Peter Boghossian on The argument from scripture
Boghossian treats belief in scriptural authority as a failure of epistemology — believing on insufficient evidence.
Boghossian's A Manual for Creating Atheists (2013) treats faith — defined as 'pretending to know things you don't know' — as the core problem in religious belief. Scripture, on this view, is not evidence but a claim that believers treat as evidence because their epistemological standards have been corrupted by faith.
His street epistemology method encourages people to examine why they believe scripture is reliable. The typical answers — it is divinely inspired, it has been preserved accurately, it contains fulfilled prophecies — all presuppose what they are trying to prove. Boghossian shows that circular reasoning is the foundation of scriptural authority.
He argues that the solution is not to attack specific scriptural claims but to improve people's epistemological tools — teaching them to distinguish between reliable and unreliable methods of forming beliefs. Once someone adopts evidence-based epistemology, scriptural authority collapses on its own.
“Faith is pretending to know things you don't know.”