There are many books dealing with this topic as Ed Babinski lists them for us. How does this relate to our debates?My main thrust is that believers cannot be sure they are right. After all, they are making affirmative knowledge claims about God, the Bible, Jesus, the church, and so forth. I deny these claims. That's basically all I do. When someone claims they saw something, anything, I have a right to question whether the person saw this. Usually I don't question most claims if they are what we would expect in the natural world, since such claims told by a sincere honest person with no axe to grind are, so to speak, on the boards. But the number and range of the affirmative claims by Christians is vast, many of which must be right for their faith to be probably true.
Debates take place between us about many issues from the nature of Biblical slavery to the resurrection. Just looking at how confident Christians are in these debates is amazing to me. There are plenty of other reasonable conclusions someone can come to about such issues, but no, they act like answer men--they have the right answers that any reasonable person should see as the truth about them, even people in the past! They ignore for the most part the fact that many other professing Christians, the only kind we see, disagree with these conclusions.
Christianity, the kind I criticize here, claims that God will judge us based on what we believe. We must believe certain things to be saved. If we don't, then to hell we go. And so in the Bible are many warnings not to be led astray by false teachers. My point is that we are all easily led astray. We know this from psychological studies and brain science. Again, we know this. This science cannot be disputed. So I find it incomprehensible to think human beings will be judged by the content of what they believe. And I find it likewise ignorant for someone to claim s/he knows the truth; the whole truth. That's literally impossible. Doubt and skepticism about that which we claim to affirm is clearly required of beliefs which have no mutually agreed upon scientific test for them, which is the best method we have for sorting out that which we can know with any degree of assurance.
In any case, I challenge Christians to look into psychological studies and brain research to see such things as how the brain is woefully inadequate to be objective about the facts. We skew the evidence in favor of conclusions we want to be true all of the time. Read these two books:
Related links:
Who's Ignorant?
Some Thoughts on Science and Religion
Revealing the Reasoning of the Believer.
Christian Belief Through the Lens of Cognitive Science.
A Review of Valerie Tarico's Book.
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