Most intelligent people are Atheist.

[DAGTA]

Originally posted by: Eeezee

Originally posted by: DAGTA

Originally posted by: DVK916
http://kspark.kaist.ac.kr/Jesus/Intelligence%20&%20religion.htm

This study clearly shows that those with higher intelligence tend to reject god beliefs. Other studies in the past have also found a correlation between religiousness and god belief.

For the first claim: I don't buy the numbers. My own experience throughout college and my professional career (as a scientist) has shown me just the opposite. I see more professors and college educated people believing in a God than I see in non-college educated people.

As for the second claim: I should call in Captain Obvious.

Did you go to a Catholic university or something? Almost all of my (scientific) professors are atheists, although I'm uncertain on a few of them that I don't know very well

Are you sure you aren't just mistaken? Did you ask them if they were atheist or not? How many of your professors do you know on a personal level?

I started at Valparaiso University, which is a Lutheran university so no doubt there was a bias in hiring there. I transferred, after one semester, to Ball State University. State school with no religious ties. It IS in the Bible Belt area so that can add a bias.

I don't know the exact number of professors I knew well enough to know some of their beliefs. Maybe 10? I don't recall any of them being atheists.

 

[Trevelyan]

Originally posted by: miniMUNCH
You gotta believe this universe came from somewhere or something...do to something far, far beyond our scientific understanding -- i.e. a definition of 'supernatural'.

All I know is there is law of physics called the law of conservation of mass and energy...well, we have a lot of mass and energy now. Where did it all come from? And don't tell me "Big Bang"...that is only a mechanism which explains our universe's present state. Where did the matter that existed pre Big-Bang in that 'singularity' come from? There is an endless regression of logical questions concerning the origin of the universe. Ultimately, one has to step outside "natural law" to answer that 'most interesting' question.

There is no way to answer the "Mass & Energy origin" question without resorting to descriptions of supernatural phenomena. And, yes, I classify the theory of chronons and alternate dimensions as supernatural and no physicists can prove me wrong.

THANK YOU! Seriously...

Some people talk like the origin of the universe is some settled matter and God is dead, but there are more unanswered questions than answered ones, and saying atheism is the "most intelligent" belief system based on science is ridiculous because of that.

 

[vtohthree]

Without reading the previous posts, surely some one mentioned Albert Einstein, a Jewish man with religious back ground(yes there are some debates, but none-the-less, not an atheist).

From what I have seen in college, a lot of unintelligent people claim atheism to look smarter by default. Hence, there are a lot of stupid atheists out there. That is not to say that there are not a lot of stupid religious people out there, but I am bringing this out against the originial "study"/claim.

 

[imported_electron]

How intelligent can you be when you don't even know that you don't know?

 

[The Green Bean]

Originally posted by: DVK916
What is wrong with this topic. I posted a valid study.

A few statistics do not prove anything.

 

[Literati]

Originally posted by: notfred

Other studies in the past have also found a correlation between religiousness and god belief.

Really? I'd never have guessed.

Interesting.

 

[Literati]

Originally posted by: LukeMan
Einstein and Newton both believed in a God, they must be anomolies?

Along with C.G Jung and Isaac Newton who was a Christian who studied the Bible daily and believed that God created everything, yadda yadda yadda.

Human nature dictates that you'll always have people across the board.

Hell if you think about it, look at who the people looked up to that created the structure for modern life as we know it.

That said I'm a Christian. Maybe that's why I struggled with math for so long.

 

[FDF12389]

Originally posted by: Literati

That said I'm a Christian. Maybe that's why I struggled with math for so long.

Hey me too, and I hear Einstein did too, look thats three, we can make another "Valid Study".

 

[Tostada]

Originally posted by: DVK916

Originally posted by: Feldenak

Originally posted by: DVK916
Guess it hard to talk about this on ATOT since most people here are sky fairy worshipers.

No, it's just that we don't like you. You are a troll...not quite JLGatsby quality yet but I think that's because you are still in HS.

1. I am not a troll
2. I am not in HS


I am an open minded person thus an atheist, who can't stand why close minded people thus theist can't look at things logically and see that god doesn't exist.

1. You definitely are a troll if you're going to blatantly insult people with the "sky fairy" comment like that.

2. Atheists are rather closed-minded. If you were fully open-minded, you would be agnostic.

You've obviously been having some hardcore anti-God stuff pumped into your head at university.

The whole concept of atheism is rather western. Most people who say they are atheists are actually anti-monotheists who have a major hatred for organized religion.

I personally despise most forms of organized religion myself, but that doesn't mean there's no higher power out there, and if you think it is totally unreasonable to believe in a higher power, you are extremely closed-minded.

I'd say it's ridiculous to believe that God is a single person with human-like characteristics. If you blieve in such a God, and you believe that He is omniscient and omnipotent, then the only conclusion that you can come to is that this God is a bad deity who doesn't care about anybody. That is, if God is all-knowing and all-powerful, it would be infinitely simple for him to solve everybody's problems and end all suffering. Therefore, if God does exist, he doesn't care about all the bad things in the world. He simply created mankind because he is sadistic. There are many other similar arguments that make God seem rather silly. I know people who didn't believe in God and now they do because of some random coincidence that made them believe God was looking out for them. OK, so God kept you from dying when you got hit by that car, but what about all those people who were raped, murdered and starved to death the same day? So maybe you can logically say God is silly, but the primary flaw of atheists like you is that you think it's either one way or the other. You think either motheism is right or there is no greater consciousness whatsoever.

But there must be a middle ground between hardcore atheists and hardcore monotheists. Pantheism and panentheism are probably the only "open minded" doctrines out there besides simple agnosticism/skepticism.

Honestly, you can't be logical and truly believe that there is nothing else out there. Sure, you can say you don't believe in a monotheistic God, but where do you think the Big Bang came from? Do you honestly believe that a bunch of gasses just decided to come together in a vacuum and explode? That's fine, but don't kid yourself that it's not a religious belief. Evolution itself is a religious belief. It may be the best the scientific community has, but it certainly runs counter to the Law of Entropy. Natural selection is a cold hard fact, but genetic mutations don't generally make better/smarter species more apt to survive. There's a lot of faith going into no matter what you believe.

How do you explain your consciousness? Do you really believe your entire being is just a bunch of chemical reactions between brain cells? That doesn't explain your consciousness in the slightest. I can't prove that anybody else in the universe is more than a walking pile of meat reacting to things in ways that can be fully explained biologically, but I do know that there's something going on inside myself that is greater than that. It has nothing to do with God per se.

I would suggest that you take a few Philosophy classes at your university before you go around sticking your foot in your mouth. Then maybe you could at least think rationally about the subjects you seem to be interested in.

Seriously, most intelligent people are not actually atheists. Most atheists are atheists as a result of some traumatic experience they had with religion.

 

[Floydian]

Originally posted by: Tostada
Seriously, most intelligent people are not actually atheists. Most atheists are atheists as a result of some traumatic experience they had with religion.

I don't often post in OT (ever?) but after reading your post I am wondering if you have proof or evidence of where you obtained information regarding the contradiction of a fundamental Law of Thermodynamics (regarding entropy) and Natural Selection? I am interested along with a few important scholarly journals. Perhaps I misunderstood.

My advice to you, which you can take and think about, or perhaps ignore (there is always a choice), is to tolerate and debate reasonably rather than accuse and explode. Your discounting of evolution and natural selection show an obvious ignorance which is... often untolerated by many people on both sides--Atheist/Agnostic/Religious. Especially by those that want to expand their knowledge through thoughtful discussion of learned ideas. This is the fun part of life is it not? Defeating ignorance is the root of education!

Personally I am a christian with many friends who are atheists as well as quite religious (I attend the University of Wisconsin - Madison--bias on both sides (outside of Milwaukee and Madison, Wisconsin is very very republican, and inside those two cities quite the opposite). I have learned to accept people's beliefs yet still engage in deep thought provoking and expanding conversation.

Someone will probably cry out "if you're christian, you're being ignorant!"

Perhaps they're right, but perhaps they're wrong. If we could definitively prove either side, there would be no argument and no debate--and perhaps we would be worse off because of it!

Do I believe everything the Bible says? No. Do I believe everything that someone tells me in church? No. Do I take it in and figure out how it relates to myself, society and the ethical conflicts I face everyday? Yes.

Is there a right or wrong way? I say no. Discuss.

Quite a thread, I do say.

 

[Zepper]

Considering the state of the evidence at this time, I think that an intelligent person would be agnostic. Belief that there is no god can get you in nearly as much trouble as belief that there is one...

.bh.

 

[Zenmervolt]

Scientists are not "more intelligent". They are more logical.

If you want intelligent people, look at philosophers.

ZV

 

[SparkyJJO]

and the flames shall get higher, and higher....

 

[FDF12389]

nvm, i really dont have the time for this.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: Zenmervolt
Scientists are not "more intelligent". They are more logical.

If you want intelligent people, look at philosophers.

ZV

I'd say that the philosophers are logical whereas the scientists are empirical.

Either way, knowing the things we know nowadays, it is getting pretty untenable to believe that there is a big guy in the sky watching down on us.

 

[Cerpin Taxt]

Originally posted by: Tostada

Honestly, you can't be logical and truly believe that there is nothing else out there.

Wait a minute. Is that a general "you," or do you mean to address a particular individual in this thread? I ask because this statement seems to set up a bit of a strawman if it is actually intended to characterize atheism per se.

Sure, you can say you don't believe in a monotheistic God, but where do you think the Big Bang came from?

You need to first understand that the Big Bang is more like a big bottomless pit rather than some ancient and furiously unstable mass that spontaneously "exploded" things into existence. It's a pit, and we can't see the bottom of it. Your question is very much like asking "what is underneath the bottomless pit?" or "what is the bottomless pit resting on?" The Big Bang singularity is the point where we sorta "run outta light," and we can't make sense of things anymore. We can't talk about a bottom that is impossible to see. That doesn't make it a "thing" as though it were an object with a discrete mass and extension... extension in what? space? time?

For these reasons your question doesn't really make any sense. Buried within it is an invalid reference -- or at the very least a reference that you'll need to make sense out of before your can justly expect anyone to answer it

Do you honestly believe that a bunch of gasses just decided to come together in a vacuum and explode? That's fine, but don't kid yourself that it's not a religious belief. Evolution itself is a religious belief.

This is just an abuse of language. You can call evolution a religion if it makes you feel better, but in any respect it stands on much more solid epistemological grounds than any traditional religion.

It may be the best the scientific community has, but it certainly runs counter to the Law of Entropy.

You are cordially invited to support this astounding claim with a material argument.

Natural selection is a cold hard fact, but genetic mutations don't generally make better/smarter species more apt to survive.

They don't have to for Evolution to be true. Indeed, non-deleterious mutations are much less probable, statistically. The fact remains, however, that non-deleterious mutations DO HAPPEN, and moreover they are basically inevitable.

There's a lot of faith going into no matter what you believe.

I can understand how it would seem this way to someone so woefully ignorant of the full body of relevant scientific facts.

How do you explain your consciousness? Do you really believe your entire being is just a bunch of chemical reactions between brain cells? That doesn't explain your consciousness in the slightest. I can't prove that anybody else in the universe is more than a walking pile of meat reacting to things in ways that can be fully explained biologically, but I do know that there's something going on inside myself that is greater than that. It has nothing to do with God per se.

...and for that reason it has nothing to do with atheism per se, either.

I would suggest that you take a few Philosophy classes at your university before you go around sticking your foot in your mouth. Then maybe you could at least think rationally about the subjects you seem to be interested in.

A few extra courses in science might be just what the doctor ordered for you, too.

Seriously, most intelligent people are not actually atheists. Most atheists are atheists as a result of some traumatic experience they had with religion.

Evidence? Statistics? Support?


Y'know... having briefly glanced that the OP's link, I will say that I don't quite credit the source very highly with respect to its central claim, but at least the OP had something to go along with his assertion.

-Garth

 

[FDF12389]

Originally posted by: Garth

Originally posted by: Tostada

There's a lot of faith going into no matter what you believe.

I can understand how it would seem this way to someone so woefully ignorant of the full body of relevant scientific facts.

-Garth

Hes right, faith is required for any beleif, where di all the mass and energy in the universe that is here today come from?

Science has NO answer to that question, without first saying "something" was just always here.

 

[Babbles]

Originally posted by: Garth

There's a lot of faith going into no matter what you believe.

I can understand how it would seem this way to someone so woefully ignorant of the full body of relevant scientific facts.

Well I have to agree with the original statement and Garth, I think you are being "woefully ignorant" of what's happening. People do not want to associate the word 'faith' with science because it seems on the surface to be somehow fundamentally different. However the fact is people have faith in damn well just about anything ranging from the study of thermodynamics to their religious conviction and to gravity.
I work as a research scientist person in analytical chemistry, and I just have to put my "faith" into the fact that certain gas laws, for example, will keep on exhibiting certain behavior day in and day out. If you think you can define one problem with another definition you will always eventually hit a brick wall where you just have to put faith that certain aspects of physics, or whatever, will just work as intended. Sure some scientists may call it a "parsimonious assumption" or some other sort of definition, but it is nothing more than having faith that something like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle will continue to be 'true' all of the time.

Seriously, most intelligent people are not actually atheists. Most atheists are atheists as a result of some traumatic experience they had with religion.

Evidence? Statistics? Support?

I don't know about any "traumatic experience" with religion, but I do know that if we continue to run with this goofy premise of scientists, intelligence, and atheism, my real life experience has shown me that most scientists are indeed religious. Between the four labs I have worked at in my short life, I think I have ran into only one atheist. Anecdotal evidence, perhaps, but if atheism was so wide-spread amongst scientists I would have thought I would have meet more than one. Oddly enough at two different labs in two different parts of the country I have ran into individuals who are leaving the science profession to enter seminary school; I even thought that was sort of bizarre, but more power to them.

I don't think people like to think of it, but I believe that in reality (and practice) science and religion are essentially the same thing; two sides to one coin perhaps. I just feel that people want there to be some fundamental polar difference simply because it may feel like it should be like that, but there is no reason at all that these two concepts must be polar opposites. I think most people in the scientific discipline acknowledge this, but it seems that more of the 'poser amateur science blowhards' (e.g. vast majority of people on ATOT, it seems ) like to argue otherwise.

 

[Tostada]

Originally posted by: Floydian
...
Perhaps I misunderstood.

That seems to be the case.

My statement about entropy was referring to the simple fact that the universe is going from an ordered state to a less ordered state, whereas evolution is primarily based on the concept of random occurrances causing the exact opposite. Evolution, again, may be the best scientific theory we have, but it still can't explain DNA. I've seen people getting all excited that they can form a few of the proteins needed for DNA by simulating billions of lightning strikes into a primordial ooze concoction, but this is still far from creating all the required proteins, and I won't even discuss the improbability of these somehow being arranged to form the DNA of even the simplest amoeba. Many people see to think that given enough time even the most improbable things are guaranteed to happen, but you don't need to take many statistics classes to see that these "million monkeys with a million typewriters" type of arguments are simply impossible until the timeframe actually approaches the infinite.

My point is not to claim that there is a superior theory out there. I never said anything remotely close to that.

Originally posted by: Floydian
My advice to you, which you can take and think about, or perhaps ignore (there is always a choice), is to tolerate and debate reasonably rather than accuse and explode.

At what point did I explode?

Originally posted by: Floydian
Your discounting of evolution and natural selection show an obvious ignorance which is... often untolerated by many people on both sides--Atheist/Agnostic/Religious.

I'm not sure what you mean by "discounting." I never said evolution was bogus, and to the contrary I stated that natural selection was an obvious fact. If you think evolution has all the answers, though, you are grossly mistaken. There are parts of evolutionary theory which are far from proven, and perhaps may never be provable. It is a theory which has gone through massive fundamental changes. I'm sure just a few years ago there were people like you calling others ignorant for not agreeing with some facet of evolutionary theory which has now been totally abandoned. It is you who are ignorant to the same degree as a religious zealot who would attack me for not believing completely in his conception of God.

Originally posted by: Floydian
Do I believe everything the Bible says? No. Do I believe everything that someone tells me in church? No. Do I take it in and figure out how it relates to myself, society and the ethical conflicts I face everyday? Yes.

Is there a right or wrong way? I say no. Discuss.

Quite a thread, I do say.

As much as you'd like everybody to get along, everybody's beliefs can't be equally correct. I can respect atheists who argue for their beliefs. I can respect Christians who argue for their beliefs. I can't really respect someone -- as you appear to be -- picking and choosing what they want out of Christianity and still claiming to be Christian, though. For example, you seem to be someone who believes in the divinity of Christ (pretty much mandatory as you say you're Christian) but doesn't really take too seriously the bits about non-believers being cast into the Lake of Fire. Discounting evolution shows "obvious ignorance" as you say, but believing in a man in the sky who loves you and is all-powerful but won't bother lifting a finger to end suffering ... that makes perfect sense, right?

 

[Tostada]

Originally posted by: Garth

Originally posted by: Tostada

Honestly, you can't be logical and truly believe that there is nothing else out there.

Wait a minute. Is that a general "you," or do you mean to address a particular individual in this thread? I ask because this statement seems to set up a bit of a strawman if it is actually intended to characterize atheism per se.

That really was a bad way to put things on my part.

I mean that the concept of atheism is not as simple as most people think. People who haven't put much thought into it may decide that the concept of God is ridiculous, and therefore atheism makes sense. In the end, though, atheism leaves all the same questions and opens up more. That is, when pondering your own consciousness or the origin of the universe, the theist ends up deferring to God as the source of their consciousness (the "in his image" business) and also the source of everything. God is beyond our understanding, so there's no use worrying about it. Ridiculous? Sure. The atheist will often be disinclined to admit that anything is beyond the realm of science, though, which is just as ridiculous. The same basic philosophical questions exist.

Originally posted by: Garth
You need to first understand that the Big Bang is more like a big bottomless pit rather than some ancient and furiously unstable mass that spontaneously "exploded" things into existence...

True enough. My point is that the Big Bang is an answer for a specific question that makes the more general question unavoidable. You can still always say "where did that come from?" no matter what origin of the universe you subscribe to. I'm not necessarily asking where matter itself came from (you obviously don't have to assume that there was ever a point when matter did not exist) but simply how it came to be at the state it was in at a given time.

No matter how you go about explaining life, the universe and everything, you can always go back to the childish "where did that come from?" question. There are ways of sidestepping it, but those answers always bring up new questions. To be honest, you have to say that nobody knows.

Originally posted by: Garth

Do you honestly believe that a bunch of gasses just decided to come together in a vacuum and explode? That's fine, but don't kid yourself that it's not a religious belief. Evolution itself is a religious belief.

This is just an abuse of language. You can call evolution a religion if it makes you feel better, but in any respect it stands on much more solid epistemological grounds than any traditional religion.

You are cordially invited to support this astounding claim with a material argument.

At this point, your post really degraded into an ad hominem rant, so I won't bother with the rest.

I'm truly amazed at the responses I get to the kinds of statements I have made. I basically come right out and say that most people who believe in God are retarded, then I say that evolution really can't give you all the answers either (an extremely simple philosophical fact). Who is it that gets offended? It's the atheists!

 

[Tostada]

Originally posted by: Garth

Seriously, most intelligent people are not actually atheists. Most atheists are atheists as a result of some traumatic experience they had with religion.

Evidence? Statistics? Support?

I suppose that wasn't a fair generalization.

I will say that from my personal experience, everyone I have ever met who has mentioned that they were an atheist has a bit of an axe to grind with organized religion. I will say that it is perfectly reasonable to assume that there are well-adjusted atheists out there. The kinds of people who will casually mention that they are atheists in everyday conversation can't be expected to be completely normal.

I've taken philosophy classes in which there were actual surveys of who considered themselves athist. Very few people actually consider themselves atheists, and most who do, upon further reflection, decide they have more of a skepticist or pantheist view. To these people, perhaps it is still best that they claim to be atheists simply because they have a definite distaste for the common monotheistic concept of God.

 

[VERTIGGO]

Hey I just did a study, and I found out that 60% of PCs are powered by Intel, so obviously Intel users are more intelligent than AMD users.

 

[FDF12389]

Originally posted by: VERTIGGO
Hey I just did a study, and I found out that 60% of PCs are powered by Intel, so obviously Intel users are more intelligent than AMD users.

Did you include all the macs that have intel in them?

 

[Babbles]

Originally posted by: VERTIGGO
Hey I just did a study, and I found out that 60% of PCs are powered by Intel, so obviously Intel users are more intelligent than AMD users.

You read that backwards. The 60% of people using Intel are dummies, and the remaining percentage that uses AMD are the intelligent ones!

 

[Cerpin Taxt]

Originally posted by: Tostada

Originally posted by: Garth
This is just an abuse of language. You can call evolution a religion if it makes you feel better, but in any respect it stands on much more solid epistemological grounds than any traditional religion.

You are cordially invited to support this astounding claim with a material argument.

The claim is a simple one. Science embraces a method for testing and confirming its facts. Propositions which cannot be tested are meaningless (much like the proposition that the pit has a bottom, but we cannot ever discover it), and facts that, through testing, are found not to accord with reality are discarded. This is hardly the case with religion wherein dogma is not only spoon-fed to believers, but questioning and testing is in fact discouraged, and when reality and religious propositions do not coincide, it is reality that a believer will deny.

At this point, your post really degraded into an ad hominem rant, so I won't bother with the rest.

That is a convenient dodge. Admittedly, there were ad hominems in my post (as there were in yours, though not directed at me), but there were also legitimate challenges to some highly dubious claims made by you. I suggest you either support those claims, or retract them with an admission that you really do not know enough about the factual details pertaining to the issues addressed by your claims to substantiate them.

I'm truly amazed at the responses I get to the kinds of statements I have made.

You shouldn't when you throw around such silly claims as that evolution somehow contradicts what we know about thermodynamics.

I basically come right out and say that most people who believe in God are retarded, then I say that evolution really can't give you all the answers either (an extremely simple philosophical fact). Who is it that gets offended? It's the atheists!

I am not upset that you have claimed that evolution does not answer some particular metaphysical question that is is not intended to answer in the first place. I am upset, however, that you have made a claim that is high upon the list of creationist PRATTs (Points Refuted A Thousand Times) and now seem to want to let it slip by without supporting it or retracting it. It's rather disingenuous, and yes, I know that's another ad hominem, but I think you've earned it.

-Garth