Atheists vs theists: How come there are smart people on both sides?

Great Debates
1

There are people with high IQ’s on both sides of the issue: belief in God vs lack of belief in God

What does it mean to be smart? Given a question and certain inputs, you get to decide on the answer to the question. And a smart person would get it right more times than he gets it wrong.

That is, you would assume that two smart people, facing the same question and given the same inputs would come to the same conclusion most of the time.
(and one of the possible conclusions is “There is insufficient input to decide on the answer”)

Now, if we focus on the question about the existence of God (not the Christian God, just a general creator of the universe), and we use as input all that we have learned throughout out lives, how can it be that intelligent people have arrived at drastically different answers to this question?
I assume that most intelligent and well-educated people have learned similar things concerning this issue. So the “inputs” are the same. I would argue that for every SentientMeat, we could find an equally intelligent person who has learned the same things about the universe, but who has decided, unlike SentientMeat, that God exists.

Or, for any intelligent philosopher who believes in God, we could find an equally intelligent person with the same philosophical training that does not believe in God. (and of course we could find one who is an agnostic)

Same inputs, same question, different answers. Why is that?

Is it simply a matter of preference?

Or, have the people who believe in God had some personal experiences (like mini-epiphanies) that the people who don’t believe in God haven’t had? If this is the case, then of course the “inputs” to the problem are different for different people, so it would not be surprising that the answers are different.

However, I find it hard to believe that the mini-epiphanies are the only reason for two equally intelligent people with similar education to arrive at different conclusions regarding the existence of God.

What say you?

2

One quick point: IQ test do not necessarily correlate to intelligence. There are people who are simply good at IQ tests.

You raise an interesting point about smart people examining the same evidence. if this were a mathematical proof, or a chess position we would expect agreement (or at least reasons why not).

But there is no evidence for any religion, just people saying they have had personal experiences.
In addition, religions do fade away. Who builds Pyramids to Ra, the Sun God, any more?

Consider the Bible. The first part is used by Judaism, who state with certainty that Jesus is not the Messiah. Both parts are taken as gospel by Christians, who worship Jesus as God.
At least one religion must be wrong.

There are numerous other splits, even within most religions.

I realise that religion is a great comfort to many people, but there is also massive belief in alien abduction, dowsing, homoepathy, psychics, faked Moon landings and that there really is a Nigerian businessman who wants to put millions into your bank account.
Belief is not evidence.

3

I’d say it’s evidence that religious beliefs are unrelated to intelligence. Religion is usually a matter of faith not reason.

4

Whence does this faith come? As I said, same inputs, different answer. Why?

5

I think some people feel the need for God, and for spirituality, and this need is not correlated to intelligence. Intelligence lets you argue more effectively for a position, but doesn’t determine what that position is.

6

We are born. We die. Many people wish there was more to it.

7

And not only that, but there are also very smart people who have gone from not believing to believing in God, and others who vice versa.

I admit, it’s puzzling. But maybe we’re just placing too much importance on intelligence. After all, there are people with high IQ’s on both sides of all sorts of issues (including, for example, just about every presidential election). Smarter people aren’t necessarily happier or better at life.

And there are different kinds of intelligence, and different habits of thinking or ways of approaching the big questions. A person may be a brilliant scientist, yet he may be below average at knowing what makes a great novel or symphony, or how to make friends or be a good parent, or what’s what when it comes to religion. And trying to apply the scientific method doesn’t necessarily help matters.

8

Let me put it this way: do stupid people always agree?
Just as there are often many “wrong” ideas that a stupid person could hold, there are, in some cases, more than one “right”. Based on the evidence, a person could decide that a religion is right - or wrong. There’s not enough evidence on either side for someone to claim total, complete knowledge of what is right.

People don’t all have the same view because a) while, when they were brought up, and still today via the media, they’re exposed to the “major” evidence for all sides of the religious debate, for the most part a person’s expiriences are their own - perhaps if I had had a similar life to Siege (for example) I may have become religious, or one like **Der Trihs’ ** and become an athiest. And b) people don’t have the same personality - a person may be more able to trust in faith, or may consider rationality about such things to be paramount.

9

I hope you don’t carry this logic over into the realm of politics or economics ands simply believe (as some partisans do) that their opponents are mentally deficient or deranged?

Actually, the answer probably lies in the issue of “given the same inputs.” Very few people experience life in exactly the same way. There are any number of experiences that shape the perception of “inputs” that vary pretty much by person, so it is unlikely that any two people actually perceive the “same inputs.”

We have examples of people who were raised as believers who, having experienced life, came the the conclusion that there was nothing in which to believe. We also have examples of persons who actively denied the possibility of belief who encountered an experience that caused them to put aside their unbelief and accept belief.

If it were merely a matter of examining neutral facts and arriving at a concluion, you might have had a prayer* of getting all the “smart” people on one side of the line, but once personal experience is factored, it is no longer a matter of “smart” people lining up to join one side or the other.
(I know. I know.)

10

I don’t think that you can expect that intelligent people will come up with similar answers, given the same question. Take politics, for example. There are many intelligent people with similar backgrounds that are at opposite ends of the political spectrum.

The problem comes from different types of reasoning. In mathematics, for instance, one can follow clear, logical steps that always lead to the same conclusion, no matter who performs them. In physics, laboratory results either confirm or dismiss hypotheses in an objective manner. In other words, both the mathematician and the physicist have objective ways to dispose of falsehoods. When a statement arises that cannot currently be disproven because of certain limitations (for example, the lack of funds to build a particle accelerator the size of Texas), disagreements erupt.

Politics has its own method of weeding out its untruths. To find “untrue” poltical ideas, one can watch the success or failure of societies based on certain principles. For instance, we can look at the state of the world post-WWII and say that the ideas behind fascism were untrue. However, since there are countless untried ways to organize a society, reasonable people have room to differ politically.

For religious and/or moral beliefs, finding untruths is even trickier. How does one grade the rightness or wrongness of a religious idea objectively? As far as I can tell, the only way to grade a religion objectively is by whether or not its adherents remain sane when confronted by a society that doesn’t share their particular delusions. This, again, means that reasonable people have lots of room in which to disagree and argue with each other.

In short: when there is no easy, indisputable way to test an idea, intelligent people will tend to argue about it.

11

Interesting question. I think spiritual beliefs or even having no spiritual beliefs fulfills an emotional need as well as a being an intellectual challenge. When examining inconclusive evidence part of which is largely subjective and personal, individuals often choose based on emotional influences. Our subjective experiences continue to influence us. So we have people whose beliefs change in both directions.

12

Quite a few people have brought up politics in this thread, but I think it is not a good example.

Most times people disagree about politics, not because they both agree on an end goal and then disagree on how to get there, but because they disagree on the end goal itself (and the goal is a function of preferences)

For example, some people think that society must help the poor, not because it is the most efficient solution for society, but because that’s the society they prefer to live in. So, it’s an issue of preference, and not of finding the optimal solution to an agreed problem.

And many times, politicians disguise preference-based decisions behind optimality arguments. For example, several right-wing people want lower taxes as a matter of principle, but try to promote cutting taxes using arguments that it is actually useful for the economy, making it seems as if people are arguing about different solutions for the same end goal (the economy), when in fact they are promoting they own end goal (lower taxes)

So, the comparison to politics is not a good one, I think, because in religion people are trying to answer the same question, using mostly similar inputs.

I do agree with several posters that different people have different life experiences, and that changes everyone’s “inputs”, but in what way do my life experiences affect the way I will answer the question “Is there a God”, unless these are small epiphanies or mystical experiences of some sort?

13

They may well be.

However, if you do not like a political analogy, how about a psychological one?

At early ages, infants either do or do not learn to depend on the adults around them to provide for their basic needs. When we were taking our pre-adoption classes, it was pointed out that a parent who anticipates an infant’s every need can “short circuit” some (generally good) learned responses because the child never has to cry to get assistance and comes to believe that everything that is needed will arrive when it is supposed to without any action on the part of the child. Running into the “real world,” where most needs are only satisfied when one seeks to have them met can be a bad shock. Alternatively, the child who can scream for hours with no response from an inattentive parent may develop the belief that no one else will ever make an effort to satisfy his or her needs, and may develop psychological defenses to reject all persons throughout the rest of his or her life. Most babies, of course, do not suffer such extremes and develop a generally healthy belief that if they ask to have a need met, someone will attempt to satisfy that need. Depending on how far from some golden, unattainable mean the child’s experiences are, the child will suffer to greater or lesser degrees the misunderstanding of never knowing why people do not respond to their (never uttered) requests, or, to greater or lesser degrees, will suffer the misunderstanding of believing that no one will respond even if they ask.

Move that infant through childhood and into adulthood, from the starting point of their personal worldview and shape them with all the subsequent experiences that they encounter, and you come rather soon to the knowledge that no two people really ever experience the same things in the same way.
No two children are born into the same family. The first child arrives to create a family of three. The second child joins the family as the younger child, making it four, and so on. (If you quibble about twins, I’ll smack you.)

Belief in that which is beyond their own experiences will very much be shaped by the experiences they do have.

14

I don’t know if you are speaking of yourself specifically or people in general.

Some people are more easily “molded” than others. They are brought up with certain beliefs and those beliefs stay with them for a lifetime. Others may find themselves susceptable to the teachings of a group that they have become friends with. Some have personality disorders or are mentally ill. Still others experience epiphanies and mystical experiences that are stimulated by outside factors such as drugs and machines. (Google: “Dr. Persinger” and “religious experience.”)

There are people who believe that science and the mystical are not contradictory and that eventually science will discover a way to explain what is far beyond our grasp now.

Many smart people are able to believe in God because they can acknowledge that they don’t yet know everything and they choose to remain open-minded.

In my own self-righteous opinion :smack: , I think that some of the people who do believe in God have in mind some One much smaller and pettier than what science may begin to uncover.

15

Because great minds do not necessarily think alike. Some of the most brilliant people I have ever known were Marxists, and others of the most brilliant people I have ever known were Libertarians.

16

I’ll suggest that the reason is because agnostics are basically correct so far: there is no commonly available reason to believe that compells belief once you are intelligent enough to reason it out.

Hence, the issue is left in the same realm as the observation that some people enjoy baseball and others don’t. There is no compelling reason to find baseball deeply meaningful and exciting. Some do, others don’t, and it has nothing to do with intelligence whether one does or doesn’t. It may well have to do with life experiences, but as Polerius notes, not in a directly evidential manner, but rather a subjective manner: the way which we in particular experience events in our life coupled with the ideas we bring to the table.

However, I think Revenant Threshold’s point is a pretty interesting one. I would be willing to bet that intelligent people agree on far more things than stupid people. I wonder if this is really true, and if it carries over even into religion? I certainly find that intelligent believers are moer in line with my thinking: even on arguments about religion, than stupid people. Of course, the counter-argument is easy to make: mayeb I think myself intelligent and so want to think they are more like me. Maybe intelligent people argue with more class and reserve and thus I respect them more. And so on. But it would be interesting, no?

Of course, there are MANY many difficulties in assigning particular beliefs to levels of intelligence, let alone in measuring intelligence. YEC certainly seems to be the view of the stupid and blinkered more than the intelligent, theist or non-theist. But then, education is not the only measure of intelligence (though perhaps education is the particular measure most interesting to the OP), and as education rises, theist belief becomes less common in general, so that’s a confounding factor as to how many intelligent YECs there are… and so on.

17

Few intelligent people differ on whether or not the ocean exists. Or even whether or not the atmosphere exists (even though we can’t see it).

Reciprocally, few intelligent people have differing opinions on the existence of unicorns.

God (as the term is generally used by intelligent people) isn’t akin to ocean or atmosphere (the folks who profess belief do not consider themselves to be describing something that can be apprehended by the physical senses). Theist and atheist alike tend to agree on that.

The atheist of simplistic depth-of-thought on the subject, especially if of strongly materialist bent, may consider that sufficient to conclude that therefore God does not exist.

The theist of more or less equally simplistic depth-of-thought may not be offering much clarification — after all, the atheist probably comprehends abstractions such as “efficiency”, “beauty”, or “justice” and does not reject them out-of-hand as nonexistent just because you can’t directly see, taste, smell, hear, or dropkick them.

Atheists of the sort you’re likely to find on this board are more often quick to grant that “God” is a word that might apply to something other than an entity that ought to be providing physical, verifiable manifestations [visibility, dropkickability, etc], and that “God” could apply to an abstraction, but they will generally reply that, a), theists generally and historically are not saying that the “God” of which they speak is an abstraction, and that they are being reasonable in insisting that the subject of the debate is “God” as the term is conventionally used and not “God” in some esoteric & atypical usage of the word as claimed by this or that SDMB theist; and b), that theists tend to claim communication of some sort takes place with this “God”, and abstractions don’t generally run around chatting up people, so we’re back to entities — people or critters — and they should be leaving footprints or critter droppings or be visible in some portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, etc etc, unless the theists can explain this away.

Theists of the nonshallow-thinking variety are most likely to say that throughout history “God” has in fact been used for a lot more than the baby-talk semi-translucent bearded fellow, and that even if (as a consequence of the institutionalization of religion and periods of obligatory lip-service to religious tenets) there have been lots of physical-literalist-entity types of beliefs about “God”, they have legitimate reasons for thinking their more abstract and complex experience that they call “God” is, in fact, that which was sensed (albeit not with the physical senses) and named by people throughout human history and given that name, “God”, among others. And such theists reject the binary categorization of all things into either an abstraction or something with which people can communicate — even if nothing other than God can be described as an abstraction to whom one prays and from whom one receives communication, that doesn’t prevent categorizing God thusly.

Once you’ve gone that far into the thicket, you’re not so much having an argument about whether or not “God exists” but whether or not to use the word “God” to reference such experiences, whether or not you yourself have had such an experience, and what sort of valuation to place on such experiences, your own and those of other people.
It has been said of the different religions that they are like climbing a mountain — i.e., that the religions are paths, not final destinations, that the correctness of one path doesn’t negate the correctness of another path, and that as you ascend you start to see how the paths converge, etc etc. … I would submit that atheism and theism are also two ways of climbing the mountain and that at a certain point you stop seeing the other as “wrong” and start to see both as converging attempts to understand and make sense of life and world.

You will notice quite a bit of that on this board — atheists and theists alike conveying their newfound respects for their opposite numbers on this board and how they’ve come to respect the other viewpoint at least in its better manifestations, and how they will no longer dismiss the entirety of the other perspective on the basis of louder but less reasonable proponents and their behaviors and arguments.

18

Beliefs about meaning are always subjective, because meaning is something that only exists due to the processing of a thinking brain. That doesn’t demand personal experience of something interpreted as a god – just the differences in interpretation and assigned meaning. I hope that if I say “There’s the aphorism that some people see the glass as half-full and others as half-empty” it won’t be taken as a judgement on one position or the other – that’s the sort of thing I’m pointing at, though that’s a simplistic version of ‘different people jump different directions with the same facts’.

Set aside people who have had an experience that convinces them, personally if subjectively, of theism/atheism (I know people who have had both). People will still have varying interpretations of the facts, assign different meanings to them – consider the scientists who interpret their work as coming to understand the workings of the divine and those who feel that their work renders the concept of gods entirely irrelevant.

It depends on which meaning structures are part of the basic outlook – which is, I think, partially taught, and partially experience-set and the meanings assigned to those experiences.

Tangentially …

<pedantry>
Nobody ever built pyramids to Ra. The pyramids are tombs for Pharaohs.
</pedantry>

(Signed, one heretic Kemetic.)

19

If there’s some kind of concrete answer, maybe. Even things that are seemingly concrete are often open to interpretation, and I think smart people may be more likely to look for alternative interpretations.

I doubt there are many questions that have unanimous answers from smart people (or anyone else). Given that proof or even solid evidence is so hard to come by on spiritual topics, I don’t see why it’s hard to understand that intelligent people have come to different conclusions.

20

“Smart” is relative not absolute.

The ability to map inputs to appropriate outputs is dependent on the context.

A person can be “smart” w.r.t. math, and not so “smart” w.r.t. relating emotionally to another person.

I’ve encountered numerous people with differing amounts of “book smart” vs common sense in a business setting.

I think the “smart” thing is so complex that it does not really shed much light on who is a good candidate for determining if there is a god.