in things I despise 

I like the Christian life
I like the Christian life

So, apparently following the Christian life will cost you friends and cause people to make fun of you. Even if you're a good old boy from Alabama. 

I happen to think that Christianity has evidential support that other religions don’t have. If you could show me another religion that has the kind of support Christianity has, I would have to take it seriously. If the book of Mormon recorded a lot of events that is supported by archaeology, I would have to take it seriously. If Islam had better evidential support than it does, I would have to take it more seriously. Maybe it’s doing better than David Wood thinks it’s doing, but I doubt it.

 http://www.answering-islam.org/Authors/Wood/best_argument.htm

So, measuring Mormonism and Islam against Christianity by the same standard of evidence, Christianity wins.

In the previous post you wrote:

Vic, there isn't a good reason to reject MN. Why would you ask that we must reject it when the preponderance of evidence supports using it in every area it touches? It's the only reasonable method to use. Your God supposedly created the world such that by using MN we have amassed a great deal of knowledge because of it. We MUST use it if we want knowledge. Science itself is based on it. There isn't any better method for gaining objective knowledge about the world. Your rationalizations that we could overlook the evidence for the supernatural are actually tiring to me. Your God produced the problem you must speak against. What's the best explanation that MN works so well? Given that your God wants us to believe and created the world in such a way that we must use MN to gain knowledge, the best explanation is that your God doesn't exist. You are trying to explain away the evidence once again.

VR: The reason why methodological naturalism works as well as it does is that methodological naturalism and methodological theism get the same results.

Naturalism says:

There are absolute regularities in nature which are just there and that’s all. They are never violated and cannot be violated.

Theism says:

God has created the world in such a way that most events are occur in accordance with them. On certain special occasions, God may act in such a way as to violate those laws, but he does so relatively infrequently, to show things that are of the greatest significance.

God creates the world in such a way that most of what goes on in the world will not be evidently supernatural. If God didn’t do that, we wouldn’t have a stable world about which we can make predictions. So, the people who founded modern science were Christians, and no they weren’t just compartmentalized. They followed methodological naturalism and methodological theism, and got the same result. But if you apply methodological naturalism to theistic claims,  you automatically reject them. As Richard Lewontin puts it:

"Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. "

We’re going to test faith on this basis? What possible answer can we get?