# Are there any super smart people who believe in God? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [October 10, 2007, 5:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-super-smart-people-who-believe-in-god/422233 "2007-10-10T17:06:39Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 6
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2007, 3:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-super-smart-people-who-believe-in-god/422233/101 "2007-10-11T15:25:34Z")
Since the question of Einstein’s beliefs has come up, those who are interested may want to listen to the episode of the NPR program “Speaking of Faith” about [Einstein’s God](http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/einstein/index.shtml), which includes interviews with Freeman Dyson and Paul Davies. I think you can download or listen for free at the link provided. ---
**Author:** ![Wallenstein](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/b5a626/32.png) [@Wallenstein](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wallenstein)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2007, 3:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-super-smart-people-who-believe-in-god/422233/102 "2007-10-11T15:26:58Z")
[QUOTE=Larry Borgia] [John Polkinghorne](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Polkinghorne) is a pretty interesting guy. [/QUOTE] My mum works with John Polkinghorn at the [Faraday Institute](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_Institute) in Cambridge. There are some v. clever people on the Advisory Board, incl. 7 members of Royal Society and three who have been knighted for their academic work. Prof. Sir Brian Heap FRS Prof. Jocelyn Bell Burnell CBE FRS Prof. R.J. Berry Revd Dr Geoffrey Cook Prof. J.S.Hill Gaston Prof. Sir John T. Houghton FRS Prof. Colin Humphreys FREng Prof. Alister McGrath Prof. Gerard Nienhuis Revd. Dr John Polkinghorne KBE FRS Prof. Eric Priest FRS Prof. Colin Russell FRSC Prof. Roger Trigg ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2007, 3:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-super-smart-people-who-believe-in-god/422233/103 "2007-10-11T15:46:35Z")
[QUOTE=Liberal] I think you might be digging in your heels just a bit over a rather vaporous point. No one can be said by anyone else to hold this or that exact belief, since there are as many perspectives on belief as there are believers. But to continue arguing in the direction that these are a bunch of atheists musing over religion is going to become increasingly difficult to defend. [/QUOTE] I haven’t made that, or any such assertion. I was just asking for evidence to support your statements. ---
**Author:** ![dangermom](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e274bd/32.png) [@dangermom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dangermom)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2007, 4:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-super-smart-people-who-believe-in-god/422233/104 "2007-10-11T16:57:51Z")
Has anyone yet mentioned Donald Knuth, the eminent computer scientist? One of my husband’s favorite books is [this one](http://www.amazon.com/Things-Computer-Scientist-Language-Information/dp/157586326X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_6/103-8922119-6568617?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1192121355&sr=8-6), a series of MIT lectures in which he talks a bit about his faith and his personal project of translating the NT himself. **Wee Bairn** , you might try that book, as well as the Collins one I linked to before, if you’re looking for opinions. As for less eminent people of faith, I do know quite a few very intelligent people who are also devout. Some are adult converts to religion, some were raised in a faith. But that’s just personal experience. ---
**Author:** ![Slypork](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9fc29f/32.png) [@Slypork](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slypork)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2007, 5:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-super-smart-people-who-believe-in-god/422233/105 "2007-10-11T17:33:13Z")
Does anyone know if the smartest person in the world believes in God? I’m referring, of course, to the almighty Cecil. Getting an answer to that would shut up all of the atheist/theist threads on this board. ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2007, 7:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-super-smart-people-who-believe-in-god/422233/106 "2007-10-11T19:28:22Z")
[QUOTE=Captain Amazing] I haven’t made that, or any such assertion. I was just asking for evidence to support your statements. [/QUOTE] Well then, you have what you asked for. As I said in the original post, you can feel free to Google and/or Wiki the names. ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2007, 8:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-super-smart-people-who-believe-in-god/422233/107 "2007-10-11T20:46:18Z")
[QUOTE=Liberal] Well then, you have what you asked for. As I said in the original post, you can feel free to Google and/or Wiki the names. [/QUOTE] I’ve been trying, but I’ve been unsuccessful for pretty much everybody but Hartshorne. If you don’t have evidence for your statement, that’s fine, but please don’t snap at me for asking for it. ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2007, 11:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-super-smart-people-who-believe-in-god/422233/108 "2007-10-11T23:47:47Z")
[QUOTE=erie774] Does anyone know if the smartest person in the world believes in God? I’m referring, of course, to the almighty Cecil. Getting an answer to that would shut up all of the atheist/theist threads on this board. [/QUOTE] …only to open up heated debate over whether super smart people believe in Cecil. ---
**Author:** ![JRDelirious](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jrdelirious/32/9531_2.png) [@JRDelirious](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JRDelirious)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2007, 12:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-super-smart-people-who-believe-in-god/422233/109 "2007-10-12T00:40:54Z")
[QUOTE=Wee Bairn] Gotcha, and I intend on looking into a couple of the ones mentioned, but I was trying to weed out the ones who turned to religion after surviving cancer or something as opposed to a scientific based reason. [/QUOTE] Well, but then that would almost by definition be a very unusual thing, arriving at belief in God through “a scientific based reason”, wouldn’t it? We would be again potentially drifting into a debate, over whether the believer intellectual can or should be expected to “justify” the belief upon scientific merit. As to whether any the believer-intellectuals ever actually set to put forth a scholarly apologetics for their belief, I have this feeling (totally unsupported, merely a hunch) that quite a few of them would be of a type of liberalish “works for me, not gonna shove it at you” faith, who would ask, why do that? (And we’d also risk accusations of no-true-Scotmanism if we were to cull out fields of scholarship as not being hard science enough, and types of personal religious-experiential reasons as not being scholarly enough. ) ---
**Author:** ![Sophistry\_and\_Illusion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b3f665/32.png) [@Sophistry\_and\_Illusion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sophistry_and_Illusion)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2007, 2:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-super-smart-people-who-believe-in-god/422233/110 "2007-10-12T02:11:32Z")
[QUOTE=Captain Amazing] I’ve been trying, but I’ve been unsuccessful for pretty much everybody but Hartshorne. If you don’t have evidence for your statement, that’s fine, but please don’t snap at me for asking for it. [/QUOTE] And Hartshorne’s god is pretty half-assed. He’s not omnipotent, or omniscient, etc. I wouldn’t be surprised if most Xtians and other monotheists would refuse to regard Hartshorne’s deity as God. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2007, 2:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-super-smart-people-who-believe-in-god/422233/111 "2007-10-12T02:21:20Z")
[QUOTE=bordelond] … I think the answer to that general question is “No, no noted brilliant mind (in recent times) has ever claimed to have proven factually that God exists.” [/QUOTE] I’m not sure about “proven” or “factually,” but those interested in a person who has moved from atheism to some sort of belief, (apparently deist), that the person considers grounded in reason might check out Antony Flew. ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2007, 11:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-super-smart-people-who-believe-in-god/422233/112 "2007-10-12T11:26:50Z")
[QUOTE=Captain Amazing] I’ve been trying, but I’ve been unsuccessful for pretty much everybody but Hartshorne. If you don’t have evidence for your statement, that’s fine, but please don’t snap at me for asking for it. [/QUOTE] Selecting a name from the list at random, Douglas R. McGaughey, a Google search takes one to his [curriculum vitae](http://www.willamette.edu/~dmcgaugh/Vita0107.pdf), where one learns that he is an “Ordained Elder and Full Member of the Troy Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church”. Maybe you could try harder. ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2007, 11:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-super-smart-people-who-believe-in-god/422233/113 "2007-10-12T11:37:29Z")
[QUOTE=Sophistry and Illusion] And Hartshorne’s god is pretty half-assed. He’s not omnipotent, or omniscient, etc. I wouldn’t be surprised if most Xtians and other monotheists would refuse to regard Hartshorne’s deity as God. [/QUOTE] I’m afraid you’ve misread or misinterpreted Hartshorne. As a [process theologist](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_theology), he thinks God is not omnipotent _only in the sense of not being coercive_. He believes that God can (and will) withhold His power for the purpose of forebearance. He also believes that reality is experiential in nature, and that God is panentheistic, but that His abstract elements remain eternally unchanged. And as an “Xian”, I completely agree with him. With respect to [omniscience](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hartshorne/), Hartshorne believes that God is omniscient _in the sense of knowing all that can be known_. God does not know, for example, the integer square root of two. And frankly, I would be weirded out if He did. ---
**Author:** ![bordelond](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bordelond/32/150_2.png) [@bordelond](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bordelond)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2007, 7:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-super-smart-people-who-believe-in-god/422233/114 "2007-10-12T19:15:26Z")
[QUOTE=tomndebb] I’m not sure about “proven” or “factually,” but those interested in a person who has moved from atheism to some sort of belief, (apparently deist), that the person considers grounded in reason might check out Antony Flew. [/QUOTE] I wonder if Flew will fulfill the OP’s criteria. Well, in any case, there’s [a well-fleshed-out Wikipedia article on Flew](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Flew), from which I quote below: > [@](#): > > In _God and Philosophy_ (1966) and _The Presumption of Atheism_ (1984), Flew earned his fame by arguing that one should presuppose atheism until evidence of a God surfaces. He still stands behind this evidentialist approach, though he has been persuaded in recent years that such evidence exists, and his current position appears to be deism. In a December 2004 interview he said: _I’m thinking of a God very different from the God of the Christian and far and away from the God of Islam, because both are depicted as omnipotent Oriental despots, cosmic Saddam Husseins._[4] > > On several occasions, apparently starting in 2001, rumours circulated claiming that Flew had converted from atheism. Flew refuted these rumours on the Secular Web website.[5] In 2003, he signed the Humanist Manifesto III. > > In December 2004, an interview with Flew conducted by Flew’s friend and philosophical adversary Gary Habermas was published in Biola University’s Philosophia Christi, with the title _Atheist Becomes Theist - Exclusive Interview with Former Atheist Antony Flew_. Flew agreed to this title.[1] **According to the introduction, Flew informed Habermas in January 2004 that he had become a deist,[1] and the interview took place shortly thereafter**. Then the text was amended by both participants over the following months prior to publication. **In the article Flew states that he has left his long-standing espousal of atheism by endorsing a deism of the sort that Thomas Jefferson advocated** (_“While reason, mainly in the form of arguments to design, assures us that there is a God, there is no room either for any supernatural revelation of that God or for any transactions between that God and individual human beings.”_). Flew states that certain philosophical and scientific considerations had caused him to rethink his lifelong support of atheism. > > **Flew’s conception of God as explained in the interview is limited to the idea of God as a first cause, and he rejects the ideas of an afterlife, of God as the source of good (he explicitly states that God has created “a lot of” evil), and of the resurrection of Jesus as an historical fact.** He is particularly hostile to Islam, and says it is "best described in a Marxian way as the uniting and justifying ideology of Arab imperialism.[1] > > Flew has subsequently made contradictory statements to those given in the Habermas interview as justification for his endorsing of deism. In October 2004 (before the December publication of the Flew-Habermas interview), a letter written to Richard Carrier of the Secular Web, stated that he was a deist and also said that _“I think we need here a fundamental distinction between the God of Aristotle or Spinoza and the Gods of the Christian and the Islamic Revelations.”_.[6] Flew also said: _My one and only piece of relevant evidence [for an Aristotelian God] is the apparent impossibility of providing a naturalistic theory of the origin from DNA of the first reproducing species … [In fact] the only reason which I have for beginning to think of believing in a First Cause god is the impossibility of providing a naturalistic account of the origin of the first reproducing organisms_". > > In another letter to Carrier of 29 December 2004 Flew went on to retract his statement _“a deity or a ‘super-intelligence’ [is] the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature.” “I now realize that I have made a fool of myself by believing that there were no presentable theories of the development of inanimate matter up to the first living creature capable of reproduction.”_ wrote Flew. He blames his error on being “misled” by Richard Dawkins, claiming Dawkins _“has never been reported as referring to any promising work on the production of a theory of the development of living matter”._ (Dawkins has - in “Evolutionary Chemistry: Life in a Test Tube,” published in the 21 May 1992 issue of Nature, with Laurence Hurst) The work of physicist Gerald Schroeder had been influential in Flew’s new belief, but Flew admitted to Carrier that he had not read any of the scientific critiques of Schroeder that Carrier referred him to. > > When asked in December 2004 by Duncan Crary of Humanist Network News if he still stood by the argument presented in _The Presumption of Atheism_, Flew replied he did but he also restated his position as deist: _“I’m quite happy to believe in an inoffensive inactive god”_. When asked by Crary whether or not he has kept up with the most recent science and theology, he responded with _“Certainly not”_, stating that there is simply too much to keep up with. Flew also denied that there was any truth to the rumours of 2001 and 2003 that he had abandoned his atheism or converted to Christianity.[7] > > … > > In an interview with Joan Bakewell for BBC Radio 4 in March 2005, Flew … restated his deism, with the usual provisos that his God is not the God of any of the revealed religions:[9] > > > [@](#): > > > > _Q And certainly in America where you’ve been to lecture… > > A Oh America, this is a very real phenomenon - oh yes. Part of Bush’s second election success is due to this. And the unbelievers are absolutely furious, not believing that anyone with any intelligence could be anything but a Democratic voter. > > Q What view do you take of what is happening in America - where presumably you’re being hailed now as … one of them? > > A Well, too bad (laughs). I’m not ‘one of them’._ > > **In late 2006, Flew joined 11 other academics in urging the British government to teach intelligent design in the public schools**. Interesting fellow. Thanks for mentioning his name, **tomndebb**. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-super-smart-people-who-believe-in-god/422233.md?page=5)