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The Turing test is a test used to determine whether or not an attempt to simulate human intelligence is successful. Questions are fed to a computer and to humans. If humans are not able to identify which responses come from a computer, then the computer passes a test for artificial intelligence. Some people have suggested a similar test in order to determine whether people of a certain ideological or religious point of view understood the arguments that were being made on the other side.
The idea is that if you truly understand the arguments that the other side is making, you should be able to successfully imitate them. That is you should be able to successfully answer questions posing as an adherent of the opposing viewpoint, and people who saw your responses shouldn't be able to distinguish your answers from those of actual adherents.
The above link is to a set of responses to such a challenge given by an atheist posing as a Christian. This atheist failed the test, convincing only 23% of the Christian judges. In general the Christians outperformed the atheists. In fact the Christians were better at convincing atheists that they were atheists than the atheists themselves.
Although there is much selection bias in this test, and for that reason it can hardly be definitive, the test might indicate that atheists don't understand the Christian point of view, and indeed understand arguments for Christianity better than the Christians understand arguments for atheism. I thought looking at some of the least successful responses would inform us about what atheists fail to understand about Christianity.
I should point out that in contrast to the poor performance that this individual made in convincing Christian judges that his responses came from an actual Christian, his genuine responses to questions about his atheism managed to convince 60% that he was an actual atheist instead of a Christian posing as one. I was tempted to think that the shortness of the responses was a clue, but this participant gave short responses to both sets of questions. Successful responses tended to be longer.
The first thing that stands out is that some of the language seems unnatural. It might be the case that sometimes Christians use phrases that don't pop up in everyday speech. However, if you are going to use them in a response you have to get them right. I believe that a Christian would probably use "our Lord and Savior" rather than repeating "our". I suspect that Christians would find the last sentence of the first answer to be theologically suspect. Christian faith is in God and Jesus, not in "our fellow man".
The most successful, genuine Christian responses cited noted luminaries of Christian thought. If someone wants to understand the way that educated Christians see things, one could do worse than acquainting oneself with the work of C. S. Lewis. Alvin Plantinga was also mentioned. I also remember mention of papal encyclicals and the scholastics.
Interestingly enough the Christians tended to give answers to the question of what would cause them to doubt. One very successful approach was to use the occasion to criticize atheism while retaining humility by focusing on the respondent's own faulty reasons for having been an atheist.
The answer to the third question likely raised some Christian eyebrows by saying that scripture said that Christians were not to judge other's faith. Of course Christians mostly believe that other religions are wrong. It is other people that they aren't to be excessively judgmental towards.
They might have thought of it as being unusual that the respondent used the King James version of the bible whereas his study group used the New International version. The NIV has more modern language and it would be more likely for someone to use that version for their personal use, so long as they owned a copy and had no theological problems with the translation. If someone were taking part in a study group that used the NIV, it is unlikely that either of these would be the case.
Talking about personal experiences of worship seemed to be successful. This was an approach that atheists were able to fake effectively.
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