So arrogant! You don't have to be stupid to be religious, you only have to choose to believe. I'm not religious, but I know plenty of highly intelligent people who are devoted one religion or another.
You couldn't have met these two guys [1] [2], but you keep on bumping into what they did for all of us.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Isaac_Newto...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Albert_Eins...
The only things that Newton did that were intelligent were things that modern physicists are still unilaterally willing to do, and holding belief in a deity is not one of them.
PS: Those guys are dead. You haven't met him either. They had less information available to them than we do today by a large margin. Their opinions and beliefs are inherently less trustworthy due to that.
> They had less information available to them than we do today by a large margin. Their opinions and beliefs are inherently less trustworthy due to that.
i for one congratulate you for being smarter and more Knowledgeable than both Newton and Einstein.
1. You argue through authority, for a subject where believers are infamous for throwing out their reasoning capacity (even becoming creationists)? :-( (Is this some meta level humor?)
2. Do you remember that quote about "standing on the shoulders of giants"? Those two are a couple of the giants we stand on the shoulders of, today. That doesn't imply a claim about intelligence, more than being able to get through a science university education.
No, i think that the categorical statement of bleachedsleet (five levels up the tree) is a bit offending, to me it sounds exactly like if he was claiming absolute authority on the subject, which he obviously can't.
showing a counterexample is not a bad argument, at least not in mathematics.
2. bleachedsleet argument needs that intelligence is very correlated with rationality. Sadly, the correlation is probably quite far from 1. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/opinion/sunday/the-differe...
(Regarding 2: For instance, there is mental disease. For another, if you raise children with one specific set of answers and they don't see any criticism of those answers, you can make most of them believe in anything all their life. Including creationism.)
You cannot use Newton or Einstein as an example of a knowledgeable perspective and simultaneously ignore the fact that there exist more knowledgeable people today. That is a fallacy; you could just as well cite Aristotle or Thales or Zoroaster. They get worse as they get older, and that's not a coincidence.
Look at a more serious religion, and you'll see better results: Scholastic Catholicism, or the Mu'tazili and Ash'ari schools of Islam, or almost any form of Buddhism.
http://www.catholic.com/tracts/adam-eve-and-evolution
Catholic doctrine is to deny random mutation (god is twiddling bits manually) and insist adam and eve were real. That along with a host of other silly stuff the believe (virgin birth).
And for Adam & Eve : "[The Church] allows for the possibility that man’s body developed from previous biological forms"
So it's not the case.
Godel was much smarter than me and appears to have believed in some divine being. Kant was also smarter than me and was religious. There are a litany of historical religious philosophers (Christian and otherwise) who belie your point as well.
Unless your point is simply that religiousity is currently out of favor with the self-professed intelligentsia. To which I'd respond: so?...
At least, for any other subject..?
(What does it say about a position that intelligent adherents can't reason about it?)
Inverse relationship between religiosity and intelligence may be true, just not sure what it tells us. A statistical appeal to authority??
Many more people are theistic or spiritual than are religious -- I doubt any statistics exist for that, but again proving a truth that tells us nothing about the basic proposition seems pretty worthless.
You appear to think reasoning about a position requires someone to come to your conclusion.
Re the anecdotal nature of the data-points, are you disputing that the mentioned people are intelligent. What in particular is questionable about those data-points, they don't disprove the aforesaid conjecture but they do cast doubt on the implied conclusion being drawn.
An absolute value would mean rationality was totally correlated with intelligence. It isn't.
I posted this in another comment -- http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/opinion/sunday/the-differe...
I doubt that was meant, either. There have been studies, most show that intelligent people are less likely to be religious. The more education, the less religion. Etc. It is, of course, a statistical thing.
(I grew up in Sweden and can tell you that to get a large fraction of (mentally healthy) people to be religious, they need to grow up in a religious environment -- without anyone really contradicting that world view. It was a bit of a shock for me the first time I went to Ireland for vacation, since I knew that a large part of the locals were really religious, but they were sane.)
> I always hear about the mythical intelligent religious person but somehow, they remain elusive.
I offered myself as a simple example. I'm neither the smartest guy nor the best Christian, but I consider myself reasonably intelligent and I try hard to live by my beliefs. I also offered several other historical counterexamples.
I don't see a statistical argument here. But it could be my religion showing.
Many of the founders of modern philosophy believed in some form of a Supreme Being. I would venture to say that this is true of most of human history up until the last 20-30 years. Whether from cultural influences, expectations, or otherwise, many of the smartest people in history have had some religious belief. That religious belief may not have been mainstream or consistent with the dominant theology of the era (see America's founding fathers and the prevalence of Deism), but there is a conspicuous absence of outright atheism.
Even in more modern times you see very intelligent people with some form of religious belief. From Newton, to Einstein, to Godel, to C S Lewis: these were very smart people who also had belief in some form of God. You don't have to agree with everything they thought or said, but you would be wrong to say they were not intelligent.
In short, intelligent religious people certainly aren't "mythical."
> As a general rule, religiosity goes down as intelligence goes up.
The thesis that there is an inverse relationship between religion and intelligence is not evident when you look at the arc of human history. And if you take the most charitable view: "Of people who are alive today, there is an inverse relationship between religiosity and intelligence" there is no proof of causation.
For the sake of argument, I'll consent that there is a growing divide between "religious" and "intelligent." Given that the preponderance of evidence suggests that intelligence is largely hereditary, what would explain this shift?
One could argue that expanding our understanding of the universe is responsible for this divide. That as people know more they believe less. But that doesn't appear to pan out when you look at a longer view of human history. Did the Newton's of the past become less religious as their knowledge increased? I don't see it.
It seems more likely that this divide is unique (or at least more sharply pronounced) in today's society. It could be that this is because it is more acceptable in today's world to be harshly critical of belief in general. That is, while there have always been fighting between sects it was not socially acceptable to be hostile towards belief in general. This is an interesting argument, but is not dismissable nor provable.
It could just as easily be that the growing availability of universities and colleges (that are widely more liberal than the general population) impacts impressionable 18-22 years olds who are branching out on their own for the first time. That a growing proportion of intelligent people are being exposed to anti-religious zealots in the form of their mentors at a very impressionable time.
Show me the statistical argument for one vs the other and we can have a debate centered around numbers. Flaming me for providing counterexamples to an offensive and hyperbolic comment hardly seems like a rational counterpoint. To point your question back to you: what does it say about your position that you can't reason about it?
The research shows a correlation between intelligence(/education) and not being religious. 30 seconds with Google:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religiosity_and_intelligence#S...
>> Even in more modern times you see very intelligent people with some form of religious belief. From Newton, to Einstein, to Godel, to C S Lewis
I already discussed the problems with arguing single data points for statistical correlations. See my comment on the brother comment of yours.
Again: There seem to be less correlation between intelligence and rationality than we usually think. (At least, as I thought when I was young enough to still have hair. :-) )
(So I am not going to touch the personal arguments. Let me just note that your examples are flawed.
Einstein called himself "agnostic": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Albert_Eins...
Newton was, well, quite crazy. :-) Also, he was hardly modern, he lived long before evolution was known. Before that, you really needed some form of designer to explain life.
C S Lewis' analytical self reflection don't impress. A bunch of years ago, I read part of a biography and how he chose religion in WWI. His motivation was flawed. Literature insight is something else than rationality.
That said, some of my intellectual idols are religious. E.g. Knuth and Larry Wall.)
> Controlling for other factors, they can only confidently show strong negative correlation between intelligence and religiosity among American Protestants.
So... American Protestants. Okay. In the scope of living people, that's... quite specific.
>> I already discussed the problems with arguing single data points for statistical correlations.
My use of these examples was not to counteract a statistical argument, but the opening sentence:
>>> I always hear about the mythical intelligent religious person but somehow, they remain elusive.
The rest of your rebuttal also appears to misunderstand my use of the specific examples. It was a simple exercise in showing that religious intellectuals are not a mythical creature.
>> The rest of your rebuttal also appears to misunderstand my use of the specific examples.
I discussed that and referenced it with "See my comment on the brother comment of yours."
I think I wasn't clear, so sturgill missed my trivial point -- I meant that it was not rational to believe in supernatural phenomena without good support.
And intelligence is probably less correlated with rationality than you'd naively think, so of course you'll find highly intelligent people that believe in anything. For instance, I've talked to a guy with mental issues that believed in lots of conspiracy theories. And so on.
(And many hundreds of years old books are not good support; there is better support and more witnesses that Elvis lives. And so on. This is a really old discussion.)
The fact they don't push their religiosity at you is a good thing, no?
Which tells us nothing about theistic belief. It would be foolish to conflate the two IMO; as appears to be happening in this exchange.
You say "mythical intelligent religious person" - few people could be considered more religious than Newton, you presumably consider him not to have been intelligent? What's your yardstick for intelligence?
Or did you mean "mythical" in the sense of "I'm going to ignore examples I know of because they contradict my position"?
That was easy, you answered your own question!
Most intelligent religious people will reject most of the content in their holy book of choice.
Doubt is often encouraged, though min got the better of me and I've since been pretty distant from faith-based living.
EDIT: grammar and clarity, minor changes
Oh, of course. I am not saying there's only one way to do it. On the contrary, that's exactly what I'm saying is wrong to think :)