So far, most readers seem to have agreed. All reviews by scholars have been extremely enthusiastic. For instance, Dr. Ivan Satyavrata, an accomplished Indian theologian who has researched the relation between Christianity and Indian thought, wrote:
Marshall’s undertaking is breath-taking in its scope, as he brings together an amazing array of factual evidence from history, literature, religions and an unbelievable diversity of other sources in a brilliantly woven case that effectively invalidates the sceptical claim that people of faith live in a `closed door’ universe that could never survive the rigorous intellectual scrutiny of the `Outsider Test’. Marshall is uniquely gifted as a writer – his careful scholarship, depth of insight and logical analysis is matched only by his illustrative genius as he skilfully blends inspired prose and vivid imagination in a much-needed, readable counter to the contemporary assault of the new atheists. This is a book you will not want to put down once you begin to read it, and a `must-read’ for any thoughtful follower of Christ. It has immense value both as a apologetic and pastoral tool - to help demolish obstacles to faith among genuine sceptics, and to encourage the weak and equip the strong within the community of faith.
I am now going to post the Introduction and first two chapters here. If you like what you read, please do get a copy of the book, and read on.
The book's few critics unintentionally prodded me into posting the first part of the book this site.
Skeptics have also posted a few reviews on Amazon. The most prominent atheist to review the book so far was John Loftus himself, who was its (partial) target. He gave the book one star, and has trash-talked it on his popular "Debunking Christianity" site. (Including, again, this morning.)
Reasoned and informed disagreement with my thesis is very welcome. But the problem is, Loftus has mainly "disagreed" by misrepresenting my arguments. Especially, he has repeatedly claimed that the first of my four arguments for how Christianity passes the Outsider Test, is simply its raw success.
Here's how Loftus represents my first argument in his review on Amazon:
"The first test is that it's to be considered evidence that a religion is true if it convinces many people in many cultures throughout history. Yet, several mutually exclusive religions pass this test. Buddhism (an atheist faith), Islam, Mormonism, Scientology, and even Hinduism pass this test, as even Marshall acknowledges. Here then is a good solid reason to reject Marshall's first test. Any test for truth which allows mutually exclusive religions to pass it cannot be a good test for truth. These religions cannot all be true. Therefore this test is faulty to the core."
Loftus is terribly confused, here.
First, I never say Hinduism or Scientology pass the first form of the test that I actually describe in the book.
Second, Loftus has grossly misstated my argument. It would have been better if he had quoted my exact words, to avoid misrepresenting me. I will give the whole argument in this and the following two posts, so that skeptics who have not yet read the book can cite my actual words, next time.
In the following post, pay especially attention to the sixth from the final paragraph, which I have highlighted in bold red. Here is where I state my actual thesis. Use the copy-and-paste function next time, John. That way you won't need to distort my argument. (Or was intellectual rather than physical convenience your real reason for altering it?)
Third, evidence in favor of something is, of course, not the same thing as proof. For instance, if you know someone named "Bruno" kidnapped the Lindbergh child, that makes it more likely that a given man named Bruno was involved, but it does not make it probable that any given Bruno you come across committed the crime. Likewise, several sports teams make it into the playoffs, which is a test of their ultimate viability as champions -- but it does not mean they will be the champs.
Similarly, I argue that several religions pass a preliminary and simple form of the OTF, which is however not so simple as Loftus describes it. There is no incoherence in saying there are therefore several possible winners, or that this form of the test makes Christianity more likely to be true. The Gospel "makes it into the playoffs" by gaining credit from (as Aristotle put it) the "skilful, old, and wise" of many different times and places.
Fourth, I also argue (Loftus forgets to mention this), that there are several reasons even mentioned in this part of the argument why Christianity does better in meeting the first "outsider" challenge, than these and other rival faiths (I also include Secular Humanism and Marxism.)
And fifth, this is I point out the weakest of four arguments. Why do Loftus and his fellow skeptics focus on it so much? All I am doing here is taking Aristotle more seriously than John Loftus. Loftus asks for an outsider perspective -- and I point out that history provides a few hundred million such perspectives, which we should listen to. But I admit from the beginning this argument is the "warm-up band:" the best, I strongly believe, come in later chapters.
With all that said, here's the Introduction. Enjoy.
********************************************************
How Christianity Passes the
“Outsider Test for Faith”
(The Inside Story)!
David Marshall
Introduction
Would
a caribou run so
swiftly if wolves had never chased its ancestors?
Would a halfback
bother lifting weights if he expected no linebackers to stand between him and
the goal? Or might he
be as thin as a sprinter
in the 100 yard dash? Biologists believe
that what doesn’t
kill us can make us stronger collectively, if not individually, by culling the
herd of the slight,
dim, and slow.
Critics
of the Christian faith may sometimes serve the same function. If the blood of the martyrs is the seed of
the Church, as the Church father Tertullian said, well-directed taunts from its critics help keep the weeds down. Persecution prevents the unrepentantly worldly from
pretending to convert,
and advertises the faith of heroic believers.
Hearty outside
criticism likewise
helps believers weed
out venal televangelists, debauched priests, bogus science, simplistic
exegesis, and glib answers to tough questions.
For helping in this way to keep the Church healthy, its
critics may
deserve sincere thanks of
Christians.
At
times, skeptics also help believers by reminding us of good arguments for our
faith that we have forgotten. Not on
purpose, of course. They suppose they
have come up with a
clever new argument that is going to écrasez l'infâme, crush the villainy, as
Voltaire put it. But as Sir
Francis Bacon pointed out long before Voltaire was born, while science (understanding
of the world based on systematic and repeatable empirical study) may at first
seem to undermine
Christian faith, deeper knowledge often brings us back to God. Sometimes the very stones tossed in anger at
the church gate,
pile up around its base to form its most formidable defense.
John
Loftus doesn’t
look like a wolf on the prowl, or a Viking storming a windswept Irish
abbey. Usually shown in his trademark
cowboy hat with a goofy grin on his face, Loftus appears affable and
approachable, and writes with a colloquial, “ah shucks” frankness. But taking down Christianity is his
ambition. He calls his web site, “Debunking Christianity,” and that is
the almost invariable theme of daily posts there. It is also the theme of his books, with
titles like The End of Christianity, The
Christian Delusion, and Christianity
is Not Great, coauthored with like-minded skeptics like the Jesus myth
historians, Richard Carrier and Robert Price, Peter Boghosian (author of the
best-selling Manual for Creating Atheism),
and Hector Avalos, a Religious Studies professor at Iowa State
University who
argues that Christianity tilled the soil for the Holocaust. Loftus sees himself as a missionary for
atheism, and there is no denying his zeal or promotional talent: his next book will
reportedly be entitled,
“Jesus is a Moral Monster.”
But
Loftus’ signature
argument is what he calls the Outsider Test for Faith. In its simplest form, the “OTF” is just the
contention that Christians should be as skeptical about the faith in which they
were (presumably) raised, as about, say, Islam or Inca worship of the Earth
Goddess Pachamama. We should step out of
the well we’ve been living in all our lives, like the frog in the Chinese
parable, and take in the broader world.
Loftus believes that if Christians dare to view their religion from an
objective, outside perspective, they will abandon it in droves. So the OTF is also presented as an argument
against Christianity.
Nor is Loftus alone in doing so. The OTF has
become a standard argument against Christianity, wielded for a variety of
purposes, like a screw driver with which one turns screws, opens paint cans,
beats drums, stands burglars down, or whisks debris out from under the
fridge. British philosopher A. C.
Grayling uses the argument anthropologically: “The fact that different
religions claim that their god or gods have different requirements in these
respects should be evidence that religions are man-made and
historically-conditioned.”[1]
Greta Christiana lends the OTF a metaphysical twist: “If God (or any other
metaphysical being or beings) were real, and people were really perceiving him
/ her / it / them, why do these perceptions differ so wildly . . . The
explanation, of course, is that God does not exist.”[2]
Socratic gadfly Peter Boghossian uses the OTF to deflate the intellectual value
of spiritual experience: “A lot of people feel some religious belief in their
hearts, Buddhists, Muslims, Mormons, people who think the Emperor of Japan is
divine. But they can’t all be correct.”[3] In a debate with William Lane Craig,
philosopher Walter Sinnott-Armstrong wielded
a psychological interpretation of the OTF to play religions off against one
another. Boghossian also develops this form of the argument:
“Different
people with different religious beliefs have different experiences that seem to
come from different gods, even though the experiences seem quite similar from
the inside. Indeed, the majority of them
must be wrong, if only Christian experiences are correct, as traditional
Christians claim. It follows that
religious experience in general cannot be reliable, according to the Christian
perspective itself.”[4]
The
challenge of pluralism is of course not new to Christians. Nor did the first Christians necessarily see
“religious experience” as quite the Zero-Sum Game Boghossian and
Sinnott-Armstrong make it out to be.
News about Jesus captured the hearts of early “outsiders” to the Jewish
tradition, like Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Augustine, precisely
because like a bridegroom waiting at the altar for her true love, they found that the Gospel
consummated deep yearnings within their own ancient philosophy and
mythology. In the 2nd
Century, already, Justin described Socrates, Plato, Pythagoras, and Xeno as
“tutors to Christ,” who prepared him for that morning on an eastern
Mediterranean beach when he met a man dressed in philosopher’s robes who told
him about Jesus. John Calvin echoed St.
Augustine, and St. Paul, in writing of a “divine sense” in the
human breast, that
points us to the One True God.
Which reminds us that the OTF is
actually older than
Christianity itself. In Chapter Five of
the Institutions of the Christian
Religion, Calvin noted that the Epicureans long ago argued that the
“endless quarrels” of religion were sufficient reason to dismiss them all:
“This
endless variety and confusion emboldened the Epicureans, and other gross despisers of piety, to cut off all sense
of God. For when they saw that the
wisest contradicted each other they hesitated not to infer from their
dissensions, and from the frivolous and absurd doctrines of each, that men
foolishly, and to no purpose, brought torment upon themselves by searching for
a God . . .”
Calvin
replied by distinguishing
awareness of God, which was experienced in many traditions, from “frivolous and
absurd doctrines,” which he saw as the human contribution to religion.
But
positive appreciation of world religions can also bring people to Christ. In the early 20th Century, G. K.
Chesterton explained his own experience of conversion by telling how a sailor discovered England under
the misconception that it was an island in the South Pacific. This adventurous but incompetent sailor thus experienced the
“fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the humane security of
coming home again.”
That
is my experience as well. I have spent
most of my adult life far from the Christian ghetto, in the secular academy,
communist China, Buddhist Taiwan and Japan, in post-Christian England, and
swimming in a sea of ancient religious texts.
I have also taken a personal and academic interest in the process by
which much of the world went from “outside” to “inside,” that is, the history
of Christian missions. Like Chesterton’s sailor, the
further I left Christendom behind, physically and intellectually, the more the
facts seemed to bring me back to Christ.
For those of us who grew up in the Church, great
biblical themes often become the background Muzak to our lives, and their very
familiarity obscures them. His enemies
never found him a bore, Dorothy Sayers noted, but Jesus followers “have
declawed the lion of Judah and made him a house-cat for pale priests and pious
old ladies." At best, the Outsider
Test should remind us to look for Jesus in the wild, not on flannel graphs and music stations that advertise how “safe” their programs are
for children. Safety and sterility are
not boons promised us in the gospels.
While
I see great potential value in the OTF, because I think it helps demonstrate
the truth of the Gospel, Loftus’ version of that argument demands serious
revision. There are logical problems,
there are factual problems. The most
essential problem with Loftus’version of the OTF, I will argue, is that Loftus
views the world outside the well in which he was raised – the great religions,
what the Bible says about them, how the Gospel has spread across six continents
and what it has accomplished for all the human race, including western skeptics
and those they love – superficially, like a tourist. Loftus himself is a native-born and sheltered
resident of Christendom and the skeptical
philosophe that is its rebellious
step-child. It is thus the tame house-cat that he and other “pious old
ladies” of the New Atheism almost invariably tangle with, not the lion.
The
“Outsider Test for Faith” should be more than a rhetorical exercise. It should be about the total human experience
of searching for ultimate truth. The
test should reflect that great
real-world experiment that has sifted beliefs, including both Christianity and
Secular Humanism, by persecution and prosperity, by reason, morals, and
imagination, as
every great mission faith has been cross-examined over centuries by seekers
within cultures tucked into isolated
mountain valleys and remote South Pacific islands, and spread across
continents. The Gospel has been
interrogated by Pharisees, other-worldly Gnostics,
stony-hearted Stoics,
sumptuously-dining Epicureans,
Germanic barbarians, Norse raiders, Islamic iconoclasts, Advedic mystics, courteous
neo-Confucian
literati, paradoxical Taoists, Freudians,
Nazis, Objectivists, Marxists, existentialists, Yanomami tribesmen, Mormons,
New Agers, feminists, and followers diverse schools of scientism, just
to get started. Christianity has prospered under those
siftings in unique
ways. Listening to the stories of
those who came to Christ from diverse backgrounds -- even the few we will have
time to tell here -- will bring
us not just back to orthodoxy, but to a deeper appreciation of what God has been doing for the
human race through this Jewish teacher, and for a possible solution to the challenge of
intellectual diversity.
While the Outsider Test is not the only way to test
the credibility of the Gospel, I will argue that the questions it raises, when
corrected for bias and informed by history and the study of human nature, can
be valid and useful, and shed needed light on the story of humanity. I
will argue that Christianity passes four different forms of the OTF with flying
colors, rendering the Christian message more credible in light of the useful
challenges our skeptical friends set:
(1)
The test of history. In a
straightforward sense, Christianity has attracted more believers from more
ethnic, cultural, and
intellectual clubs than any other religion. If the OTF shows anything empirically, it
shows that Christianity must possess remarkable reserves of plausibility, to
have convinced so many people, of so many kinds, asking so many vital questions, and risking so
much (in some cases) to follow Jesus.
(2) The test of prophecy. From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible is
abuzz with promises that the Good News would spread to the “ends of the Earth.” Those prophecies have come true, demonstrably
and shockingly. (Think how improbable
they must have seemed on a remote hill in the Levant, or on a fishing boat bobbing
up and down on the
Sea of Galilee along the ethnic outskirts of an ancient empire
that was soon to decline and fall).
(3)
The test of impact. In Genesis 12, God
tells Abraham, “All peoples of the earth will be blessed through your
seed.” This promise has also come true,
I will argue. Despite our famous
hypocrites, of whom I must sometimes confess to being one, and
the cruelty of history in general, Christianity
has not acted in human society as some sort of “poison” or “virus” as many
radical skeptics maintain. Even limiting our scope to observable effects
on this planet, the Christian message has dramatically bettered the lives of
people around the world in numerous ways, even in non-Christian countries. It has served as a universal agent of reform,
a seed that grows into a tree
that yields succulent and life-giving fruit.
(Yes, a good deal of rotten fruit, too – which is why we need our
critics, Christ’s kingdom is “not of this world,” and competition among
churches can be a good thing.)
(4)
While Christianity first reaches new ethnic
worlds as an “outsider” faith, a remarkable transformation often occurs. The history of missions is like the Grimm
story of the man whose lover was held by a witch’s spell in a castle. He dreamed of a red flower, and on waking,
searched until he found that flower. He
then visited the castle and touched the captive maidens with this blossom,
breaking the spell and freeing them all.
One reason the Gospel caught on so widely is because the story of Jesus,
who falls asleep and then wakens, affirms and fulfills sacred prophetic dreams,
then liberates us from bondages to which peoples around the world stand in
thrall.
More
prosaically, on the simplest level, Christianity provides a larger map of the
world that embraces insights recognized by great pre-Christian teachers:
Isaiah, Moses, Socrates, Plato, Zeno, Confucius, Lao Zi, the authors of the
Poetic Edda and of the Vedas. It
summarizes and fulfills not just the Jewish “Law and Prophets,” but the
highest ideals of Axial
teachers who laid the foundations of the world’s great civilizations. It also answers
riddles, puzzles, even prophecies, that troubled
the mind of Neolithic man.
Seekers
after truth in every tradition should thank skeptics like Loftus
and Grayling for
bringing such questions up again! These
matters have been on my mind a long time.
I first formulated a primitive version of the OTF in my 2000 book, Jesus and the Religions of Man, several
years before Loftus started writing about it.
But we need to be reminded more often than taught, as C. S. Lewis put
it. We also need to be challenged. Despite their
intent to harm Christianity, with their critiques, Loftus and
his allies bring to
light an astounding set of facts about history, the promises of God, the hopes
and fears of humanity, and how they are met in the life, teachings, deeds,
death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
Their challenges also gives me an excuse to recount what might be called the “Second
Greatest Story Ever Told” (though to be frank, I doubt it has ever
been told quite as it will be in
these pages), the
story of an “outside” faith that turned out again and again to fulfill truth at
the heart of great traditions, transforming them from within.
Now here's Chapter One.
[4] William Lane Craig and Walter
Sinnott-Armstrong, God: A Debate Between a Christian and an Atheist, 39
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