Ideological Turing Test

Alan Turing

Atheist blog Unequally Yoked has published an ideological Turing test to determine whether atheists can pretend to be Christians and vice versa.  The purpose of the test is to see how well the two groups understand each other. 

For those of you that don’t know, a Turing test is a exam to determine a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior.  A human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each emulating human responses.  If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test.  The test was first introduced by computer scientist and mathematician Alan Turing in a 1950 paper.  He opens the essay with the following quote- “I propose to consider the question, “Can machines think?”  

Can you see the connection between the Turing test and the Unequally Yoked version?  Atheists and Christians will answer both sets of questions, then a judge will try to determine who is a believer and who is not based on the responses to the questions.  Here are the questions...

For Christians...

-What’s your best reason for being a Christian?

-What evidence or experience (if any) would cause you to stop believing in God?

-Why do you believe Christianity has a stronger claim on the truth than other religions?  On what basis do you reject the truth claims of other traditions and denominations but accept your own?

-How do you read the Bible?  Do you study the history of its translations?  How do you decide which translations are the true Bible?  How does it guide you if you have a moral or theological dilemma?

For Atheists...

-What’s your best reasons for being an atheist?

-What evidence or experience (if any) would cause you to believe in God?  If you believed in some kind of God, what kind of evidence would be necessary to convince you to join a particular religion?

-When you have ethical and moral disputes with other people, what do you appeal to?  What metric do you use to examine your moral intuitions?

-Why is religion so persistent?  We have had political revolutions, artistic revolutions, an industrial revolution, and also religious reformations of several kinds, but religions endures.  Does this not suggest its basic truth?