I think the point they’re making is that they’re not concerned about relative violence, just absolute violence.
I think that’s a pretty silly way to go about it, but it’s their thread, I suppose…
I think the point they’re making is that they’re not concerned about relative violence, just absolute violence.
I think that’s a pretty silly way to go about it, but it’s their thread, I suppose…
I don’t think there’s any reason to consider that question to be “more important.” The underlying question, after all, is whether atheism is more logical that theism. After all, if one says that the general populace is unlikely to apply logic in this case (or, as atheists often claim, if they rely on nothing but blind faith), then their conclusions are of decidedly less importance in addressing this particular question.
Moreover, if both the intelligencia and the general populace favor theism – or at best, hold it as equal with atheism – then the second question still does not prove one’s supposed point.
Besides, for reasons that I gave earlier in this thread, I don’t think we should be quick to assume that intelligent atheists (or theists, for that matter) necessarily chose their beliefs out of sheer logic. Heck, even Michael Shermer, one of the most outspoken atheists I know of, dismissed that very notion.
Hmmm.
First, I do not see a correlation between belief and intelligence. I see a bunch of people who are willing to be mental slackers and hold to whatever suits their casually-held worldview – on both sides of the fence. And I see people who are willing to put forth the effort to determine what the truth might be, even if it turns out to be unsatisfactory to their previous worldview – again on both sides of the fence.
As for the “atheism is a belief” canard, fine, you have a good dictionary definition. Which excludes most of the self-identified atheists on this board, whose views are that there is insufficient evidence for anything identifiable as a god, and that Occam’s Razor therefore calls for a tentative holding of “no god” pending definitive evidence for or against.
I consider them to be atheists since that’s what they consider themselves, just as I consider LDS members to be Christians, both since that’s what they consider themselves and because they meet the stripped-down bottom-line definition of what a Christian is. It’s a matter of respect.
Of course, one may choose to pontificate based on his or her own opinions.
Kind of odd… If you accept logic and rationality as the alpha and omega of your worldview, then you’ve excluded God, for the various tiresome logical arguments that you all are as doubtless tired of hearing as we are of being witnessed at. On the other hand, the ability to follow a logical thread does not make one intelligent, any more than accepting Jesus makes one loving and compassionate.
On the contrary, there exist compelling logical arguments for the existence of God, especially in modern S4 and S5 modal logic. We’ve even dealt with those here.
Vorlon wrote:
Um, they’re also from the pool of mammals, but that’s beside the point. National Merit Scholars are a subset of the general population, yes. But so are prison inmates, most of whom are Black. But that doesn’t mean that most of the general population is Black.
Damn I had a written a decent post that got eaten.
It basically boiled down to this (because I am too lazy to retype it all):
Polycarp:
All you really did was substitute “tentative holding” for “belief”, so what?
I am willing to call people atheist if that’s what they want, even if their definition of it does not jive with mine, and is also out of step with they way it is generally understood. A respect thing as you say.
The point of my post though, was to point out the absurdity of Urban Ranger’s blanket statement, not to paint any atheists into a logical corner.
Atheism is hopeless for even if god does not exist it can never be proven or known.
Where as, if god does exist, god can possibly be known at least subjectively.
I think It takes SOME intelligence to attempt to understand the nature of this existence. A sage or jnani are not idiots.
The meaning of a simple statement like:
“The very act of perceiving shows that you are not what you perceive.”
is lost to most.
Some of the most highly intelligent people are not oriented towards their inner self. There are different ways intelligence manifests, sometimes in the form of intuition and insight that is not easily translated into thought as reason and critical analysis.
I think discovering for ones self the true nature of this existence is the highest form of insight------who’s path if carved solely by intellect would never be found.
It very well may be true that the act of thinking itself is a barrier to the truth, i.e. It can only take us so far.
And agnosticism also may be a belief.
I don’t know that atheism is necessarily more logical than theism, or that people who achieve academically are necessarily more logical than those who don’t.
However, Libertarian’s claim that academic achievement (as represented by NMS status) has no relationship to atheism is invalid.
If I know that a given person is in prison, and I know that most of the inmates in prisons are black (what a wonderful ‘justice’ system), then I can determine that the chances of that particular person’s being black are much greater than a random person selected from the population at large, and I would conclude that being black is somehow related to being in prison (again, what an incredible system).
If I know that half of all NMSs are atheists, and that fewer than half of the population are atheists, then I would conclude that some unknown factor links being in the National Merit group and being an atheists. Perhaps both are the result of some other factor, perhaps one causes the other, or perhaps the findings are spurious. Further evidence is needed.
In any case, Libertarian’s assertion that this evidence not only provides no support for the idea that atheism and academic achievement are related, but actively contradicts it, is fairly silly. This evidence supports the opposite conclusion.
As far as I know, there is no profession (except perhaps webmaster for American Atheists) that has more atheists than theists in it; however, I lack evidence that this is actually the case. In most circumstances, theists vastly outnumber atheists.
I’m pretty sure that this is exactly Vorlon’s point. African-Americans are overrepresented among the prison population, just as atheists are ostensibly overrepresented among National Merit Scholars. If we ascribe “high intelligence” to National Merit Scholars, as you have done (and appropriately so, in my view), then atheists are overrepresented among intelligent high school seniors in the United States.
In other words, in the U.S., the population of intelligent high school seniors is disproportionately atheist. [This presumes that the original citation is accurate, which I cannot judge.]
Vorlon wrote:
You have the cart pulling the horse. The fact of the matter is that no logical conclusion may be drawn from the National Merit Scholar study other than that intelligence among NM Scholars is not related to religious belief. Any other conclusions are pro causa and post causa.
Most biologists are atheists. According to a 1998 article in Nature (Vol. 394, No. 6691, p. 313), theists among biologists in the National Academy of Science total 5.5 percent.
Savaka wrote:
No, it means that the population of National Merit Scholars exhibits no link between its intelligence and its religion.
No one is saying that atheists aren’t over-represented among National Merit Scholars if the data is accurate. The problem is the inference you draw from it. All it says is that the top 1% of high school seniors[sup]1[/sup] contains a disproportionately large number of atheists is comparing (supposedly) intellectually elite high school seniors with the population at large. From this, we might infer that unintelligent people are more likely to be theist than are people as a whole; we can’t infer anything at all about whether smart people are more likely to be atheists or not.
The problem is that the former isn’t even remotely relevant. I’d expect that smart people tend to be less accepting of what they’re told, and given that most of the population is theist, we naturally expect there to be a disproportionate number of atheists among the people who question what they’re told. If the situation were reversed, and most of the population were atheist, you might well find smart people to contain a disproportionate number of theists rather than the reverse. I rather doubt that the comparison that y’all want to make is really all that useful, and the comparison that Lib and JThunder want to make is somewhat more helpful.
Unfortunately, there’s still a whole host of other factors which complicate the issue, and of course neither comparison is even remotely conclusive.
[sup]1[/sup] This is not, by the way, a highly relevant sample, in my opinion, simply because beliefs tend to be very much in flux still at that age. It might be more useful to see something like the relative percentages of theists vs atheists in people who were National Merit Scholars 20 years ago, or something.
IMHO the more intelligent a person is, the more they tend to lean towards agnosticism regarding religious truth. After all, religious truths are by definition non-provable. They are believed based upon faith.
When it comes to a question that cannot possibly be proven or dis-proven, you may feel the evidence leans you heavily one way or the other, but to choose a side simply for the sake of choosing, when you don’t KNOW…is not intelligent to me. That is the act of a coward afraid to hang in limbo.
If you don’t know the answer…then wait until you do know. That is a demonstration of Wisdom, by far the most valuable subset of intelligence.
So in regards to the figures below…
BELIEF IN PERSONAL GOD 1914 1933 1998
Personal belief 27.7 15 7.0
Personal disbelief 52.7 68 72.2
Doubt or agnosticism 20.9 17 20.8
These would just lead me to conclude only about 20.8 percent of the above people are intelligent. That sounds about right to me. In a survey of scientists you might find 20% were reasonably intelligent.
That seems to me to be a recipe for paralysis, not wisdom at all.
I’m sorry, ready, but I couldn’t disagree more. No scientist, for example, knows any theory to be true, since such knowledge isn’t even possible (in this narrow sense, scientific knowledge and religious knowledge are alike). Nevertheless, pretty much any scientist you talk to has theories that he or she believes to be true. Do I know that quantum mechanics is right? Of course not. Do I believe that it is? Yes.
To put it plainly, waiting to decide whether you believe a scientific answer is correct until you can prove that it cannot possibly be false means that you won’t answer any scientific questions at all, and that you hence have no business whatsoever being in science to begin with. I, at least, would not consider this to be a sign of supreme wisdom or intelligence.
It is expected that unless you can prove something to be true beyond all possibility of doubt that you acknowledge that you might be wrong; it is not expected that you take no position whatsoever in case you might be wrong.
This is to be distinguised from claiming that there is insufficient evidence to answer a question, which is a perfectly reasonable stance (unless, of course, the criteria for sufficient evidence is that it could not possibly be otherwise).
Correlations between linked variables are often difficult to find within selected populations taken from the extremes.
For example, if you look at people who do very well in school, there’s virtually no link between academic achievement and life achievement. If you look at the population as a whole, there’s a significant correlation between the two.
Your argument doesn’t hold if you look at intelligence within that sample (which your OP didn’t actually state, by the way), because the sample is too misrepresentative to be meaningful. If you assume that NMSs are meant to represent intelligent people in general (which is a fairly dubious leap), then it still doesn’t support the point you originally made.
I don’t understand at all why you made your point about biologists and atheism (excepting that it’s an example of a profession with outnumbered theists) as it seems to counter your earlier point.
I’ve read a fundie book that said that when you go to college, they teach you that the Bible is just fairy tales, hence, the smarter you go, supposedly in college, the more God is taught (by atheistic professors, I guess) to be not real.
Make of it what you will.
But any ratio of theists to atheists among National Merit Scholars supports this claim. The fifty-percent figure is irrelevant if this is the point you were trying to make.
Perhaps this is the crux, then. I did not intend to make the claim that atheism causes intelligence nor that intelligence causes atheism. I will not speak for the Ambassador. But it is true, as gr8guy pointed out, that no claims of causation can be made based on the NMS data you cited. That data was only correlational, as it did not derive from a controlled study.
No, it means that, in the U.S., the population of intelligent high school seniors is disproportionately atheist.
Provided, of course, that you accept the logical sequence that I presented. That sequence is: 1) NMS’s are drawn from the general population of high school students; 2) NMS’s represent an adequate sampling of the most intelligent (or highest achieving) of those students (in point of fact, the sample here probably contains more than 75% of the most intelligent students, which is an absurdly high percentage for a sample; it’s almost inappropriate to call it a sample); and 3) we are defining “most intelligent” as “top 1% of academic achievers.”
If these are true, we can compare the relative prevalence of various traits within NMS’s and the general population. We would expect to find the NMS’s to be normally distributed in terms of height, since height is normally distributed in the general population, and we believe that height has no correlation to very high intelligence. If we believe that gender is independent of extreme academic achievement, then we would expect to see roughly equal numbers of boys and girls represented among NMS’s, since we find roughly equal numbers in the general population.
On the other hand, if we believe that family income is independent of academic achievement, we would expect to see that variable represented at the same rate among the NMS’s as in the general population. We would discover that we were wrong, and that kids from higher SES were overrepresented in the NMS sample. The null hypothesis would be disproved and we would be justified in concluding that there was a correlation between family income and very high achievement. (Again, we would still not be justified in concluding anything about causation.)
Thus, since we find that atheists appear in the group of NMS’s at a higher rate than in the general population, we conclude that atheists are disproportionately represented among the most intelligent high school students. This says nothing about the correlation between intelligence and belief among the other 99% of us.
And none of this has even the slightest relevance to the question of whether God actually exists.
“Ignorance is preferable to error. He is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.” --Thomas Jefferson
You know, Savaka, I hate to say this, but… I really don’t think that quote, Jeffersonian though it is, applies here. Inasmuch as there exist sufficient reasons to believe something to be true, the wise person accepts that thing as likely to be true, while granting that it is not guaranteed to be so.
I mean, think about it. I cannot prove that every time I jump I’m going to come back down, and neither can anyone else. That said, I believe that jumping off the roof of the Sear’s Tower is not a particularly good idea. And I would contend that it take a fool to think that I might or might not fall hundreds of feet, presumably to my untimely demise.
There are a great many questions the answers to which we not only do not but cannot know. Failure to ever make an educated and informed guess as to what the answer is despite a sufficiency of evidence does most emphatically not constitute wisdom.
I may be closer to the truth if I take no position than if I take the wrong position, but I am farther from the truth if I take no position than if I take the right position. If I have ample reason to believe that position X is correct, I would be a fool not to take it. Of course, I would also be a fool not to acknowledge that I could be wrong.
Vorlon wrote:
Your argument doesn’t hold if you look at intelligence within that sample (which your OP didn’t actually state, by the way), because the sample is too misrepresentative to be meaningful. If you assume that NMSs are meant to represent intelligent people in general (which is a fairly dubious leap), then it still doesn’t support the point you originally made.
I didn’t write the OP.
I don’t understand at all why you made your point about biologists and atheism (excepting that it’s an example of a profession with outnumbered theists) as it seems to counter your earlier point.
You had said, “As far as I know, there is no profession (except perhaps webmaster for American Atheists) that has more atheists than theists in it; however, I lack evidence that this is actually the case.” I merely attempted to edify your ignorance.
It certainly doesn’t counter my main point (that there is no reliable correlation between intelligence and faith) since biologists are not necessarily smart.
Savaka wrote:
But any ratio of theists to atheists among National Merit Scholars supports this claim. The fifty-percent figure is irrelevant if this is the point you were trying to make.
No, the fifty percent figure matters here because it means that, for any arbitrary NM Scholar, he is as likely religious as not.
Thus, since we find that atheists appear in the group of NMS’s at a higher rate than in the general population, we conclude that atheists are disproportionately represented among the most intelligent high school students.
Apparently, the reason for your dicto simpliciter is that you’ve oversimplified the populations. The NM Scholars are not selected from the general population, but from a subset of the high school population.