No, I said your original post, as in the one where you first brought up the National Merit Scholars. If I’d said the OP, you’d be correct.
Thank you, Libertarian. It’s greatly appreciated.
Since not even performance on intelligence tests reliably correlates with intelligence, I’d say we have a deeper problem here.
We can certainly agree on that.
Sorry, but that’s clearly not true. If 90% of National Merit Scholars were atheists, then one could say that atheism correlates positively with National Merit Scholarship. The converse could be said if only 10% of them were atheists.
No, it’s entirely relevant to Lib’s point – namely, that there is no correlation to be drawn.
The problem is that you’re arbitrarily selecting the general U.S. population as the superset against which these National Merit Scholars are compared. I submit that one’s “conclusion” can be predetermined by judiciously selecting the superset against which these scholars are compared. As g8rguy pointed out, why not compare them specifically to high school students instead? Or maybe just the top 20% of high schoolers? Or perhaps teenagers as a whole?
That illustrates the fallacy of harping about “disproportionate representation” of NMS atheists in comparison to the populace at large. Its an example of how one can use an invalid comparison to pick and choose statistics so as to support one’s claim.
Lib, you missed it again. If atheists are 10% of the population, and 50% of a group of that population is atheists, then atheists are over-represented.
And, since high school students are being tested on their intelligence (sort of) and fill out polls about religion, it makes sense to use them, especially since the vast majority of people would be eligible to be in high school at some point in their lives.
Robertliguori wrote:
“The group” is not selected from “the population”.
Now that you’ve added temporality to your premise, it is more obfuscated than ever. Your general population now consists of every person in history and the future. The permutations of temporal modal conclusions boggle the mind.
And, as Lib and I both pointed out, one can skew these statistics by judiciously selecting which superset we use to define “the population.” In other words, you can manufacture statistics to reflect “over-representation” by defining your superset to be sufficiently large.
That is one reason why, as g8rguy pointed out, pulling in statistics about the general populace is invalid, and an effective way to generate false conclusions.
race and g8rguy:
When interacting with our world, we are forced to make our best guesses based upon evidence and experience. This can be done still knowing these assumptions may be wrong.
Scientific theories are the best descriptions of the world we are currently able to come up with. To say that you “believe” in the theory as representing some sort of ultimate truth of existence…would be an act of irrational exuberence.
When it comes to the questions such as: Is the Universe the result of intelligent design? Is their a God? Is consciousness merely the result of the mechanisms within the brain? Is their a reality beyond or beneath what we perceive? To choose a “definitive” answer to any of these questions, without definitive evidence, is also an irrational and unintelligent act. If you don’t know, then you don’t know, and to claim you know is to behave like a fool.
You may feel heavily in favor of a particular theory that you think best describes the answer…but to plant your flag in that camp is never necessary except for peace of mind.
So yes, you may choose to believe or disbelieve in God based upon a universe of inadequate evidence. But to choose a side without definitive reason is to behave cowardly.
In the ongoing saga of a perhaps not particularly relevant hijack, with comments taken out of order…
I see. Apparently, however, this is not possible in matters of religion. :rolleyes:
Yes, of course to choose to side without a strong reason to do so is silly (I don’t see how any rational person could describe it as cowardly). To presume that all people who have religious beliefs base said beliefs upon inadequate evidence is IMO a presumption based upon inadequate evidence. Which leads me quite nicely to…
You’ve just made a statement of opinion without having proof. You may feel that you have adequate reasons to make this statement; others may feel differently. The point being, of course, that deciding what constitutes adequate evidence requires in and of itself a value judgment.
In a newsflash, some theists and some atheists actually feel that they have adequate evidence to support their position. You are not uniquely qualified to determine whether their evidence is adequate or not, and the mere fact that you apparently think the evidence is insufficient and they disagree makes them neither unintelligent nor cowardly.
As for the rest of your post (dealing with belief in science), it’s an interesting topic, one on which I think you’re incredibly wrong, but one which is I think too far afield to continue arguing about in this thread.
Let’s take another simple example.
You are being chased by a killer. You have two doors. You know one of the door is a dead end, the other leads to safety. At some point you have to choose. You may even have some evidence as to which door leads to safety. Once you choose, (for practical purposes…)is it required that you declare “I believe door number 2 leads to safety and door number 1 does not!” No it is not required. You still do not know, but you had to make a decision for practical reasons, so you make your best guess.
Science often leads us to try technologies based upon theories that are not absolutely rock solid and proven. They are our best guesses. That is why we do experiments.
Do you have to choose whether or not there is a God? Do you have to choose whether or not the Bible is the word of God or not? Is someone pointing a gun at your head? Do you have adequate evidence to decide the answer? If not, then why choose? To choose is not the act of intelligence it is the act of someone who is at worst a weak coward, or at best simply too impatient to wait until they do know.
Now some people consider a “feeling” they have when they pray or read the bible as adequate evidence, and that is fine. That is their decision and judgement. If they honestly feel they have evidence to decide the answer to the question, then they are behaving intelligently.
Nonetheless, in absence of definitive evidence, the intelligent thing to do is neither to believe or disbelieve, but to wait until you know…or if possible, just look behind one of the doors.
JThunder wrote:
To reduce this, let us say that I am the sample taken from the general population. I am intelligent, and I am a theist. Therefore, 100% of intellgent people are theists.
Okay, maybe I don’t disagree with you as much as I thought on this particular issue. I’m wondering, though, if you presume that the majority of intelligent theists or atheists are theists or atheists despite the evidence or ** because** of the evidence. I would suggest that most people who we would consider intelligent and who have definite religious beliefs have ample reason to hold the beliefs that they do.
To be fair, we need to draw the distinction between a misrepresentative sample and an insufficient sample size. While I agree that comparing the top 1% academically of high school seniors to the general populace is misleading at best, the thing that really makes your example seem so silly is really the fact that the sample size is insufficiently large for any conclusions to be drawn. Perhaps a more useful example is this: let us suppose that every one who has their doctorate of divinity is intelligent. Some very large fraction of these people might be theists. This, of course, scarcely allows us to draw general conclusions because the choice of samples was misrepresentative, even though sufficiently large.
Yes. You are correct. I must confess that I have been consistently misreading your posts on this point. My apologies. I thought you were suggesting that Merit Scholars, as a group, were representative of “intelligent people” in the general population. Upon rereading the thread, I realize that you have made no such claim. In fact, in at least one place, you explicitly denied saying that. Perhaps it would help me if you would post redundantly and in color, like some of our White Nationalist friends. In any case, I concede the point.
I am now more mystified than ever, though, about why you introduced the NMS study into the debate. A 40-year-old, non-random sample of high-achieving high school kids seems to have little bearing here, regardless of what their religious beliefs are.
Part of my confusion stems from the fact that this early statement,
does not mean the same thing as your more recent statement,
The second statement is supported by the study, the first is not. In order to prove the statement, “Intelligence among National Merit Scholars is not related to religious belief,” one would need to do a correlational study among National Merit Scholars comparing their relative intelligence within the group and their stated religious beliefs.
So my question is, how does this study, which uses a subgroup (NM Scholars) of a self-selected subgroup (those who took the PSAT) of a subgroup (high school sophomores, I believe) of the general population relate to the OP?
Indeed. But I ask again, how is this relevant? And Libertarian’s original post, the one I was responding to, said “…intelligence among NM Scholars is not related to religious belief.” Your hypothetical percentages do not support this statement any more than the 50-50 figure does.
Yes. You are quite correct. I have conceded this point. However, one’s conclusion can also be predetermined by judiciously (or carelessly) selecting the sample. In this case, we seem to be in agreement that the NMS sample does not represent the general population. It may or may not represent the population of high school students 40 years ago, but in either case, I question its relevance to our debate.
Well, I think debates can ebb and flow, often splintering off into various discussions that are related to the topic. In this case, someone had posted studies that allegedly supported the notion of a link between IQ and faith. I responded by posting counterexamples, which I believe is an acceptable debate tactic.
Frankly, I would rather that a debate might have ensued from my original assertion, which was that faith and intelligence are not at all related even conceptually. Although I find ample support from logic and reason for God’s existence, my faith in Him comes not from that but from my own experience. He offered Himself to me, and I accepted Him. Thus, my faith was a gift.
Ready29003
This is just a brief note to inform you that I find your point to be most interesting and probably valid. Though you are in a different debate, I am following yours with interest.
Yes, this is the more interesting and relevant question. The reason I didn’t take you up on that topic is that I agree with you.
Honestly, the only reason I wanted to debate the NMS study was that it appeared to me that you were making a very amateur statistical error. From what I know of you from your posts in other forums, this seemed very uncharacteristic. Now that I understand your position, I have no quarrel.
I’d just as soon drop this debate and join the other hijack.
Ready,
your posts are well written and thought out, and I hope I am able to continue the discussion with similar adeptness.
As I said in my first post, I agree in princilple that there is no way that we can know definitively that there is or is not a God.
However, as with Gr8, I have to take issue with your statement:
I still don’t get the coward thing. Wouldn’t choosing to act positively in the face of a lack of total certainty of success be an act of bravery rather than cowardice?
Further (and this may not exactly be the most germane thought) one could certainly make the case that choosing to believe in God is an act of intelligence, because if nothing else, it shows our ability to look forward and consider the consequences of our actions.
To paraphrase Pascal: if you believe in God and live accordingly, and He does not exist, you lose nothing. However, if you believe in God and live accordingly and He does exist, you gain everything. Therefore, the only intelligent choice is to believe.
I realize that quote reduces religious belief to a bet, but it does, I think, at least refute the idea that believing something you cannot prove is stupid or cowardly.
Finally,
To take your science metaphor a step further, there is an intermediate step between observing a phenomenon and determining through experimentation what the actual process is: the hypothesis. Perhaps we are only debating semantics here, but I think it is fair to say we “believe” a hypothesis when we are as yet unable to test it, if it best explains the phenomenon. Most people believe that the speed of light cannot be exceeded despite the fact that we are unable to test.
To me, the concept of God best explains the phenomena that I observe in the world. In a simple sense, God is my hypothesis. I cannot test that hypothesis, but I choose to live my life based on it because it enables me to understand and interact with the world most effectively. I call that belief, after all a belief by definition is something you hold to be true without direct knowledge, and I do not consider it to be a position arrived at through cowardice or a lack of intelligence.
Re Pascal’s wager: There is an invisible pink unicorn behind you right now. Unless everyone who reads this sends me $5.00 in unmarked bills, said unicorn will impale you. Don’t believe me? Is $5.00 worth the risk of having a pink horn where Sol fails to illuminate?
Yeah, it’s silly to me, too. But that’s how Pascal reads to those of us who don’t believe in pink unicorns.
That’s another one of those tar-the-opposition-with-accusations-of-evil sorts of things that make “fundamentalist” a dirty word on most of this board, Vanilla.
Fact: I’ve been taught that Genesis 1 is a myth.
Question: Was that an attempt to undermine my faith?
Answer: Not in the slightest.
Definitions 3 and 4 are what the fundamentalists would consider such an allegation. But read 1. What the story in Genesis 1 contains is the creation of the world by a supernatural being in a manner that explains aspects of that world and delineates the understanding of God held by the Hebrew people, and in particular on the origin of the Sabbath. It does not go into the sort of detail one might expect a detailed account of creation to deal with: While God obviously had a very clear understanding of what a naked mole rat, a duck-billed platypus, or a Goliath spider was going to be, it does not contain His commands, “Let there be duck-billed platypuses…” It’s a simplified account of how God created, shoehorned into a six-day work week to accommodate the creation of the Sabbath.
So the story is a myth, fitting definition 1 to a T. There’s a post elsewhere in GD that lists off the mythical elements of the Christ story – and each of them has the same evocative sense to the reader that a true myth does. Joseph Campbell is very good on this sense of how myth evokes feelings in the reader, and the idea that such a sense of participation in the story is the reason behind myth.
Now, the kicker: If every cosmologist, paleontologist, geophysicist, astrophysicist, and evolutionary biologist were in unanimous agreement that the world and all its lifeforms came into existence during one week in October 4004 BC, the story in Genesis 1 would still be a myth.
It’s categorizing its literary genre, not its truth value.
I once saw a short essay that recounted the history of World War II in the form of a traditional heroic legend. Every word of the account was true history, but the manner of telling it was that of a King Arthur or Roland sort of story.
What seems to be inordinately difficult to get through the head of a conservative Christian generally is that people say this stuff, not out of some conspiracy to debunk their faith, but because they sincerely think that it’s the truth.
Like the Resurrection: I am not necessarily inclined to the belief that the exact body that was hung upon the cross was what was raised from the dead on the First Easter. I am however convinced that Jesus Christ rose and is alive today. To someone like His4Ever, that might seem like a denial of an essential article of faith. But it’s not – it’s a holding of doubt regarding how an inexplicable event (that I do believe happened) physically occurred, not a denial of the event itself. (See I Corinthians 15 for what Paul says about the Resurrection, and the question of what constitutes “a spiritual body” and how it differs from “the natural body” that Jesus of Nazareth obviously had prior to the Crucifixion.)
RobertLiguori: According to conservative Christians, God doesn’t hold with gambling. So there’s a fair probability that anyone betting Pascal’s Wager is doomed either way! 
Robert wrote:
His argument is valid; it is merely unsound.
Robert,
I dunno why I’m wasting my time on this point, but you have misrepresented Pascal’s wager.
The critical distinction is that in Pascal’s statement, if you live your life as if God exists, you lose nothing. This presumes that the “costs” of belief in this world are balanced out the benefits. (e.g. alms you pay go to the poor, indirectly improving your own life, etc.)
In your example, I have indeed lost if I bet that the unicorn is there but it is not. I got nothing for my $5.