Mr. Feser’s “serious arguments for religion”

Ed Feser continues to argue for the scientific and rational basis of religion: 

If you really think that denying that religion is “unscientific” amounts to endorsing lame exercises in pop apologetics like the Templeton prayer experiment, then I’m afraid you’re simply proving my point. That you focus on such easy targets — here and in your other writings on this subject — seems to me pretty strong evidence that you know nothing about serious arguments for religion.

Readers of Secular Right still await Mr. Feser’s proposal for a “serious” “scientific” test for religion.   We would like to know on what “scientific” basis he would have potential believers decide whether to attach themselves to Mormonism, say, rather than to Islam or to Christianity.  He claims that only someone “smugly unreflective and dogmatic” would say that such decisions rest on “blind faith.” 

So let’s move beyond “blind faith.”  Unfortunately, the runic tablets read by Joseph Smith with his magic spectacles have been transported back up to heaven, so we are unable to subject them to the usual tests for historical authenticity.  But we can at least investigate the claims of those golden tablets, such as that the United States was populated by the lost tribes of Israel.  If an archeological investigation determines absolutely no basis for such a revelation, will Mr. Feser declare it a delusion if not a fraud?  Or does he have in mind a different kind of science that is more appropriate to religious claims?  

Perhaps I am being crudely materialistic.  I await any other objective, rational test that will allow me to distinguish between the truth claims of various religions, and that will be accepted by their adherents, who, according to Mr. Feser need nothing as crude as ‘blind faith” to attach themselves to this and not that religion. 

What Mr. Feser calls “easy targets” are simply the day-to-day claims made by the religious and by religious leaders.  Somehow, it is viewed as impolite and “ignorant” to ask that these claims meet the most elementary standards of plausibility.    Apologists like Mr. Feser want to turn our attention to Medieval metaphysics; I ask him to turn his attention to the actual practice of religion and defend its “rational basis.”  As I noted in my Beliefnet exchange with Michael Novak, last year, Pope Benedict XVI canonized an 18th century friar, Antonio de Santa Ana Galvao, as Brazil’s first saint.  Nuns in Brazil dispense pills containing little scrolls with prayers to Fra. Galvao wrapped up inside.  In canonizing Fra. Galvao, the Church declared that ingesting those pills had helped cure a young girl of kidney disease and had allowed a woman who had had a series of miscarriages to carry a child through the first two trimesters of pregnancy after doctors declared her incapable of doing so. 

It would be great if Mr. Feser proposed a scientific test for the efficacy to the Fra. Galvao pills—would he support a double-blind experiment regarding their usefulness in treating kidney disease?  What is his theory for how they work?  There is a product peddled on late-night TV called Kinoki Detox Foot Pads.  These large Band-aid-like strips are applied to the soles of the feet at night to remove “toxins” and cure arthritis, diabetes, cellulite, and insomnia.  Mr. Feser is an educated man, so  I assume he would share my confident rejection of such a claim.  He might even share my distress that educated Westerners with all the benefits of scientific education would not ask by what imaginable biological theory could such a product work.  I’m sure therefore that he also would hope that educated Westerners ask the same questions of the claim that a piece of bone in a jeweled case, say, or a medal to a saint, has curative powers  

Mr. Feser asserts that “theism is true, indeed rationally unavoidable.”  Let’s look at the “rational” part.  I am puzzled by the following logic: 
Situation A: A mine collapses and the miners are trapped in terrifying blackness and waning oxygen for five days.  Rescue efforts prove successful, however.  Their rescue shows God’s love for humanity, that he cares for every one of us. 
Situation B:  A mine collapses and the miners are trapped in terrifying blackness and waning oxygen for five days.  Rescue efforts prove unsuccessful, and the miners die.  Their death shows God’s love for humanity, that he cares for every one of us. 
X (miners live) = proof of God’s love (Y).
Not-X (miners don’t live) = proof of God’s love (Y).  So X = not-X. 
       
        There is no imaginable occurrence that a believer in God’s loving personal attention to each individual will ever accept as inconsistent with that proposition.  Saved from cancer, died from cancer, rescued from the tsunami, drowned in the tsunami, pulled out of the burning house, incinerated in the burning house, all mean the same thing: God loves us as a loving Father and exercises his omnipotence and omniscience on our behalf. 
       
        I am grateful that medical science and engineering do not rest on such a “rational basis.”