All in all, I think I’ll stick with believing real, published research results above an anonymous webpage if it’s all right with you. (Or even if it isn’t all right with you.) But even if I did want to switch to giving webpages higher priority that one would be a singularly bad one. First of all, despite claiming to prove that “more intelligent people tend not to believe in religion”, most of the page has nothing to do with that claim, focusing instead on the prevalence of religious beliefs among scientists vs the general population. The only portion of the webpage that has anything to do with what the author claims it proves is the list of studies in the middle of the page. Not a single one of those studies comes with a proper citation, hence there’s no way to verify any of them and no reason to trust what’s written about them, or even to be sure that such studies existed at all. However, even I were to make the mistake of taking what’s written at face value, where does that get me? Some of the studies appear to have nothing whatever to do with religion. Others say the exact opposite of what they’re supposed to say; look in particular at #'s 1, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15 on that list, as well as the study from Warren and Heist listed farther down the page. Among the rest, the information given is too vague to make any conclusions. #3 mentions a “negative correlation between religiosity and IQ”, but any high school statistics student could explain why that statement is meaningless unless we know what actually correlation is. -.001 is a negative correlation, after all. Similar problems with #'s 2, 4, 7, …
However, fun as it may be to poke many holes in that webpage, it’s really beside the point. The question of whether it’s really true that education prevents people from being or becoming religious cannot be settled by small, individual studies of the type listed there, even if they exist, but rather by an in-depth look at the long-term effects that unfold on a society’s religious makeup. The article I already linked to gives such an analysis and the conclusion is clear, that more education doesn’t lead to less religion, despite the high hopes of some atheists. Unlike the webpage you linked to, this article backs up its research with many proper citations to further research.
I think that’s really all you need to know. Anyone with access to a modern education would have to be not only ignorant, but willfully ignorant, to say the Bible is inerrant.
And throwing in qualifiers about subject or intent doesn’t mitigate ignorance as much as it mitigates integrity. I have more respect for the intellectual honesty of someone who insists on a literal six-day creation, than someone who claims that Genesis can be reconciled with science. I guess I’d rather have the latter for a neighbor, though.
I truly don’t wish to offend anyone, but if I believed in fairies, I don’t know of an inoffensive way you could tell me how silly I was.
Actually, I think you have it backwards. Clueless Christians are much more likely to be “pretty vocal” than clueless atheists, at least in my experience.
A good knowledge of the Bible is pretty scarce in both camps. And that’s because the vast majority of people are passive in their beliefs. In the US, at least, most Christians are Christians just because their parents were, and they never questioned it, and they never studied it. Most atheists probably got approximately the same indoctrination as most Christians, but for whatever reason, it didn’t stick.
It’s only a minority of either group who really put some study into it before making a reasoned choice.
But in my experience, which I fully realize is limited and anecdotal, most atheists-by-default are not that vocal about defending their lack of faith, while totally untrained Christians can be quite belligerent in defending their faith, even though they really don’t know much about it.
Maybe my perception is skewed by the absolute numbers. There are many more Christians than atheists, so if 90% of each group doesn’t know much, you will see a lot more clueless posts from Christians than from atheists.
That’s quite a conflation. Being informed about the contents of the Bible has next to nothing to do with being informed about the hairsplitting and terminology that Christians use to debate among themselves which denomination REALLY understands it.
The two links I provided were more than just anonymous sites, those were from 43 real studies and polls that have been published and spread out over a period of many decades, and other than four, the rest did show that the more intelligent the person was, the less religious they were which the second link also provided. And they weren’t just based on scientists, although they studied some of those groups too. This was a very comprehensive list, and your site spends a good portion of time on economic studies of religion, without covering much of the material that my sites uncovered with those studies and polls. There were some similarities, however. Your site does admit that professors, scientists, and other highly educated Americans are less religious than the general population, but they say the differences are associated with gender, race, and other demographic traits. If your link was going to be a comprehensive test of intelligence and religiosity, I think IQ’s studies would have been another important indicator. My links included them, along with Mensa, and SAT scores. Your link goes on to say though, that despite professors and scientists and other highly educated Americans being less religious than the general population, within academia, religious faculty are far more common in the “hard” sciences than in the humanities or social sciences. Even among average scientists, the numbers don’t reflect that. With leading scientists the numbers are even greater. We’ll get to that shortly with the NAS results which have been conducting surveys since 1914.
For now, some of the concluding remarks from Beckwith that reviewed all of the studies from my link states:
So as I stated, your site sure left out a lot! You state:
My link does back up with the proper citations and further research, naming the studies and the year the research was conducted. Your link also stated that * We find only two areas – outright rejection of religion and rejection of the Bible – where the estimated impact of high education or a scientific/college career overshadows the impact of gender.*
Your link goes on to say though:
First of all, the groups would be a better representation if separated. Secondly, this certainly would be a surprise to leading scientists from NAS. Your link skips them altogether. 93% of leading scientists reject or seriously doubt a personal god, and human immortality.
Ignorance is part of the human condition. Read Plato’s dialogues, and the only guy there who doesn’t look like an ignorant fool is Socrates, because he admits he is ignorant. Over and over again. What is knowledge, what are our standards of evidence, what has meaning to different people are all basic human questions before we die and decompose? A poster who is certain there is no God speaks to their own condition and by their own experience and own accepting of what is scientific. But as valuable as science is, it is just a method and most people ever born don’t place any personal value in it. Others see that it has limits to what science can tell us about our existence. And as of this date, it tells us next to nothing on what it means to be happy and at peace, we must look beyond science for an interpretation that is relevant now.
Those who see no value in systematization of knowledge like science look like ignorant hicks to those who value it.
Then there are hucksters like the late Jerry Falwell. I am convinced Falwell was an unbeliever at heart and simply used religion to get rich and fat in an evil and cynical way. But there are others who have used religion for wonderful and charitable purposes too.
Sticking to the OP and skipping the mostly tangential subsequent discussion, the short answer has already been given. As Czarcasm says (nailing it in the very first reply), “some can, some can’t.” See also several similar early replies.
What I would add is that, since the OP self-identifies as a former secular humanist, he should understand that standard apologetics are useless in engaging atheists. Standard apologetics preach to the choir and assume the very points atheists dispute. To meaningfully engage atheists, an apologist must meet us on our ground. Whether the Bible is true is a question, not something to be assumed. Whether faith is a valid argument is a question, not something to be assumed. Whether God as first cause solves the problem of where we came from is a question, not something to be assumed. Whether we have souls and a propect of eternal life (or damnation) is a question, not something to be assumed. BTW, why believing a story (without evidence) is the touchstone of salvation would be pretty helpful.
FWIW, I can play the “used to be” card too. Only I used to be a Christian. One day, I realized my communion with God was the sound of one hand clapping.
No they aren’t. They could have been written by anyone (if someone came up with a text they claimed was written directly by God, I doubt you’d accept it as evidence). It is only evidence that some person existed.
If you meant to say anything about evaluating and comparing texts, then you should have. What you actually said was that if all you had was old writing, stories and hearsay about someone then that person was fictitious. And that makes everyone for whom we have no physical evidence of existence fictitious (I forgot about DNA evidence in my first statement, which was kindly corrected by razncain).
And for most historical personages, all we have to go on is old writing, stories and hearsay.
More nonsense. You speak as if every bit of writing was some isolated scrap that had no context, no references to its author in other works, no references to things that could be checked, nothing like that. And by serving as evidence that someone existed, that does prove the author wasn’t fictional; we might not know who they were but we know they existed. That’s far more than any religious text does for any god.
I wasn’t expecting this to devolve into a silly attempt to equate verifiable historical documents and fiction.
No, that’s how you spoke. I’m arguing from the point of view of your statement. And indeed, you recognise yourself that it’s nonsense. Good.
Where, presumably, historical documents == things you agree with and fiction == things you don’t? Or do you have some other method of evaluating “old writing” (now that it’s not all classed as fiction)?
I think revelator771 has yet to respond to what his beliefs are. I don’t know what an Evangelical is either. I believe Bible literalists, for whatever reasons they harbor, choose to ignore reality.
The Houston Museum of Natural Science is expanding & adding a big new paleontology section. Robert Bakker is on board as Visiting Paleontology Curator. Anybody who has watched any dino TV in the last couple of decades knows him–he’s the one with The Hat & The Beard. Here’s something I didn’t know:
Well, he was right in one sense: many of the studies mentioned in your links do not contain proper citations. Further, most of them appear quite old; methodological advances have occurred over the decades. Unfortunately, ITR champion seems much too willing to extrapolate from the experiences of the US (in which education does correlate positively with religion) to international trends (which go the other direction). A few recent articles:
Lynn, Richard, John Harvey, and Helmuth Nyborg (2009). Average intelligence predicts atheism rates across 137 nations. Intelligence, 37, 11-15. Studying 137 countries, a strong negative correlation – 0.6 – was found between intelligence and religiosity (as measured by proportion of believers). Cuba and Vietnam (in one direction) and the US (in the other) seem to be the primary exceptions.
Sacerdote, Bruce and Edward L. Glaeser (2001). Education and Religion. NBER Working Paper 8080. Unpublished, unfortunately. They note that – within the US, somewhat anomalously – religion correlates positively with educational attainment. However, they find that persons with higher education exhibit less church attendance, appearing to select into less “fervent” religions.
Fan, C. Simon (2008). Religious participation and children’s education: A social capital approach. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 65, 303-317. A bit more conceptual. Fits in with the prior article by demonstrating how the positive effects of education on religion can be explained in terms of the accumulation of social capital.
There are additionally quite a few studies that demonstrate that religious schools are more effective than secular schools (I trust this doesn’t require citations), but what that has to do with the schools’ religiosity per se I’m not sure.
Okay I know this isn’t the topic- but going to the star wars comment or even star trek- if a language and life is created based on fiction doesn’t that mean the involved think its real or real life based?
Not usually. Though starting, at least, with the Baker Street Irregulars some people find it fun assuming the role of a person who believes it to be real.
On the other hand if you grew up with parents and friends who act as if Star Wars was real, and went to a building every Sunday decorated with Star Wars images, and listened to sermons about how the Force should help you live your life given by a person dressed in Jedi robes, you might get taken in. If you asked how we knew about this, you’d hear it was revelation through Saint George, and if you asked to see evidence you’d be told that the evidence was obvious a long time ago in a galaxy far away.
You must be very new if you are just discovering Der Trihs.
I would say that the people I’ve known who fit he definition generally show a tremendous amount of intellectual dishonesty, especially when it comes to the obvious problems with the Bible as “the word of God” and the fact that the burden of proof is obviously on them, not skeptics of religion as a whole or people who are skeptical because of distinctly different faiths held. If this intellectual dishonesty were to be included in the definition of ignorance, then, yes, I would say that Evangelicals are ignorant as a whole.
I’ve met many who are honorable, kind, and free of blatant hypocrisy, but that is all separate to the question.
“Evangelical” is one of those labels (like “conservative” or “liberal”) that is commonly used, but that doesn’t have clear, well-defined boundaries. People or groups sometimes self-identify as Evangelical, but they may not all have the exact same definition in mind. At the risk of oversimplifying, Evangelicals are a subset of Christians (often the more conservative ones, though being Evangelical isn’t just a matter of being conservative), who place a great deal of emphasis on the Bible and its authority, on an individual’s personal relationship with God, and on the need for everyone to “get saved” and “accept Jesus into your heart.”
