My guest blogger alumnus, Leah of Unequally Yoked, has proposed a very interesting challenge for Christians and atheists alike which she calls the "ideological Turing test":
One of the greatest gifts of my time at Yale has been living, writing, and arguing in a community of smart people with whom I fiercely disagree... The imitation test has helped me make sure I really understood what I was rejecting and, in the end, embracing.
Unless your enemies are purposefully contrarian... there is something they find uniquely compelling about their ideology. To imitate them, you need to know what that is and understand why it moves people. It doesn't matter if the benefits of an ideology are outweighed by its drawbacks; unless you can recognize the good as good, no partisan will ever trust your analysis of their creed.
And, unless you're uncommonly brilliant and perceptive, it will do you a lot of good to confront the merits of the other side.
The basic idea is that both Christians, and atheists posing as Christians, will answer a slate of questions aimed at people professing a Christian viewpoint. Then the atheists, and Christians posing as atheists, will answer a similar slate of questions for people professing an atheist viewpoint. Finally, a panel of judges will read all the answers and see if they can tell the difference between the people who genuinely hold each viewpoint and the ones who are merely trying to imitate it. (See here for more detailed rules.)
The point of this exercise is that, if you can convincingly argue the other side's position, it's good evidence that you truly understand it and aren't merely rejecting it out of ignorance. I think this will be a fun game to play, and the outcome, regardless of what it is, should be interesting fodder for discussion and analysis. My only concern is that this may be a difficult game for the Christians - answering convincingly from the atheist viewpoint might require what they'd consider blasphemy - but if they're willing to play along, that's up to them.
If you'd like to help out, either as a participant or as a judge, leave a comment here or or on Leah's blog, or e-mail me or her (leahDOTlibrescoATgmailDOTcom). Leah tells me we particularly need more questions targeted at the atheist viewpoint, so if you have suggestions for those, please propose them.
An intriguing idea. Is it really true, though, that it's impossible to explain an idea without understanding it (or, put less strongly, that an attempt to explain an idea without comprehending it will always be less coherent than that of someone who does comprehend it and is otherwise of similar competence?)
Could a candidate not memorise stock answers to common questions, and regurgitate the words as necessary without even comprehending them, Chinese-room style, and potentially score quite highly? Is it possible to develop an internal model, entirely abstracted from all other experience, of a pattern that itself models parts of the world, yet sufficiently accurate to make successful predictions of its behaviour, without becoming aware that that pattern does in fact accurately model the world as experienced? The experiment seems to require that this be false as one of its axioms; but is it so? That's a really difficult question; probably something only someone extremely familiar with the best theories of consciousness itself might be able to answer.
I've certainly heard tales, but not verified them, of staunch-creationists (tales sometimes even recounted by themselves, not that that really has any bearing on their truth) who somehow manage to get educational qualifications in evolutionary biology by doing something like this; learning the patterns in the material (or just flat-out rote learning standard answers) sufficiently well to answer questions without ever attaching any worldly relevance or validity to any of it. But perhaps that's just an idictment of excessive predictability or susceptibility to gaming in current educational methods themselves, not the actual data they attempt to impart.
Comment #1 by: Tom | June 25, 2011, 4:29 pm