SDMB members and politicians excluded. People like Stephen Hawking and the like. I was having a similar discussion with someone and I came up with the argument that you can be a genius and believe in a higher being, and since then I was wondering if my argument was correct.
You mention Hawking. In a lecuture Hawking once pointed out that Einstein was unhappy about randomness in nature and liked to say “God does not play dice with the universe.”
Well, Einstein as mentioned, what about the giants upon whose shoulders he stood? Neuton.
That was in reference to quantum mechanics, and (more importantly in this context) it was a metaphor. I myself say “Thank God” pretty often, and I’m as hard an atheist as anyone except SentientMeat.
Einstein was most probably an agnostic. He’s been misrepresented as having a belief in a Judeo-Christian God. He addressed this head on while alive and made it clear he did not believe in the Judeo-Christian construct of a deity. He was not an atheist but he was hardly a theist.
I don’t know exactly how to measure super smart, but at two different universities, I was taught by priests who were believers and who were far, far better educated and well-read than I ever will be. Do they qualify?
Incidentally, being a genius doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve had the eternal truths revealed to you. Often, it simply means that you’re bright and disciplined, you had an older, intelligent individual who saw to and encouraged your early education/training, and you have put in 10,000+ hours of study/practice in the field in which you are considered a genius. It doesn’t automatically mean that you have an overarching insight into the full nature of the cosmos that is denied lesser mortals. In many ways, the “super smart” are very ordinary, and, not surprisingly, have a wide range of beliefs.
Except Einstein didn’t believe in God as most people use the term. When he used “God” he meant the sum of all physical laws in the universe. He wasn’t even really a deist, and he certainly didn’t believe that God was any sort of conscious entity or that God had a personal interest in human beings, or that human beings had souls. He used the word “God” in the same way people might use “Mother Nature”. That doesn’t mean they believe that there exists a literal nature goddess.
No. Einstein, when point blank asked the question by my grandfather, said he believed in God, but not an anthropomorphic God. He then asked my grandfather if he know what “anthropomorphic” meant (he did).
In my humble opinion, anyone advancing a statement that Joe Q. Genius believed X should be prepared to offer a cite indicating it.
Now, I don’t believe that we my infer theism from the single quote, “God doesn’t play dice with the universe,” but the people confidently attributing specific beliefs to Einstein should provide the sources they are relying upon.
sources taken from Wikipedia, primary source, the man himself (Eisntein not John Q. Genius):
His words,
“My position concerning God is that of an agnostic. I am convinced that a vivid consciousness of the primary importance of moral principles for the betterment and ennoblement of life does not need the idea of a law-giver, especially a law-giver who works on the basis of reward and punishment.”
(emphasis added)
see Albert Einstein in a letter to M. Berkowitz, October 25, 1950; Einstein Archive 59-215; from Alice Calaprice, ed., The Expanded Quotable Einstein, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 216.
Again his words,
“It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”
see Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman (eds) (1981). Albert Einstein, The Human Side. Princeton University Press, 43.
or were you looking for a cite more along the lines of Reality Chuck’s “according to my granddaddy”
The final straw causing me to stop reading the column by Marilyn Vos Savant - the self proclaimed smartest human ever or somesuch - was when she responded to a question asking about theism saying something like, “90%+ people believe in some sort of deity, surely that many people can’t all be wrong.”
Of course, to my mind that was yet another instance in which the substance of her column seemed to contradict her claimed intelligence…
It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. (Albert Einstein, 1954, The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, Princeton University Press)
Edited ; Damn, beat to the quote again!
I took that quote to mean she doesn’t have the balls to piss off all of the Christians who read Parade magazine…
And as an aside, shouldn’t the smartest person ever be doing something more important with their life than a Q&A column in Parade magazine?
Alvin Plantinga
I assume the OP is asking about modern people, as religion is less of an expectation today than it was in earlier times. Somebody has, however, already pointed out Newton, who was much more religious than the average Enlightenment scholar.
as to the OP and not the hijack:
Frederick Buechner
Paul Tillich
Reinhold Niebuhr
C.S. Lewis
Freeman Dyson
well, how about Robert Bakker? I find it interesting that a guy who revolutionized paleontology is also a Pentecostal preacher. He apparently doesn’t find anything at all inconsistent about being an Evangelical Christian as well as a scientist studying dinosaurs. The wiki article says he’s a strong proponent of “theistic evolution”, which the uncharitable might observe as a kind of intellectual pretzel which is required if you are going to try to combine religious faith with the pursuit of science. A debate between Doctors Bakker and Richard Dawkins would be interesting.
If we’re going to do dead people who are still recent enough for public non-belief to be an accepted norm, add Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
Most of these people seem to be those who were trained as ministers and the like, so my (new) theory that no one (or very very few) who was brought up as a non-believer has gone out into the world and later decided that there was a creator, washed up famous people excluded (I’m looking at you Stephen Baldwin).