“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that” – Richard Feynman [1]

These questions are applicable to conversations between one religious person and another, or to conversations between skeptics and religious adherents.

Have you read any first hand materials criticizing your beliefs or has it mostly come second hand? If so, what? If not, why? Mark Twain once said “The easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.” Have you applied the same level of skepticism you use when approaching other religions to your own? Put another way, do you do unto your own faith what you already do unto others? If most people are biased towards believing what they were raised to believe, how do you know this natural human tendency isn’t affecting you more than you realize? If people from other religions claim to be just as epistemically certain as you do that their beliefs are true, shouldn’t this at least give you pause? If you believe most of the religious people who have ever lived were self-deceived and delusional, how do you know that you aren’t? How could you know that your experience of certainty and relationship with the divine is any different or more certain than anyone else’s? What criteria would you use? Would you agree that humans generally attempt to find evidence that justifies what they already believe? Do you notice this in yourself? If so, how do you deal with it? If there is a spiritual power at work that uniquely equips adherents of your religion to live lives of obedience to the divine, shouldn’t there be evidence that people from your religious tradition are better than people who do not have access to this resource? If not, why not? If so, has this been your honest experience of yourself and the others within your tradition that you know well? If you can discount deconversion stories due to life experiences, wouldn’t it be fair to discount conversion stories for the same reasons? If faith and reason conflict, which should we default to? If you were talking with a person from another religion, what would you say to them if they claimed that they default to faith when the two conflict? If your religious text is true and clear, why do we have to constantly reinterpret it in light of new information? If you lived in an ancient time and heard a voice claiming to be a perfectly good God that instructed you to offer a family member as a blood sacrifice or kill the women, children, toddlers, and infants of the enemy, would you be able to believe it? Would you not consider the possibility that you are delusional? Throughout history, we (humans) have always personified the forces of nature by having a pantheon of gods for every conceivable thing. How do you know that your belief in a personal god isn’t due to our human tendency to deduce agency from things we don’t understand? Every culture without exception believed it was obvious that the earth was flat, unmoving, and that the sky was solid until these things were scientifically disproven. Given these facts, why should we privilege claims about what appears to be true about the natural world (like design) when our commonsense perception is so often false?

These questions were inspired by my reading of “Why I became an Atheist” by John Loftus. There are many books that are much better on the topic, but this one does cover a lot of ground. Regardless of the source, (I consider myself an agnostic, not an atheist) these questions should be useful in interfaith dialogue as well as dialogue between skeptics and religious adherents. Obviously, not all questions apply to every religious tradition. (Various religions don’t believe in a personal god).

Jerry Coyne, Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible, p. 28