Starting with skepticism

An old friend of mine makes an argument for taking a critical approach to religious claims from the start which he calls the outsider test for faith (OTF):

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.

This is restating, in formal language and with much support, a web meme that began with a quote by Steven F. Roberts:

"I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." -- Stephen F. Roberts

Sometimes something is said like this by Dawkins or Hitchens or Harris: "We're both atheists about Zeus and Thor and almost all of the other gods who have ever existed. I just go one god further than you do."

I also like this math-based permutation of the same idea:

True by sheer force of numbers: the number of gods I reject is approximately equal to the number of gods you don't believe in. Here's the mathematics for the hard-of-thinking: x ≅ x+1, for sufficiently large x. Here x is the number of gods you don't believe in, which has been measured and found to be precisely a metric shitload. I just reject one more.

Of course, there are some criticisms of these sentiments, and I don't mind to address their major complaints.

First, I agree that by saying, "Because you reject a great many claims in religions other than yours, you must reject the claims in yours, or all claims in all religions," is a non sequitur. But I don't even think that's the point. I think the point is that in order to reject claims in other religions, you adopt a certain level of scrutiny and critical thinking towards those claims. You rely solely on the evidence and the logic. The atheist is saying to you, "I think you have a double standard, in that you aren't as critical of the claims in your own religion as you are towards other religions (and even towards atheism)."

Second, I agree that to call someone an "atheist towards god X but not god Y" may be semantically wrong, although I think the point is trivial. Perhaps it is like saying, "You are a vegetarian towards beef but not towards chicken." Either you're a vegetarian or not, right? And so the semantic argument is that you can't call Christians "atheists" towards other gods because the word atheist means, literally, "without [a] god" and not "without this one particular god"...

So what atheists should instead say, apparently, is something like, "If you are as skeptical towards religious claims in your own religion as you are towards others, you'd probably find they don't merit your belief and you'd abandon your own religion entirely in the same way you reject other religions."

The other night I went out and drank with, literally, a room full of Christians and talked about the problem of evil. I was the only non-theist in a room of about 20 theists. It went well, I think...for me. After all, I did have on my side basically the most powerful and irrefutable argument against the existence of an all-good and all-powerful being ever. Anyway, near the end of the night a guy basically told me to "roll the dice" on a god. I asked him why he thought I hadn't already tried that, then told him, briefly, why I thought Pascal's Wager sucked.

Pascal's Wager intersects with the "OTF" concept for the reason that you can't place a "safe bet" when it comes to religion. It's always possible, if you don't use the route of skepticism, for a given religion to be correct about some claim about what's required for salvation or to avoid damnation. But if you do use the route of skepticism, then you will end up withholding belief in all religions because of the paucity of the evidence to substantiate such extraordinary claims.

Another problem is that you can't simultaneously believe in/follow/meet the requirements of all the religions simultaneously. Also, you can't believe in something just because you think of it as a cost-benefit ratio. Your belief won't be authentic. I've trod this ground before. There are other flaws with Pascal's Wager, of course, and other responses to it.

Long story short, skepticism towards religion makes sense.