At our last dinner. We spent most of the evening discussing whether Christianity is true or not. I was quite surprised to hear what this otherwise very intelligent person had to say against my view. I outlined three basic ways we know things are true. Incidentally, this is what epistemology deals with.
Epistemology deals with the field of knowledge.
So when asked how we test religious truth claims, I give some epistemological tools. These tools are nothing fancy, nothing out of the ordinary. Basically, you respond to religious truth claims in the same general way you deal with any other claims. The first way we know something is by authority. Frankly, most of the things we think we know we don't know because we've discovered them ourselves, but rather because someone we trust told us they were so.