This makes no sense to me, Bryan. I believe that proving one thing wrong does nothing against another, unless the two share the same point.
Well, what’s the objective distinction between Christianity and, say, Judaism? If one points out a number of obviously arbitrary constructs in Christianity that call into question its entire basis, it becomes easier to do so with Judaism (and indeed any religion) unless Judaism can say “We have a more solid basis than Christianity and here it is…” with some impressive reasoning to follow that demonstrates that even if Christianity can be dismissed, Judaism cannot.
My premise is that religions do share the same points, in that all their points are arbitrary and interchangeable, or at least I’ve seen no evidence otherwise.
For the OP’s idea specifically… I’m sure someone could study and memorize the various dogma of a particular religion, though not an actual believer, to the point where they could give answers indistinguishable from someone who performed the same studies and was a believer, thus passing a Turing test in the sense that a questioner would be unable to tell which was which. The particular dogma studied is an arbitrary one.
Well maybe I was seeing the flip side of that. I do better understand the point you are making I think. If A and B both share X which is crucial to their validity, then disproving X disproves both.
But I am talking of a frequent problem where A and B share X, but A also has Y Also crucial but not Z; B also has Z, also crucial but not Y. Many people argue because Z is proven false, and B is therfore false, because A and B share X, A is therefore also false.
Okay, so what’s the crucial Z unique to Christianity that preserves it?
Bumping this thread to report that the atheist blogger mentioned in the OP has announced she is converting to Catholicsm.
So you no longer support banning homosexuals from marrying?
Ontopic: It would seem that the test has no value at all, other than to show who has better knowledge. I’d say atheists would have the advantage, since in general, they are more knowledgeable about religion than theists. And many or perhaps most of them have been theists at some time.
Many Christians think atheists are angry at God, which is of course, nonsense. So I’d expect they’d be worse at pretending to be an atheist with any fidelity.
Or so she says. How do we know this isn’t just an experiment she’s conducting to see if she can convince other people she’s a Catholic?
I’m not buying it.
I mean, I am not disputing she is converting. I just am not buying she is doing so because of some amazing argument that convinced her.
Religion fails dramatically in the face of logic. Faith requires belief that denies logic. Most atheists are so because the logic of religion makes no sense to them. Morality is definitely NOT owned solely by religion. You can get there without religion just fine.
I can conjure up many reasons why she might want to convert (which is of course her choice and free to make). I am just not coming up with any rational argument that would have gotten her there if she started as a thoughtful atheist (i.e. one who came to that view from careful consideration and decided that is what made the most sense).
Let’s give her the benefit of the doubt - maybe she suffered a head trauma of some kind.
Or, less irreverently, I can picture an atheist embracing religion after experiencing some kind of epiphany after… I dunno, a significant personal tragedy? While recovering from an addiction? While in jail? After surviving a near-fatal plane crash?
By the same token, of course, a lifelong believer could abruptly announce that he or she is now an atheist and/or has come to view religion as meaningless, or whatever. It remains unclear at best if there is an actual God or gods involved in (or necessary to) these kinds of side-swaps.
This creates an interesting Turing test question as well.
Was she an atheist that “came to that view from careful consideration and decided that is what made the most sense?” So far as I know, during the time she identified as an atheist, no ne question her bona fides on the issue, but no one may have rigorously examined that point either. Could someone who was not one still convincingly act as an atheist who came to that view from careful consideration and decided that is what made the most sense?
In my opinion, by the way, you are right. My own faith is grounded in reason, but it is reason that rests on personal experience. In other words, given what I have experienced, it is absolutely rational for me to believe… but there is no way I can share those experiences in a meaningful way with anyone else. So someone without similar experiences is absolutely rational in not believing.
I think to found it in reason, you’d have to include the possibility of self-delusion. So, I’d venture that saying you founded your faith in reason isn’t really warranted.
In any case, the lady who converted probably did for the same reason anyone converts. She ignored rationality and did what she wanted to. There are a great many benefits to faith (for the individual, it costs society quite a bit). It lets you not have to deal with death and the loss of loved ones. It lets you think that you deserve all the good things in your life and will overcome all the bad things. It says that there is justice in the world, and that eventually, everything will balance out. It lets you pretend that you’re going to exist forever in bliss and death is nothing to fear.
It’s attractive, so of course people do it. But no one does it for rational reasons. Any more than anyone believes in astrology for rational reasons. So the lady is rationalizing an emotional decision. The fact that she thought the religious version of the Turing Test was somehow profound shows that she wasn’t very smart to begin with.
I would think the usefulness of the ideological turing test is to get past the point where the person or people you are debating believe you do not UNDERSTAND their arguments and positions. If you can play back to them their own perspective, not just repeating their key points but showing that you genuinely get it, can make new assertions from THEIR perspective, make connections, elaborate on things, etc, until they agree that you seem to be understanding them, THEN when you disagree you can move on to look for a point of departure. It may be easier to agree to disagree in a respectful and friendly manner, something that’s difficult when you feel that the person or people you’re arguing with just don’t GET IT.
Would the moderators allow a volunteer Christian to start a thread along these lines? An “Ask the hypothetical Atheist” thread where she/he argues with those of the Christian persuasion?
As someone who is neither, I feel like I’ve been doing both the atheist version and the christian version of turing tests on Straight Dope GD threads since 1999.
Does is matter? For instance, it’s easy to trap a real, sincere, religious idiot with questions that link dogma or religious theory to real world examples. A lot of idiots (religious or not) won’t even understand they’ve been trapped. Or won’t care, because there are “mysteries” to explain everything they themselves can’t.
Atheists, even idiot atheists, have an advantage because there is no dogma or theory to trap them with.
I don’t have a copy ahndy to check, but I recall Richard Feynman describes in one of his books trying to pin down Yeshiva students in this way and finding it extremely difficult, since they’d been well-trained in defending their faith.
My last post made me wonder about how such a test could ever work. We see a lot of “true believers” on this board who ultimately prove not to have a deep understanding of the tenets underlying their own faith. Even those who have a more complete knowledge of faith and dogma ultimately resort to arguments of “faith” and/or “mysteries” when pressed.
Atheists, having no tenets of faith or theory or dogma to defend, and in theory IMO they should have a huge advantage defending their viewpoint, mainly because they don’t have one. 
So, how can a religious Turing test really prove anything beyond what a “generic” Turing test can prove? Ultimately, it’s a test of the language skills of a computer against the language skills of humans, and I can’t see how that would change.
Well, then the people he spoke to aren’t religious idiots. I apologize if anyone thought I was claiming that “religious people” = “religious idiots”.
Oh, and the point of my post, which I apparently never got to, was either “it would be easy for a computer to pass itself off as a religious idiot, if that was what the person on the other side of the conversation was expecting”; or, “religious idiots will be easily mis-identified as computers because they will fall back on rote positions and be unable to respond effectively to sophisticated arguments”.
Oh, I wasn’t trying to imply you were calling religious people idiots, it’s just that your post reminded me of Feynman’s anecdotes.