Reddit mentions of The Outsider Test for Faith: How to Know Which Religion Is True

I believe that, if we ignore the fact that it's computationally infeasible, the optimal epistemological stance regarding how one knows what one knows is based on universal induction and described here. (Disclaimer -- I read some of Hutter's other work on the same topic. I believe this to be more accessible to philosophers than his others, but I didn't read all of this one.)

It would be a mistake to have a different story about how to determine whether God exists vs. how to determine how many fingers I have. The procedure for seeking religious truth should not differ from the procedure for seeking truth in other domains.

But none of this is relevant. Controversy about religion only happens because the religious people are ignoring the facts plainly in front of their eyes. Any philosophical theory of knowledge that was intended to lead to true beliefs and does not have religion built into it will either conclude that religion is not true or you'll want to ignore it because it will have a ton of other ridiculous conclusions.

The most glaring fact that is inconsistent with religious beliefs is the existence of multiple world religions, no one of which is believed by the majority of people in the world. This is covered by Loftus. If you're committed to one religion or another, we have to look at the provenance of its scripture. The Bible includes books known to be forged such as Timothy 1 & 2, for example.

Edit: Mentioned both books of Timothy, included citations.

"Someone" would be John Loftus in his book, The Outsider Test for Faith: How to Know Which Religion Is True.

Which would be a good one for OP to read!

Edit: in fact, such a good recommendation I'm gonna put it at the top level so OP sees it.

Actually, testing your faith as an outsider is necessary for being able to determine its objective truth and hardly "a waste." For instance, suppose you were raised as a Catholic, baptized as an infant. Ask yourself, how do other reasonable people first become believers, or insiders, if from the outside they can't understand Christianity? Which comes first, faith or understanding? If, as a nonbelieving outsider, someone cannot understand the Christian faith, then how does God expect them to reasonably come to faith in the first place? How do you get from being an outsider to being an insider as a rational, thinking, skeptical adult? If you were raised Catholic from childhood then you know that as children we had not yet developed critical thinking faculties to question what our parents told us. We didn't know any better. Isn't it unfair to bring up a child in that environment? How many Catholic parents have adequately questioned their own faith and investigated its truth content before raising their children Catholic?

How many Catholics would accept Catholicism if it were forced upon them when they were 18 years old? Wouldn't we have asked some questions about what our parents told us? If someone came along and tried presenting you a brand new religious paradigm, for example, Scientology or Mormonism, at your age you would, as an outsider, take a critical, skeptical stance against accepting those views. At some point along the line, as we become adults, we need to critically examine what we were taught as children. Doubt and skepticism are learned virtues and as we learn to question, we become thinking adults. But strangely most people don't seem to question their religious faiths which seem too obvious and have become too ingrained in us, usually because they are a part of the culture we live in. Not only that, your faith has ingrained in you a fear of Hell if you deviate from it (of course there is no evidence for the existence of heaven or hell, either), although if you do deviate from it, you can always return later.

Given the abundance of religions around the globe, the probability that the one you happened to have been brought up in is true is highly unlikely. Basically all religions teach that they are the one true religion. At best, only one can be true, as you pointed out earlier. At worst, they are all false. The only rational way to test one's culturally adopted religious faith is from the perspective of an outsider, a nonbeliever, with the same level of reasonable skepticism that a believer already uses when examining the other religious faiths he or she rejects. If you can do that and show how Catholicism is still objectively true, then Catholicism is the one true religion, and all nonbelievers could rationally convert. The problem is that there is just no evidence to support its truth. Again, Richard Carrier's Proving History and its companion On the Historicity of Jesus are the most comprehensive scholarly treatments on the existence of Jesus. Carrier has done a lot of scholarship on the early history of the church and the facts do not hold up the way that the Catholic church would make you think they do. Not to mention that "God's true church" has been involved in some nasty terrible acts throughout history and held some embarrassingly mistaken views about reality, and it is not the paragon of moral virtue that an institution with divine inspiration would exhibit. I would challenge you to question your faith as an outsider. Read those books by Richard Carrier, for instance. Read The Outsider Test For Faith by John Loftus and question your faith as an outsider would. And if you still hold to Catholicism as the one true religion, then you have not lost anything. But if you are convinced by reasonable, skeptical arguments that Catholicism is mistaken at bare minimum or at most totally false, then you have gained a truer perspective on reality.