Ask HN: How can one be educated, smart, and believe in God? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How can one be educated, smart, and believe in God?

8 pointsnicc32 comments

I'm not sure this topic is appropriate, but I've been wondering this for a while.

I also don't mean this in a disrespectful way. I genuinely want to know how someone can both believe in God, and in science and facts.

How can being educated, smart, and believe in science not clash with believing in God?

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Here's my (simplistic) take: Believing in God (this word is problematic because it has many different uses) is an axiom, it doesn't need to be, or indeed can be, "proven". You just accept it as given as see what logical conclusions can be drawn from it. Think of it as similar to Euclid's fifth postulate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate), you can accept or leave it and build a system around either choice. This is actually a fun activity to do, e.g. try to see if whatever definition of God you use imposes limits on the entity, e.g. "Can God create an equal" (if you've read Weaveworld this is how Shadwell tempts the The Scourge, but I digress)

I don't think the above approach clashes with science, many scientists have held religious beliefs.

However, organized religion is quite a different thing from the above approach, which is probably what you are referring to in your question. It seems humanity has needed religion as a bulwark against life's tragedies/evil/etc. from the earliest times (see Gobekli Tepe, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe) and it seems this inherent need is still going strong, although many attempts have been made to stamp it out. Depending on your deposition this may be a sign of the great Truth or an evolutionary bug in our brain's wetware.

This is the path I took, as well as asking myself the question "Why am I here?" I choose to believe I am a created being rather than a product of random chance, which leads to "there is a God" to be a true statement and hence religion follows from that. I get that there is some comfort in increasing entropy and all things returning to dust. But IMO there is too much unimaginable complexity in so many things; the biosphere in which we live, the metabolic pahtways in our own cells, the spark that gives rise to consciousness in the standing waves of bio-electricity in our brains. Sure we've learned a lot but there's so much we don't, or may never know about the natural world.

Some would say we just haven't learned about those things yet. I claim some things are unknowable, indeed the science of computation is all about what's computable and what's not.

For myself, I chose to become Catholic as an adult. Catholics don't give a damn about "Creation Science" and other such nonsense. Georges Lemaître was priest who first proposed the Big Bang theory. The fact that the Church doesn't try to explain the how of creation is very appealing to me.

We as a species are at Day One of understanding a neuroscience of consciousness. Natural philosophers since the time of Ibn Rushd have vociferously argued that reason constitutes a legitimate avenue for unveiling religious truth. But as of right now, it has been impossible for us to conceive of empirical tests of any theories of divine origins. And it may be 10,000 years of trans-human innovation to acquire the necessary sub-perceptual "eye".

Human single neuron activity precedes emergence of conscious perception

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03749-0

In the short term, I can recommend starting in on the Wisdom Literature and other mystical sources. Begin your own experiments with truth in quotidian life. And pay heed to the minds who have attempted to describe their own ineffable experiences of yore. Best of luck!

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mysticism/

Teleological thinking and IQ aren't particular correlated. It is possible to believe in god across all levels of IQ. Atheists tend to have a lower capacity for teleological thinking. Scientism, as opposed to science in the strict sense, is basically a religion with rational and irrational proponents.

I speak as an agnostic, but I think you have to distinguish between strict literalism / fundamentalism and religious belief more broadly.

Literalism / fundamentalism is something that's hard to believe in without willful denial of huge parts of reality. You have to believe in a young Earth and a lot of other incredibly improbable or impossible things. Details will vary by your religious belief but I'm not aware of any that don't contain total falsehoods when interpreted literally.

Not all Christians or members of other religions are literalists. In fact I'd say it's probably not even the dominant position theologically. Its popularity in America probably biases many peoples' views.

More philosophical forms of theism don't suffer from that problem. Theism broadly defined amounts to the idea that there is some consciousness or analogous entity or process behind the universe. The root of theism is the same as thesis and theory. It amounts to saying that the universe is or was created by something teleological or with some goal or idea in mind.

This is probably an unfalsifiable idea, so it goes beyond what science an deal with, but it's not impossible to entertain rationally.

Edit:

I also have to point out that non-belief in God does not imply or necessitate rational beliefs. I see a ton of atheists that hold extremely irrational beliefs about all kinds of things. Atheism just says what you don't believe, not what you do.

Nice point.

Science makes the assumption that we are real, and the universe exists.

Perhaps religion makes other assumptions in that space, which science don't mean to solve but rather accept as truth to move on to more practical applications?

The same way one can be educated and smart and think there is inherent meaning in existence. Science has no other function than to further the understanding of how the universe works, while the people of good are content with leaving what the don't understand to the workings of god.

Neither will save humanity from the inevitable heat death of the universe.

I don't have anything particularly insightful to add, but perhaps search the archives of /r/AcademicBiblical and /r/AskBibleScholars for some perspectives (or submit the question).

There is an interesting lecture series by Donald Knuth on this topic which I've listened to multiple times. It's described here [0], but I can't find the recordings. It appears a condensed version was given at Google 10 years later [1]

[0] https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/mit-lectures.html [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPpk-1btGZk

God is the name the educated and smart still give to one possible originator of all this world we live in, it is not important its form and dimensions. With the progress of science and technology, we will be able to replace myth with facts, but the fundamental questions will stay long enough. Big jumps in comprehension or quick annihilation might come from contact with alien civilizations or superior entities so, if a God exists for humans, we better hope it is benign.

I'm an atheist myself, but I know Jon Skeet of stackoverflow fame believes in God and answered that question on his blog 10 years ago:

https://skeetfaith.blogspot.com/2008/04/synopsis-of-my-faith...

The truth is that we _know_ almost nothing. That fact clashes with virtually everything we assume in our everyday lives.

Sure, but what we know, we proved it, and what we don't know doesn't mean "God", it just means "we don't know".

What's your point, here..?

The point is that there's nothing particularly special about belief in God (whatever that might mean). We literally know nothing about almost everything. All believing, all knowledge, is a clash with reality. See for example the Allegory of the Cave, Descartes, etc.

Your premise is wrong - there's no contradiction between God and science.

Belief in a higher power provides a powerful emotional/psychological need. Being more educated will strengthen your critical thinking skills. But if you have a deep need to believe in God, you will.

You should look up some writings on the topic by Freeman Dyson and Sir Roger Penrose.

They are among the most accomplished and respected theoretical physicists in the world, and both are practising Christians.

I’d start with C.S. Lewis’s Miracles for a take by an educated theist. Tim Keller’s talks at Google about the reason for belief cover similar ground.

Firstly, smart people know that we don't know everything, and probably can't, and science, as we have formulated it, can't explain everything. Its often the less smart and the wannabes that go around touting science as the ultimate yardstick for discovering and evaluating the "truth". History of science is ridden with examples, and that pertaining to all things of consequence, of how people kept accidentally discovering newer and newer forces in nature that always existed but are beyond human perception, so who knows what else awaits discovery. Smart people know and acknowledge this but don't say it out loud for it may be misconstrued as propounding esoteric theism etc, resulting in unfavorable branding, because science is in the hands of the mob, just like democracy is, and the mob lacks reason and knowledge.

Secondly, one must not conflate belief in a supernatural entity such as god, or even devil, and practicing religion rife with rituals and dogma. Its a major philosophical blunder that has been happening, again, perpetuated by the ones who don't quite understand these things and are eager to appear science-y.

Thirdly, when these amateurs attempt to disprove existence of god, they are really simply falsifying the assertions made by religions. Look closely. They take specific quotes from the religion they are attacking and show the absurdity of it using logic. This is far from disproving existence of god. They can't disprove because the believers cannot prove, and if you press them about it, the true believers that is, they simply say its their gut feeling, which is fair.

Another thing I find amusing is how the god denouncers challenge the believers to ask their god to perform miracles, like, say, curing a fatally ill person, by praying. This is again their imagination of what god is and what god does, which is basically taken from the religion they are attacking. These lot never cease to amuse me.

Now, does it mean god exists? I personally don't think so (actually I don't care), and I can't justify it beyond saying its just my gut feeling, which is exactly equal and opposite of the believers'. Debating gut feelings is futile. We can go into depths of human mind to answer this, but its a labyrinth we haven't cracked yet; we only have theories, conjectures and corelations.

There are three questions that humans ponder that I find to be incredibly waste of intellect - does god exist, where did universe come from, what is life. I find them wasteful since its my firm belief (ha!) that we will only find more bread crumbs but never reach the destination. I would rather people engage their intellect in improving the real and tangible, aka society.

Personally, I have no problem if a smart person believes in a higher power, but there is nothing redeeming about smart people who follow rituals laid down by religion, and I reevaluate my view about their smartness when I find out. In the edge cases where unquestionably smart people such as scientists, mathematicians, musicians etc are religious, I simply separate their achievements from their philosophical bent, and pity them for the latter, for there is no reason to discard beautiful art and hard science they produced just because they light a candle at midnight and stand on their head for three hours to please their god because their scriptures instruct them and their priest approves it.

I find it profoundly unsatisfying, but this may be a good starting point for further exploration:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-overlapping_magisteria

Interesting, but I think Dawkins has a point: religion does interfere with scientific matters.

Maybe, if one doesn't take the Bible literally, but as a metaphor? But then again, for thousands of years the Church said we should interpret it literally.

>... for thousands of years the Church said we should interpret it literally.

This is completely false.

Source is the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p1s1...

In Sacred Scripture, God speaks to man in a human way. To interpret Scripture correctly, the reader must be attentive to what the human authors truly wanted to affirm, and to what God wanted to reveal to us by their words.

In order to discover the sacred authors' intention, the reader must take into account the conditions of their time and culture, the literary genres in use at that time, and the modes of feeling, speaking and narrating then current. "For the fact is that truth is differently presented and expressed in the various types of historical writing, in prophetical and poetical texts, and in other forms of literary expression."

Nice. When is this document from?

The linked document is from 1992 (commissioned in 1986). However, I don't know when the ideas in this section became part of Catholic teaching. The Catechism assembled ideas rather than created them, they already existed in other sources (biblical or prior writings of the Church or scholars). Thomas Aquinas and others are cited in the footnotes so at least the core of the idea (that the Bible isn't meant to be entirely literally interpreted) within the Church dates back to their writings. However their acceptance (that is, whether the Church declared these ideas official canon or just valid non-heretical ideas), I can't say when that happened.

No, not really. One of most influential early Christian theologians, Origen of Alexandria, wrote about Genesis

  And who is found so ignorant as to suppose that God, as if
  He had been a husbandman, planted trees in paradise, in Eden
  towards the east, and a tree of life in it, i.e., a visible
  and palpable tree of wood, so that any one eating of it with
  bodily teeth should obtain life, and, eating again of
  another tree, should come to the knowledge of good and evil 
  No one, I think, can doubt that the statement that God
  walked in the afternoon in paradise, and that Adam lay hid
  under a tree, is related figuratively in Scripture, that
  some mystical meaning may be indicated by it. The departure
  of Cain from the presence of the Lord will manifestly cause
  a careful reader to inquire what is the presence of God, and
  how any one can go out from it. But not to extend the task
  which we have before us beyond its due limits, it is very
  easy for any one who pleases to gather out of holy Scripture
  what is recorded indeed as having been done, but what
  nevertheless cannot be believed as having reasonably and
  appropriately occurred according to the historical account.

(http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/origen125.html)

More generally see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegorical_interpretations_of..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_views_on_Hades, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_literalism

And by the time of Augustine Christian teaching had become even less literal. See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustine_of_Hippo#Views_and_t...

That said, as compared to the orthodox Christianity that came to dominate, there existed early Christian communities which interpreted biblical stories more literally, communities which interpreted them more allegorically, and communities which interpreted them esoterically. But these mostly died out in the first few centuries.

> Maybe, if one doesn't take the Bible literally, but as a metaphor? But then again, for thousands of years the Church said we should interpret it literally.

No, the canon wasn't even set thousands of years ago (so there wasn't a single accepted Bible to take literally or metaphorically), and Biblical literalism as a doctrine is a minority doctrine in Christianity that is only a few hundred years old, originating within Protestantism, and mostly became a big deal with the explosion of fundamentalism in the US even more recently than that.

The Catholic Church didn't even think laypeople should read the Bible until fairly recently, one of the main concerns being the danger of naive interpretation, which simple literalism would surely qualify as.

While “literalism” might be close enough for rough grouping, I’ll note that few evangelicals or even (traditional Christian) fundamentalists hold to absolute literalism. The Chicago Statement on Inerrancy is the widely accepted standard, and it says:

> inerrancy does not refer to a blind literal interpretation, and that "history must be treated as history, poetry as poetry, hyperbole and metaphor as hyperbole and metaphor, generalization and approximation as what they are, and so forth."

Evangelicals do hold that the Deity means what He says, even about creation in Genesis. There’s a potential for fact/faith conflict there, but it’s not really logically necessary.

Which is to say, Dawkins isn’t a terribly reliable guide to what believers believe.

I would like you to ponder over why you narrowed the issue to one of "God". For me, I tend to wonder why people even narrow down to "religion". When you start thinking of the level of "faith", then you see much more in common with what we normally think of religion and other spheres of life. At that level, you realize that the notion of religion is nothing all that different, and even wonder why it has a special name - because people who cling to any ideology based on faith often will act in ways similar to what you see amongst religious folks.

Examples of other faiths: Environmentalism, capitalism, communism, socialism, all manners of diets. Many beliefs people have about the body and health are rooted in faith type thinking.

Note: This is not to say that if you are an environmentalist, or a capitalist, then you are necessarily indulging in faith based thinking. Just that many (most?) who do are that way. If you have any belief in your brain that you are not willing to abandon, that is faith based thinking. When you look at how such people approach the subset of the world involving their faith (e.g. when confronted with contrarian evidence), you'll see behavior that differs little from religious folks.

Examples of faith based thinking:

"I firmly believe everyone is born with equal mental abilities."

"I believe anything humans have eaten for centuries is not bad for the body. And anything not tried and tested will cause problems to our health."

"I believe as long as one follows X diet they will not have Y health problems."

"I believe that as long as one follows X workout program, they will not have Y health problems."

"I believe if we don't interfere with the ecosystem, then the outcomes will be better for humans who live in this world."

"I believe that without societal pressure, the normal state of a human is good/evil" (substitute specifics for good and evil, like kind/greedy)

"I believe that the most efficient health care is through a free market economy." In fact, based on my observations, most non-experts' views on economics and its impact on society is heavily faith based. People have passionate arguments about it with very little to back what they believe.

I spent over a decade in academia. Trust me: Even though many academics are atheists, they are definitely religious in other arenas of life, and generally are not willing to confront their beliefs. This is true even if you limit to the natural science/engineering departments. From my experience, if many/most scientists are atheists, it is mostly because of their culture (i.e. indirect peer pressure) - similar to how my friends who move to heavily liberal cities tend to become more liberal. It is not because of their training and introspecting about life and the universe. They'll easily become atheists, yet not confront all their other non-fact based beliefs.

So with that all in mind: Smart, educated people can easily believe in God if they are not part of a community that has decided to shun God. They have many other beliefs, and a belief in God is merely one more unsubstantiated belief.

Have you read Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens? His central claim is that the -isms are all just like religion, in that one needs faith to believe they exist. Indeed, he postulates that the way humans have come this far in civilization is by collectively believing in complex ideas.

>Have you read Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens?

I have not, but a friend did recommend it to me earlier this year.

>His central claim is that the -isms are all just like religion, in that one needs faith to believe they exist.

I looked at my comment after reading yours, and realized almost everything I listed is an "ism". That wasn't intentional, but I guess it's also not surprising.

Somewhat on a tangent: In the last so many years, in various conversations, if I'm asked what I think of <insert random -ism>, I tend to respond "I don't believe in it." Or more nuanced "It has some interesting points". The problems I've had with -isms is that people are initially attracted to a particular -ism because something in it rings true for them. But then over time they start pushing things simply because they are part of that -ism - without critical thinking. I'd rather not be pushed into accepting it wholesale. They'll defer a little too much to leaders in that particular movement. Invariably, they'll unnecessarily believe something that is espoused by that ideology but may be in conflict with the world.

Along the same lines, I'm a bit wary of making any ideology part of my identity. As an example, many of my beliefs may coincide with what in the US is called liberalism, but I will never view myself as a liberal. It's totally fine to be liberal in some ways and not in others. I have my own identity, and it is influenced by many ideologies - but I don't want to add things to my identity just because I am partial to that ideology. And I definitely don't care if someone points out that some particular view I hold is not consistent with liberalism.

If you've read the book Influence by Cialdini, this is essentially guarding against the consistency principle.

You don't in my experience.

There are many smart religious people out there, but personally I couldn't reconcile it.

Same could be said from the other perspective I suppose. It is difficult to understand why others think the way they do, because the only thing we can observe is how they appear to be, while we have full access to the internet workings of our head.

>Same could be said from the other perspective I suppose.

Sorta. I used to be religious so I'm well aware of "the other perspective" & how persuasive it can be.

It's kinda difficult to contrast the two perspectives without it coming across as condescending so I'll just leave it at that.

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