Well, okay, the title of this post is misleading and I’m having a little fun in using that title.
Yesterday, I saw a blog post by William Dembski, where he used the acronym “FBI” as shorthand for a Fundamentalist Belief Inventory. So no, in this case “FBI” does not stand for “Federal Bureau of Investigation”.
The inventory consists of 40 pairs of statements. In each case you are supposed to pick the one that fits best. And it is a forced choice — you are not allowed to select “none of the above”. I suggest you follow the link above to Dembski’s post and read the questions. It will give you an idea as to what fundamentalists believe.
Testing myself
Directly testing myself would not be much fun. I would probably score a zero on the fundamentalist scale. So, instead, I tried to answer them as I probably would have answered them back at age 20 — around 3 years before I left Christianity.
I’ll note that this is hard to do. So my count may be slightly off.
According to my scoring, I count 3 as the number of fundamentalist positions that I would have agreed with at age 20. If I go back to age 15, it is probably more like 6.
According to Dembski, fundamentalists will score in the high 20s to low 30s. And liberal Christians will score in the single digits. So I guess I always fell into the liberal Christian category.
Many of these answers just seem like common sense. Of course the story of Jonah and the big fish is fiction. Of course the story of Noah’s ark is fiction, though perhaps inspired by an actual local flood. As a teenager, it was already clear that languages evolve and diversify naturally, so the Tower of Babel story could not have been anything other than fiction.
If somebody had questioned me about these beliefs back in my teenage years (when I was a practicing Christian), I would have said “God gave us brains and expected us to use them.”
So go take a look at the questions, and maybe estimate how you would have answered them at an earlier time in your life.
The Heretical Philosopher 