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

Great Debates
21

Spiritual and Material are kind of inverse polarities to one another. A lot of materialists think that the spiritual world doesn’t exist, and a lot of spiritualists believe that the material world is just an illusion.

Humans are not machines that are made on an assemblyline and they certainly do not receive the same input/output. So finding a standard measure of intelligence is kind of difficult.

What I would say the difference is basically is this. Take two people who live at a mountain.

Person A lives ON the mountain
Person B lives IN the mountain

They both have equal experiences OF the mountain but have very different perceptions of the nature of that mountain. This is the difference between Spiritualist and Materialist points of view. Spiritualism is “esoteric” in that they try to find the truth internally, whereas Materialism is “exoteric” in that they try to find the truth externally. Neither position is right or wrong, correct or incorrect, they are both different ways of viewing the mountain. The only time that people really come into problems that delude them is when they think that one perception is ‘right’ and the other is ‘wrong’.

Erek

22

I think most smart people and all other people accept the things they are taught at an early age.
Have you ever noticed that smart, dumb and all other people in Buddhist countries tend to be Buddhist?
And Zoroastrians, and Coptics in their respective regions?
Why try to explain it as though each of those people independently arrived at Buddhist or Zoroastrian or Coptic teaching? Like the local diets, they ate what they were fed. They didn’t independently decide they preferred rice or millet or sorghum flour.

23

If each society has a traditional way of explaining something that folks experience, and putting that experience into words (let alone translating into other languages) is a damned complex process, I’d expect to find that folks were more often inclined to find resonance within their traditions than outside of them.

Exceptions exist where traditions become ossified, diverted to other purposed (such as political governance), or momentarily caught up locally with with short-term passions.

24

This is a very good point, but you will notice that intelligence still lets people cut through the local “crap”.

In many cases, intelligent people either reject their local religion and become atheists, and or start to hold more “general” views about God and don’t agree with all the details of the local religion like many uneducated people do.

So, intelligence has a way to clear away local influences, and yet, some of these people go one way (decide there is no God), and others go another way (decide there is a God, though more general than the one specified in their local religion). Intelligence does not seem to be able to help people make a choice between these two options.

25

But this is just preference. Your Marxists friends just preferred equality of outcome in society (even if it meant less personal liberty), while your Libertarian friends preferred personal liberty (even if it meant unequal outcome for different people).

They were not trying to solve the same problem.

Intuitively, if two equally intelligent people with a similar educational background try to solve the same problem with the same input data, they should reach the same solution. It is not a matter of prefeerence.

People are not atheists because they prefer that there is no God. They are atheists because they are convinced there is no God. Similarly for theists.

26

An astute observation, in my opinion. Even among believers, there is intellectual disagreement over many things concerning God. (Possibly so likewise among nonbelievers.) Part of what makes God so beautiful to me is the humiliation that I experience in contemplating Him. In the end, for me at least, God is not about intelligence, but goodness. And I’ve know plenty of people who were dumb but good and smart but evil.

27

I’m curious. How many people believe that atheism is not based upon faith?

28

oh oh, now you’ve stepped in it.

29

This is a very important point; however, I would modify it somewhat. For the vast majority of people raised in a religious society, their religion is not just “taught at an early age”. Rather, it is thoroughly drummed into them, starting at an early age and continuing for the rest of their lives. In a thoroughly religious society, religion is introduced to children almost as soon as they can talk and before they learn to think critically and evaluate arguments. Adults relentlessly inform children that their particular religion is the one and only correct one, and (at least in the Western religions) that horrible things will happen to those who fail to believe. They are brought once weekly to religious institutions where these messages are hammered constantly. Schooling is centered around religion.

Moreover, in religious societies, most people get little or no exposure to secular thinking.

When you put all this together, it’s hardly surprising that almost everyone raised in a religious society turns out to follow their religious upbringing. The thinking behind that upbringing is melded into their brains early on, and hardened into place quite thoroughly. It takes an extreme event to break such conditioning.

(And obviously I’m not suggesting that every religious person on this planet had their beliefs shaped in this way. But the majority did.)

30

Then the same is true of atheism, isn’t it? If only secular thinking has been “drummed” into the brains of children who are never exposed to religious thinking, then aren’t they atheist for no reason other than the same sort of brain melding? Perhaps that is why, from God’s perspective, whether a person is a theist or an atheist is irrelevant. If God manifests wherever goodness is faciliated, then it doesn’t matter one whit what the intellectual bent of the facilitator is.

31

Well yes, subject to the usual caveat that atheism is a broad church. Some embrace conformity, some go with the flow, some bounce desparately to the opposite of what’s familiar, some rebel for the sake of it.

32

How is that different from what people raised as theists do? At this point we’re just discussing what human beings do, not what atheists or theists do.

33

Atheism is a statement of belief. I believe there is no God, is a statement based on faith. Almost all knowledge is based on faith, you have faith in the knowledge or faith in your senses.

34

OK, I hang out with Mensans and I enjoy discussing religion, so I figure I’m qualified to comment on this question.

The problem is, intelligent people aren’t working with the same data. Their beliefs and their attitudes towards religion are coloured by their life experiences. For this post, I’m going to limit myself to people I know who are in Mensa, and, while I don’t think I need to do this, I will clarify and say that Mensa is an organization for people with IQ’s in the top 2%.

I’m a devout Episcopalian. I was raised within the Episcopal church; I’ve never had a bad experience within the Episcopal church, and I’ve had some profound religious experiences, including one which I believe saved my life and sanity some thirteen years ago.

One of the two guys who got me to join Mensa is Jewish by heritage and agnostic by practice. He’s been looking for some hard sign or evidence of God, but hasn’t seen anything to convince him.

The other guy who got me to join is one I’ve referred to many times in religious debates around here. He started of Presbyterian like the rest of his family. Sometime in his early 20’s, I gather, he had a profound experience and became a Fundamentalist Christian. He was even a Young Earth Creationist for about 6 months until he couldn’t reconcile it with logic. Over the years he lost his faith and fervor and wound up a devout Atheist. As he puts it, he’d go to Mensa Regional Gatherings, see people doing tarot readings and say to himself, “How can so-called intelligent people believe this stuff?!” Sometime after that, while researching a book he was writing which involved tarot (it’s a science fiction novel and I can e-mail anyone who’s interested the title and his real name – he’s got 70-odd books to his credit at last count), he had what he calls his “Epipha-Wiccany” and is now a devout Wiccan. He has had experiences which reinforce his Wiccan view of the Divine, just as I’ve had experiences which confirm my Christian view of the Divine.

I will also, for the sake of completeness, mention that I do know one woman in Mensa who is allegedly a Young Earth Creationist. I’m afraid I don’t much care for her and I haven’t discussed religion with her, so that’s all the information I can offer. Having worked with her on a project and from what I’ve heard from others who’ve worked with her on projects, I’d describe her as not being very bright, despite the organization she and I belong to.

The Mensans I know are all over the map when it comes to religion, including one fellow who tried to convince me Jesus turned water into marijuana, not wine at the wedding at Cana (it was something to do with “Cana” indicating “cannabis”). My experiences with Christianity have been positive and continue to be positive, therefore, I’m not only Christian, but Anglican. I have also made no secret of the fact that if I’d had the experiences with Christianity that some people on this board have had, I’d be as anti-Christian as anyone around here.

Let me give you an example of how the same experience can reinforce intelligent people’s different views of religion. A few weeks ago, I was hauling a bag of canned goods to my church to go to someone who’d otherwise have gone hungry this Christmas. I was a bit foolish and I decided conditions were too risky for driving, so I decided to walk to the bus stop. I also stupidly underestimated the weight of the canned goods, to the point where I quietly prayed, “God, give me strength or give me a lift!” A few minutes later, a fellow who was walking his dog saw what I was up to, asked what I was doing, and drove me not just to the bust stop, but to church. Because of my experiences and religious beliefs, I saw this as a prayer being answered and it reinforced my faith in God. This didn’t reinforce the faith of the gentleman I’ve been seeing, an Armenian Christian and Mensan, but it did increase of his opinion of me, while confirming that I’m a bit crazy. One hypothetical Mensan atheist seeing this whole thing and knowing why I was doing what I was doing might well have thought “She’s crazy! Doesn’t she know there are other ways to give to the needy?” Another hypothetical Atheist who was more hostilely disposed towards Christianity or religion might have thought “Hah! More evidence of how lousy religion is! Look at what she’s having to do for her Invisible Pink Unicorn!”

I do concede that even I thought I was crazy, but it does show how the same data can result in different conclusions if prior experience is factored in.

And now, back to work!
CJ

35

There’s nowhere in today’s society where you can raise a child who’s only exposed to secular thinking. Let’s say two atheist parents decided to raise their child as an atheist, and to block out any trace of religious thinking from their child’s experience. First they would have to make sure that child only encounters relatives, friends, peers, teachers, coaches, etc… who weren’t religious. Even if they accomplished that, the child would still encounter religion from the culture at large. Movies and television shows informing where the simple faith of simple folk wins out over elitist secular people. Several shelves in the local bookstore packed with books explaining why a particular religion is superior to others. Bumpers stickers, church signs and highway billboards threatening terrible punishments after death to nonbelievers. The President of the United States declaring that atheists can’t be good citizens. Heavy pro-religion bias in almost every mainstream newspaper and magazine. And so forth.

36

But, ITR champion, exactly the same is true of children raised in religious homes. You can’t keep a child in a bubble of any belief system either–unless maybe you live in Iran or a remote Chinese village. Any Western child is going to be exposed to all kinds of beliefs from day one. My kid is 5 and knows quite well that her friends go to different churches, or no church at all, and she also knows of the existence of Islam, Hinduism, and so on. What religiously-raised children are you thinking of who never run into people with different beliefs than their own family’s, to say that children raised in atheist homes are truly different?

37

Even if the “inputs” (in this case meaning knowledge of the facts of the case) were the same for two different individuals with the same set of intellectual abilities, the conclusions may be quite different because each individual has different values and needs, and therefore different facts are weighed differenty and different conclusions prefered in the face of incomplete data.

How important is it to conform to your family’s values? To rebel against them? To your community’s values? Who do you consider your community? Who do you identify with? How important is belief (or non-beleif) to that identity? What value do you place on the need for proof? What value do you place on moral certainty? Do you percieve a God-shaped hole in your life and are you able to live with it if you do? What utility would God-belief bring you? What utility would atheism bring you?

These are not questions of intellect or of facts, but they decide the question for many.

Or, look at it another way: we are complex non-linear systems of the sort that chaos theory was created to describe. Even small variations in starting conditions will produce drastically different results.

38

It would be more accurate to say that atheists see no evidence for God, therefore have no reason to think one exists. It’s a logical conclusion, not an unsupported belief.

You’re also mixing up two definitions of ‘faith’ :

  • confidence due to previous experience
  • belief (typically religious) despite no supporting evidence

I have faith in Earth gravity.
I have no religious faith.

39

Wouldn’t the logical conclusion be agnosticism then? See this entry at Infidels.org:

http://www.infidels.org/news/atheism/logic.html#antecedent

Note that this line of reasoning —“If the God of the Bible appeared to me, personally, that would certainly prove that Christianity was true. But God has never appeared to me, so the Bible must be a work of fiction.” — is a logical fallacy. (Denial of the antecedent.)

40

Lib, not really. (And please note, that I say the following as someone who has reccently found out that the best phrase for my belief set is “agnostic deist.”)

An atheist is merely applying the same standard to God-concept that they apply to other beliefs: in the absence of evidence, a belief is not held as true. Therefore they do not believe in IPU’s or that spirits live in trees or that horseshoes hung upside down cause good luck or hold a God-concept … not because they have been proven false but because they see no evidence to substantiate such beliefs. They do not claim a lack of knowledge about IPU’s or tree spirits or horseshoes-induced luck; they claim that they do not exist. They would maintain that the burden of proof for any belief is on the belief: a belief is held to be false until sufficient evidence suggests otherwise.