An Ideological Turing Test for Atheists and Christians

What does ‘lean’ Atheist/Christian mean?

It is not clear whatsoever what I need to do with these links. For shame, seems like an interesting experiment but I probably won’t mess with trying to figure out how to fill it out.

Very confusing.

I am wondering if they could have made this test harder to take, or its results harder to analyze.

I am guessing “yes,” while thinking it would take some work.

I have to be somewhere in an hour, I will come back to this when I have enough time to look at it.

Fine, I won’t give any hints 😉 I still think that some answers were written by Vulcans.

It was really tough for me as most of the answers one could hear people in the comments thread on this website repeat. Even if it’s a stereotypical answer (I hate God, Religion scarred me emotionally, Religion is a conspiracy to control people) there are atheists who would say it. Get any Christian knowledgeable enough in the debate and I don’t think an atheist could tell the difference. I don’t know how much that matters though. What matters is the arguments and if they are sound. Should make a board game out of this like that Battlestar Galactica game where you have to pretend you aren’t a Cylon.

“Which answer that best matches your belief about the religion of each contestant?” doesn’t make any sense. First, it isn’t a sentence. Second, which are the contestants?
If it’s a Likert scale, make it a Likert scale rather than introducing odd terms like “lean”.

I agree Brice, and yet some seem too easy (or do they?).

I know, can we carbon copy our guesses to Hemant and the ones with the highest number of correct answers enter some raffle or something (I am yet to get a freebie, sigh)

Leah, I will send you my answers in the morning, hard to do from a mobile device. Thanks for the challenge!

Took the test. Don’t know how well I did. Not sure I want to know.

I do know that I let my own biases about how atheists ‘should’ be colour my decisions, so there may very well be a few atheists on there I labeled Christans and vice versa.

Most interesting thing I’ve seen in the atheist blogosphere in weeks. I’ll take the test later tonight when I have more time.

Fun.

I too found it overly confusing. Maybe that’s the test? How many atheists are willing to while away hours trying to figure out how to take it? I have spinach to harvest before dark (and dinner), so I’m out.

I think I may have messed up my answers. I thought lean atheist/lean Christian meant agnostic atheist/agnostic Christian.

I was impressed. The people they got to do this aren’t you’re average, garden-variety bible-thumpers. They cast into doubt our all-too-frequent assumption that we know their materials better than they do, and they don’t know ours at all. I had to rely on hunches–an emphasis there, a certain wistfulness of expression there, an interpretation of something that isn’t quite right. . . And most of them knew more about philosophy than I remember. It was an interesting exercise, and more challenging than I expected.

And I couldn’t vote against one who was not very articulate, because there are atheists who are not brilliant or articulate.

Unless the authors make themselves known and identify themselves I can’t give a definitive answer for any of them, so I leaned one way or another on each entry. Knowing that half of them are false to begin with really gets my skeptic sense tingling.

Wish I had enough time to sit down and do this. I am working my way through a Rushdie novel right now though so I think I will focus on that!

I think this was super cool. It was pretty time-consuming, yes, but worth it. Pretty hard too! I agree, I could never have pretended so well as a Christian. Can’t wait to see how I did.

Instead of “Lean Christian/Atheist”, it should be “Probably Christian/Atheist”. This eliminates the ambiguity in which it seems to imply that the candidate is “leaning” towards Christianity or atheism.

Most interesting thing I’ve seen on here in a while.

I don’t have the patience to read all of that…I am curious to see the results though…

I would very much like to see MY results because I marked a distinctly large portion as being one group and am now certain I was wrong about many of them.

That was nifty, thanks.

Read them all carefully and spent some time explaining my decision procedure. Can’t wait to see the results.

If I hadn’t thought Christians were mixed in, I also would have marked them all down for atheists.

As it was, there seemed to be the occasional phrase, perspective, or word most online atheists wouldn’t use. Just a kind of “feel” from the writing style as to whether the author was trying to prove something or just give insight into their beliefs. Even so, all of them could have been atheists.

I kept a record of my answers. Hope to check them out soon!

I get it, this was a trick to get some of the christian contestants to research our viewpoints so thoroughly that they begin to understand us. Eventually, the mass conversions will begin!

I thought the Christians-posing-as-atheists were marked by a) excessive use of buzzwords that they do not understand; and b) asserting the inverse of common (and bad) apologetic arguments.

Nice.

I’m guessing there was a larger sample of participants, with random ones chosen to answer? There was only 1 out of them I thought was for sure a christian.

I’m curious how the next one pans out, to see if some atheists (whichever ones they chose) are good at emulating christians fairly and accurately. If they are as well-researched as these, I’d imagine we’d have some of the best arguments for christianity all in one place.

Hmm…. This isn’t one of those “trick” experiments where it turns out they were all atheists or christians and the survey taker was purposely misleading us to see how many we’d guess incorrectly “knowing” some of them are fakes and some of them are real….

To answer some of the doubts that have been raised — I’m a participant in the test (one of the fifteen respondents), and I’m a Christian. So I can definitively say that there is at least one non-atheist answering!

More generally, no, the point of the exercise is not at all to “trick” anyone. It’s simply to see how well each side knows the arguments of the other. And as anyone who’s tried to teach or tutor knows, the best test of knowing a concept or argument is trying to explain it to someone else.

Darn. I was hoping to learn if I was right or not. 🙁

What’s the point of taking this? It’s too long and cumbersome an exercise just to see if you can discern a “true” atheist from a Christian masquerading as one. The effort taken to read and judge 15 entries deserves a bigger Hallelujah (lol!) moment.

My big problem with this is that it doesn’t seem to have been a true Turing test, in that everyone was given time to formulate their answers (see: links given in a couple of them). I would have thought any Christian who was willing to do this would have been able to do a bit of research for their answer. This wouldn’t mean that they understand the atheist position, just that they did research for that particular question.

Even if none of them did, the possibility still makes it very hard to judge.

I also don’t think the questions were all that helpful, but maybe other people will disagree there.

I came away with 8 atheists (3 pretty sure and 5 leans), 7 Christians (2 pretty sure and 5 leans)

Incidentally, Bacopa – I’m an atheist and I use the word ‘foundational’. :p

I thought this was really interesting. The christians did better at this than I would have expected. I’m eagerly awaiting the second half, where we see if the atheists did as good a job at pretending to be christian. And I also want to know the affiliation of the participants, and if liberal christians were better at fooling us than then fundies.

I’m also glad that we as judges were asked our affiliation, because I want to know if atheists are better at spotting fake atheists and christians are better at spotting fake christians.

The entrants in this were self-selecting, so that will bias this somewhat. If someone were not already confident they could do a good job in impersonating the other side, they probably would not have signed up in the first place. I considered signing up, but being twenty-five years out of religion didn’t think I’d do the best job, so didn’t volunteer. I’d love to see this test done with a more random selection of people.

Did anyone else have a flashback to Blade Runner and the scene with Leon answering questions to determine if he was human or a replicant?

I am not at all confident in my ability to differentiate between atheists and intelligent, well-meaning theists in disguise.

Any of the answers could have been written by atheists. When responses used Evangelical Christian buzzwords- well, many atheists grew up in that environment. When the answers showed a worshipful attitude or misunderstanding of science- well, no one said atheists had to be rational (well, someone probably did, but I’m not saying that).

That said, I marked one as definitely Christian and a few more as “leaning” that way.

I’m having a really hard time with the “lean atheist” and “lean Christian” categories. What does that even mean? Distinguishing an atheist from what appear to be Christians extremely well versed in atheist positions is hard enough, how the hell am I supposed to differentiate a Christian from someone who only “leans Christian”?

The test itself is extremely difficult. There’s only one I’m fairly certain is a Christian and one or two others I could tentatively guess lean that way. One commenter in the test expressed it well; it’s hard to see how someone could lay out the atheist position so well, argue it so convincingly, often with scholarly references to scientists and philosophers, and actually fail to be an atheist.

I agree with the comments of how successful the Christians were! I’d predicted it was going to be simple, but maybe when you’re competent at fooling yourself, it gives you a leg up on fooling others! However, kudos to the fakers in the survey, they made it tough.
Furthermore I applaud the effort as an extension of the dialogue as I was reminded of Julia Sweeney’s memoir when she said she had “put on the ‘no god’ glasses” just to see how the world looked. Once she did, there was no going back to the delusion, so BRAVO!

Claudia:

It’s not how they lean, it’s how you lean. So if you’re not sure but you think they’re more likely a Christian than not, you put “lean Christian”.

The second round (with an improved interface) is now open for voting here: http://www.unequally-yoked.com/2011/07/vote-on-christian-turing-test.html