Back in the early 1980’s, Linus Pauling was once a guest on the Phil Donohue Show. It’s an interview that I have never forgotten, and I fervently hope that someday I will somehow be able to obtain a copy of it. It is the only time I have ever seen Donohue humbled. At one point in the interview Donohue asked Pauling if he believed in God. Pauling didn’t miss a beat. He simply looked down, shook his head slightly, and said “no”. Half the audience literally gasped, and there was dead silence for several seconds afterwards. Donohue finally composed himself and then asked Pauling “don’t you think it’s cowardly not to believe in a supreme power”? To which Pauling replied “not at all”. “I think it is more cowardly to believe in God”.
I don’t even understand what Donohue was saying. In what manner could it be cowardly not to believe in a supreme power? I can’t see how such a position could be reflective of fear.
Well, I guess the idea is that someone would sincerely believe in God, but be afraid of his wrath or some such, and thus go into a state of cognitive dissonance where they deny his existence in order to achieve a superficial happiness. But this is such an odd view of how atheists think…
I believe in God.
Yeah, I hear there’s this ultra-smart (like, he knows everything) being who believes in God as well.
In another thread someone had at me with Blaise Pascal who most certainly counts as a Big Brain sort of person.
Not only did he come to religion of his own accord as an adult he became a leading religious philosopher and to this day his mathematics and philosophies are taught in schools.
Right, but of course almost all people anyone would name (geniuses or not) outside of relatively modern times were theists of one stripe or another.
Near as I can tell Pascal was not an especially religious man at all till around age 23. At that point in his life his father became very ill and apparently some priests came by to care for him who impressed him greatly and led to his becoming extremely religious.
I suppose in that day and age he probably had some religious upbringing as a matter of course but his “coming to God” (my phrase and for lack of a better one) only seemed to occur of his on volition.
The ultimate irony I think would be if God himself turned out to be an atheist.
From a biography of Pauling:
From wiki:"*By his own definition, Einstein was a deeply religious person.[54] [55] He published a paper in Nature in 1940 entitled Science and Religion which gave his views on the subject.[56] In this he says that: “a person who is religiously enlightened appears to me to be one who has, to the best of his ability, liberated himself from the fetters of his selfish desires and is preoccupied with thoughts, feelings and aspirations to which he clings because of their super-personal value … regardless of whether any attempt is made to unite this content with a Divine Being, for otherwise it would not be possible to count Buddha and Spinoza as religious personalities. Accordingly a religious person is devout in the sense that he has no doubt of the significance of those super-personal objects and goals which neither require nor are capable of rational foundation … In this sense religion is the age-old endeavour of mankind to become clearly and completely conscious of these values and goals, and constantly to strengthen their effects.” He argues that conflicts between science and religion “have all sprung from fatal errors.” However “even though the realms of religion and science in themselves are clearly marked off from each other” there are “strong reciprocal relationships and dependencies” … “science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind … a legitimate conflict between science and religion cannot exist.” However he makes it clear that he does not believe in a personal God, and suggests that “neither the rule of human nor Divine Will exists as an independent cause of natural events. To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with natural events could never be refuted … by science, for [it] can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot.” (Einstein 1940, pp. 605–607)
Einstein championed the work of psychologist Paul Diel,[57] which posited a biological and psychological, rather than theological or sociological, basis for morality.[58]
The most thorough exploration of Einstein’s views on religion was made by his friend Max Jammer in the 1999 book Einstein and Religion.[59]"
*
I’d have to say it sounds more like Einstein was more of a Deist than anything else.
I second Diogenes the Cynic’s suggestion of Isaac Newton, a deeply religous man, and possibly the greatest scientist and genius of all time.
The argument could run that people believe in a god because they think it will protect them and it assuages their fear. I am not advocating that, I’m just suggesting it as something I’ve heard and which might be what Pauling was thinking.
Yeah, and even without believing it, I might snap such a thing in response were I in Pauling’s position; my bafflement, though, is at whatever Donohue was originally thinking, in positing that it’s the atheists who are cowardly.
(Maybe all men are innately cowards, but believing in God, by assuaging that fear, removes the cowardice, which atheists are left stuck with…)
I don’t know much about Deism. However, having had a quick read on Wiki to get a feel for it, I wonder why you say this. For example, Wiki says these are common elements of Deism:
[list=-]
[li]God exists and created the universe. [/li][li]God wants human beings to behave morally[/li][li]Human beings have souls that survive death; that is, there is an afterlife[/li][li]In the afterlife, God will reward moral behavior and punish immoral behavior.[/list][/li]
Yet at least what you quote of Einstein doesn’t seem to me to suggest that the existence of a god, or souls, or afterlife, or what a god might want humans to do formed any party of his thought.
Well, honestly, you have a deeply religous man with no religion. 
Hard to pin down.
From your same wiki aricle: "*Deism is a religious philosophy and movement that derives the existence and nature of God from reason and personal experience, in contrast to theism (with religions like Judaism, Christianity and Islam) which relies on revelation in sacred scriptures or the testimony of other people. Deism became prominent in Great Britain, France, and the United States in the 17th and 18th centuries and continues to this day in the form of Classical Deism and Modern Deism.
Deists typically reject supernatural events (prophecy, miracles) and tend to assert that God does not interfere with human life and the laws of the universe. Deists commonly respect divine revelation prominent in organized religion, along with holy books as conveying the reasoning and personal experience of others…Critical and constructive Deism
The concept of Deism covers a wide variety of positions on a wide variety of religious issues. Following Sir Leslie Stephen’s English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, most commentators agree that two features constituted the core of Deism:
* The rejection of revealed religion — this was the critical aspect of Deism.
* The belief that reason, not faith, leads us to certain basic religious truths — this was the positive or constructive aspect of Deism.
Deist authors advocated a combination of both critical and constructive elements in proportions and emphases that varied from author to author.
Critical elements of Deist thought included:
* Rejection of all religions based on books that claim to contain the revealed word of God.
* Rejection of reports of miracles, prophecies and religious "mysteries".
* Rejection of the Genesis account of creation and the doctrine of original sin, along with all similar beliefs.
* Rejection of Judaism, Christianity, Islam and other religious belief"*
Deism isn’t spot on, I’ll admit. But what do you suggest?
How about a more specific version of the question:
How many Nobel Prize Winners believe in God?
This restricts it to people alive since 1901, when they started awarding these prizes. It puts a limit on the number of people (772 people, 739 men and 39 women), and Nobel Prize Laureates are in general considered “super smart people”.
We could consider only the ‘hard science’ Nobel awards (Physics, Chemistry, & Medicine) and separate out the ‘softer’ ones (Peace, Literature, Economics), which are awarded on more subjective grounds. That will probably cut the number of people about in half.
But I don’t know where to research this, other than by looking up all the people involved. The website http://nobelprize.org gives the names, at least.
Stuffed if I know. But I’m not sure that Deism is it, because of Einstein’s apparent indifference to the whole god thing.
I’ve heard Einstein’s beliefs described as pantheism.
I think this is a myth. The ancient greeks reasoned that the earth was roughly spherical (and gave a good estimate of its size), and in Europe at least this idea was never seriously challenged.
Also, this is the kind of thing people say when they want to believe that a modern day area of science might be overturned in the future. The truth is, there’s a big difference between people once, intuitively, believing the world was flat (whether these people were clever or otherwise) and modern-day science where for a theory to gain acceptance it must make many, very accurate predictions and be repeatable.
In answer to the OP:
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<slightly off-topic>
If you go to the Answers in Genesis site (a creationist organisation), they count many doctor-level scientists among their membership, some quite renowned.
I wonder what it must be like, being a creationist doctor in Geology. Their explanations are so twisted to me, and they utilise every logical fallacy in the book, and yet they’ve reached a level of education where they should be well aware of such reasoning errors. -
<Slightly more off-topic>
Creationist organisations also count many of the pioneers of science among their membership – e.g. Newton, Galileo.
But there are a couple of things to say here. Firstly, many of these people lived in times where an atheist could be defined to be a person whos head is not attached to his body (as Galileo was obviously aware).
This also meant that no-one had a chance to openly debate, question and think about the validity of religion itself.
Secondly, as pioneers of science, unsurprisingly they didn’t apply the scientific method entirely rigorously, and believed in some of the myths of their time. Newton for example, I think wrote more about the philosopher’s stone (alchemy) than about optics or gravitation.
William F. Buckley, Jr. is a a pretty smart guy who is also a Roman Catholic.