Is it free will that renders intelligent people atheistic?

Great Debates
41

Look, I’m not trying to nitpick your every little utterance, but I genuinely have no idea what you’re on about with this.

You were saying that, “as marshmallow has just mentioned above, s/he might be religious without even realizing it.” That was, if I understood you right, a claim that atheists and agnostics can count as having a religion if they dedicate themselves to a secular cause, be it an ideology or a nation or reason or whatever.

You added that a guy who didn’t bother with religion in the slightest – given that odd definition of it – would be “a member of our species who has failed to develop into a person,” lacking a key power of abstraction and being incapable of complex mental processes. But here you blithely note that people in modern societies “have learned how to deal with their fears and craves without resorting to religion.”

So, what do you mean by “religion”, there? Are you suddenly using it to mean a belief in the supernatural? Or are you still using it to encompass purely secular stuff, saying that modern people – each, presumably, having developed into a person – can deal with their lives and the human condition without even resorting to that?

42

Unless you’re saying that all earthworms actively believe in a god, they would all qualify as atheists. As would sparrows, rocks, iron molecules, the contents of empty boxes…

There’s not exactly a high bar for entry, is what I’m saying. It seems to bug some theists, but by its current common definition atheism really is the default state. You have to make an active effort - actively believing in some entity or another - to not be an atheist.

Which is probably why the article posits that belief in religion is instinctive in humans, since allegedly most people in allegedly all human societies have been religious. However I don’t personally think it follows that religion is instinctive in humans. I think that, instead, humans have a lot of instincts and tendencies that tend to make them receptive/vulnerable to religion when it’s a dominant element in society. Some of these, off the top of my head, might be:

-Belief in the accuracy of authorities. Parents, societal leaders, priests and so on.
-Desire for community and reluctance to contradict the crowd.
-Fear of the unknown and a desire for answers.
-Tendency toward confirmation bias and making false positives while pattern matching
-Tendency to assume deliberate intent in perceived patterns.
-Tendency to reject and ignore data that contradicts their established beliefs.

Note that while all of these would aid a person in becoming religious or in being inducted into a religious organization, none of these are actually a tendency towards religion, and most of them can still be seen in atheists. This is also the foundation for the “believing in UFOs, conspiracies, or that the Cubs are any good is almost like religion!” argument - lots of different behaviors and fervent beliefs are supported by natural human tendencies. This does not make religion the baseline or natural state, of course - it’s just one of many dissimilar things people can get hooked on - different religions themselves being pretty dissimilar to one another too, of course.

Where intelligence probably comes into play is a tendency to question authorities and possibly a greater ability to recognize and reject confirmation bias and other logic errors. I know that I personally ended up an atheist simply because even as a child the religion that I was forcefed didn’t ever ‘click’. I never accepted it as true, because I knew adults weren’t always right, and so I was free to notice that what they were saying didn’t match up with reality and didn’t withstand scrutiny.

That said, there is far from a perfect correlation between intelligence and atheism, and lots of otherwise smart people are religious. (That whole ‘tendency to reject and ignore contradicting data’ thing I mentioned above comes into play here.) I don’t think that religion is fading because we’re getting smarter; I think it’s fading because we’re getting more multicultural. The desire not to offend any of the many religions has driven religion out of our popular culture, allowing a lot of people to notice that things work just fine without it. And when it’s no longer the cultural norm, the problems in a given religion (like its tendency to cling to the cultural norms of two centuries ago) tend to be a lot easier to notice and question.

43

I feel like some people might be missing the point of the article. It’s not about “free will” (which IMHO is an entirely different discussion altogether). It’s more intelligent people tending to become atheist because they are able to use reason and intellect to address problems, rather than instinct or belief in magical forces influencing their lives.

I would disagree a bit. I think it has more to do with information becoming more freely available. At a certain point, once you know that the lights in the sky are giant thermonuclear balls of hydrogen and not various demons, angels and demigods I think it becomes harder to swallow the rest of it.
Although, I also believe that to a certain extent, religion is less about actual belief in God or supernatural creatures controlling our fate as it is a shared system of stories, characters and mythologies that serve as a moral and philosophical framework. To a certain extent, religion isn’t any different than people debating over the minutiae of Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Marvel Cinematic Universe or any other broad fictional universes.

44

I agree - I actively avoided mentioning free will in my comment because I believe it’s beside the point.

I mean, I’d love to have a good discussion about free will, what is is, do we have it, etc, but I don’t think this thread is the place for it.

There’s no reason it can’t be both. In general I don’t think that religion is fazed much by scientific or factual disproof -they’ve been fighting off evolution for generations- but I do know that Mormonism has had some real problems as information about its founders being lying dirtbags came to light. So clearly at least some kinds of information can get past the shield of faith and blind belief.

This may depend on the religion. It’s my vague understanding that jews take great pleasure in debating the minutiae of their religion, but while a lot of christians I know like to study their religion, it’s for the purpose of reinforcement and self-validation, and not for informing their morals and philosophy. Honestly it seems more common for them to project their morals and philosophy onto the religion than vice versa.

Oh, and also none of the fictional canons serve as a moral and philosophical framework anyway, so they’re not comparable in the slightest in that regard. (Putting aside people who self-identify as Jedi, anyway.)

45

I can see others have already commented on the terrible journalism of that article. I really can’t fathom that it is a Newsweek article, but then I stopped reading that mag years ago. They didn’t even bother interviewing scientists with opposing views. What has happened to journalism?

Anyway, just wanted to point out that their entire argument stems from the fall off the historical Greek and Roman empires. It was not the advance of science that made them fall. There were a few different reasons, but it was mainly the slave society that put an end to it.
Christianity spread like wildfire among the slaves. Eventually they started revolting, and it is a sad moment of history as the Christians burned down the Great Library of Alexandria. All that accumulated knowledge lost.
As the population became more Christian, the Roman emperors converted to Christianity and that was pretty much the end as heathen barbarians encroached on every border.
As Europe turned Christian, so started the dark ages. The age of ignorance.

If only the Greeks and Romans had understood how slavery was undermining their society, perhaps things would have been better. But those were the norms of that time.

46

I’m sorry I can’t clarify things better for you. The phenomenology of religion article in Encyclopedia Britannica may be a better read than my little explanation.

47

I propose three propositions that can summarize the OP:

  1. Human beings are inclined to be religious.
  2. Intelligent people are less inclined to be religious.
  3. Free will renders intelligent people atheistic.

And here’s my brief take on them:

  1. Religiosity is present in every social group, with members showing religious elements in various degrees.
  2. Higher intelligence enables less group reliance and more reason or logic in decision-making or problem-solving processes; hence, less religiosity.
  3. Problem-solving processes involve making a choice and, therefore, free will may render intelligent people atheistic.

People who came up with the notion of free will (i.e. ancient Greek thinkers) regarded free will as one’s ability to free oneself from natural instincts and passions with the help of reason. In this acceptation, free will does not allow humans to change their decisions at will – instead, it enables them to control their instinctual and/or irrational nature to make better decisions (become more successful, lead better lives, etc.).

48

I read part of the article, but then it decayed into Idiocracy.

Not sure what that actually means. He seems to claim that stupid people breed more stupid people, when there is no solid evidence to support that. In fact, it appears that every brain cell you have is genetically unique to every other one. Given that, I fail to see how intelligence can possibly be transmissible. We may not be tabula rasa, but we are highly dynamic, so the idea that atheists will be unbreeding themselves into insignificance is simply unsupportable.

How would we discover the religious instinct? It seems to arise on a case by case basis: some people seem to have it, some do not. I was raised by a very religious man, but I managed to escape religion myself. By contrast, William Murray, son of outspoken atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, is a baptist preacher. So, upbringing is obviously not as influential as we might think. We seem to form and develop in unpredictable ways.

Which is to say, I rather doubt that “free will” is a legitimate argument for overcoming our “instincts”. We do and think in ways that make us comfortable (not necessarily in the physical sense), and what we are comfortable with varies tremendously from person to person. What appears to be a religious instinct is more likely an affect of the socialization patterns of this particular species, in which social structures carry through by tradition and lore far longer than they would with a non-verbal species.

49

It just leaves me with the same questions about your explanation, is all.

That article mentions a guy who’d stated that “all religions arise from the experience of the numinous” that “compels not only respect but also reverence, which is the wellspring of religious thought, behavior, and culture.” There’s also talk of “terms that evoke the sense of an encounter with a sublime, suprahuman other.”

But your claim seems to be that an atheist or agnostic with no use for terms that evoke a sublime and suprahuman other can be religious without realizing it, if he’s just dedicated to human reason, right? That respectful folks who are big on some mundane thing that plainly exists are – religiously – indistinguishable from people who say they’ve experienced something numinous that compels reverence?

If so, then I’m not sure why you’d link to that.

50

This is a more complicated and subtle thing to sort out than anyone who has responded to my own post seems to realize. That’s not me playing superior, in case it reads that way, it’s me trying to nudge everyone to think a bit further than they have, including whatever “experts” have done and been referred to.

There is a real difference between declaring that humans are inherently “programmed” such that they formulate magical belief systems, and what I have seen to be the case in my own studies. Let me try a different simile or example, to see if I can get what I’m talking about across.

There are tons of human behaviors which are common across the entire expanse of humanity. Thousands of things that many or even most people end up doing. But most of them are NOT considered to be due to some inherent programming (as from DNA), they are instead recognized as natural and entirely logical reactions to the physical world that humans inhabit, as our own physicalities and our necessarily existing social groups interact with said realities.

Look at fundamental “inventions,” for example, such as using fire for heat and light. Humans do it, but as far as we have seen, no other creature does. Does that mean that humans are programmed by our DNA to use fire like this? No. It is the natural result of the intersection of the fact that we CAN do it, with the fact that our planet ALLOWS us to do it.

This is what religious beliefs are like as well. Religions don’t spring up because humans inherently choose to believe magic as explanations for everything: they come into being as a result of side elements of our existence, such as the fact that we communicate through symbology, combined with the all the social phenomenon associated with acquiring power through dominance behavior.

Another way to put it: we don’t hit each other with rocks and sticks because we are born to do so, we do it because we CAN do it (physical capability) and because it WORKS. Using magical explanations for events and experiences is the same. We don’t do it because it is built into us, we do it because we can,and because it works (though not directly!), from a social point of view.

51

Maybe that’s not the right term. What I meant is not so much that Star Wars or Harry Potter serves a moral guide for people’s behavior. More like they are shared stories about good and evil and whatnot that serves as a common point of reference. I feel like religion almost serves a similar purpose for most people.
Like the Ancient Greeks were pretty educated and they had an early form of astronomy. Somehow I doubt that they thought the sun was literally Apollo driving a big chariot across the sky. But they still told stories about him.

52

If you’re just trying to say that religion is part of the culture, then yes, religion is part of the culture. Most people, at least in America, know who Noah is, and have even heard of that Jesus person.

53

Given that religion invented evil in the first place and defines it to serve its own ends, yeah.

54

Errrr-no. Evil can be pretty easily defined from a social utility perspective. When Thad noticed that it didn’t feel good when Og punched him in the face, he didn’t need a religion telling him that it was bad. You’re right that various religions like to tweak the definitions of what’s evil to their own ends, though.

To relate this to the OP a bit, I think that is kind of an example of the prevalent, mistaken idea that religion is foundational to civilized society, which could be considered related to the mistaken idea that religion is instinctive in humans. Many religions have things in them that reflect civilized society, like rules against murder (except of the unfaithful), but we can be virtually certain that the religions just adopted existing social norms and codified them into their own rulesets to give the impression that their gods were the source of morality. Which they’re pretty clearly not.

55

Not directly, no. Belief, it seems to me, isn’t something that one can just choose to change. To use an analogy relating to preference, if one prefers chocolate over vanilla, one can’t just decide to like vanilla more. One could choose to stop eating chocolate and/or have more exposure to vanilla and maybe over time, due to these different experiences, that preference will change. Or maybe not.

Similarly, if one believes in a god or gods, or one doesn’t, one cannot just choose to believe different. One can take action to expose oneself to an opposing belief, like an atheist attending various religious services, doing meditations and rituals and prayers, reading from various spiritual leaders, etc. But it seems to me belief, in this sense, necessarily has (or lacks) some experiential aspect that can’t be simply chosen or reasoned into or out of.

So, my point being, intelligence, or more precisely curiosity, encourages one to increase the breadth of one’s experience and exposure and evaluate it with as minimal bias as possible.

Religion and theism are not the same thing. Atheism is the opposite of theism, by definition, but not of religion. Thus while one that rejects theism is necessarily an atheist, one can reject religion without rejecting theism and, thus but not necessarily be an atheist.

I think it’s fair to say that we recognize causality and it’s typically a helpful adaptation to make causal links, even if flawed. Consider an ancestor in the woods and hears a random rustling in the leaves, if he assumes it’s dangerous and is wrong, no big deal, but if he ignores it, it’s bad. This of course led to us attributing aspects that we couldn’t easily explain to SOMETHING and is likely how religion first formed.

That said, I don’t think intelligence is fighting against that as much as directing it. After all, is not science itself about finding causes? We know lightning or earthquakes aren’t caused by angry deities but by complex meteorological or geological processes.

But then again, for plenty of people, understanding the precise reason behind some things isn’t that important, unless it has impact on our decisions. As in, when someone wants to use his phone to access the internet, whether they understand all the technological underpinnings or think it’s powered by invisible elves, unless they think they need to behave one way for one explanation and differently for the other, it doesn’t matter. However, it would obviously be comically awful if a smartphone engineer believed the same thing.

And in that, we’re ALWAYS going to be stuck with gaps in our knowledge that we will explain away or glass over to some degree. Even in science, for example, we don’t know what dark matter or dark energy are, though we have some candidate possibilities, instead we accept the unknown until such a time that it is known or an alternate even more accurate theory supersedes it. As long as some people continue that investigation and we don’t just write it off as unknowable, which is ultimately the danger of dogmatic explanation, not limited just to religion. Unless we can prove something is unknowable (a famous example being the halting problem), but even then we at least have certainty that it’s unknowable rather than just an assertion.

Ultimately, it seems to me that intelligence, it this case, is best defined by that insatiable curiosity that black boxes or god of the gap types of explanations aren’t satisfactory. This sort of curiosity makes the sorts of gods of our ancestors largely or completely unnecessary for whatever their initial explanatory purpose was, but then, I wonder, are we not just replacing those anthropomorphizations as deities with more abstract concepts detached from ritual and dogma?

56

Intelligent people can create better rationalizations to maintain their religious beliefs. Or their favored political ideology.

I don’t think sacred beliefs are the domain of the religious, but general human psychology. If you think kicking a baby is despicable but kicking a rock isn’t then I conclude you have sacred beliefs about life. This is a defense of atheists against theists who accuse them of being nihilists. If you’re a nihilist, never mind.

2,000 years in the future:

Like the Ancient Americans were pretty educated and they had an early form of space travel. Somehow I doubt that they thought Jesus was literally God or his sacrifice cleansed humanity’s sins. But they still told stories about him.

There are seemingly normal people who lack or are severely deficient in mental constructs some might consider basic aspects of humanity.

Aphantasia: lack of mental imagery.
Sociopathy: lack of empathy and remorse.
Ahedonia: lack of pleasure.
Congenital analgesia: lack of pain.

I’m not aware of evidence for a spectrum for sacredness appreciation. If one exists, I’m guessing poets, literal tree huggers, and people who have heart palpitations when viewing art have a lot of it.

Maybe someone could hypothetically purge themselves of sacred beliefs, but they would probably be considered inhuman by others. They wouldn’t believe in love, the dignity of life, or the beauty of nature. At least nihilists can engage in fictionalism, or argue that their preferences still exist even if they don’t have objective meaning.

I’m an atheist, as is David Chapman. One can believe in science without succumbing to scientism.

In your linked video, Minchin indicates that he is an insignificant bit of carbon, yet he places a great deal of importance on living life and loving his wife. He didn’t say that love is merely a cascade of chemical reactions in the brain designed by evolution to maximize reproductive fitness via pair bonding.

Are you a rational egoist, or do you think justice and society have a special value separate from your own interests?

57

Why not?

You seem to be saying that people with a sociopathic lack of empathy and remorse exist alongside those of us who score higher on an empathy-and-remorse spectrum. And that there are people who score low – possibly zero – on a ‘pleasure’ spectrum, just like there are people who do likewise on a ‘mental imagery’ spectrum.

So what if, as you’re saying, there’s someone who scores a zero on, uh, ‘sacredness appreciation’ – but who scores really high on empathy and remorse? Someone who still gets a high score on the imagery spectrum and the pleasure spectrum, and so gets a single glistening teardrop rolling down his cheek when painting the beauty of nature from memory or whatever – and who also genuinely cares about other people, as per his high score on the ‘empathy’ spectrum?

Why would he need a separate ‘sacredness’ score to feel love and respect life and gasp at the beauty of nature? If he scored low on the ‘empathy’ spectrum and the ‘imagery’ spectrum and the ‘pleasure’ spectrum, then I don’t see how a high score on some kind of ‘sacredness’ spectrum would help – and if he already scored high on those, then I don’t see how a low score on ‘sacredness’ would hurt.

58

I don’t know about the ancient Greeks, but certainly the Romans, by the time of the late Republic or early Empire, viewed the Greek gods as just fun characters to tell stories about (like Captain America is to us), or at most as symbols (like Uncle Sam). Ovid, for instance, said of his own works that they were “ancient poets’ monstrous lies”.

But that just meant that when the pendulum eventually swung back to religion, it did it in the form of new religions, namely the mystery cults (of which Christianity has proven to be the most enduring).

59

Towards the top of his post he says that if you think it’s worse to kick babies than rocks then he would conclude that you have “sacred beliefs” about life. This is putting a very weird definition on the term “sacred beliefs” - perhaps something like “beliefs that are (presumably) both taken ex nihilo and which seem vaguely related to morality”. Personally, as one who doesn’t hate the english language (much) I’m quite bothered by this weird redefinition of the term - but under this redefinition of the term a person without “sacred beliefs” would have no morality whatsoever and be a complete sociopath, so yeah, they probably wouldn’t get invited to a lot of parties.

60

I considered that – but, after discussing sociopathy in terms of lacking empathy and remorse, marshmallow said that “I’m not aware of a spectrum for sacredness appreciation.” I took that to mean marshmallow was aware of a spectrum for empathy and remorse – which I figured would react to baby-kicking a little differently than it does to rock-kicking.