But surely one’s intelligence level can influence one’s polical leanings, as opposed to one’s race or gender.
They absolutely are. Not all religious people are stupid, but the more intelligent they are, the less likely they are to be religious because they are more likely to be critical thinkers and to be skeptical. Religious beliefs are products of emotion and culture, not critical thinking. It is not possible to arrive at a belief in magic spirits by way of empirical, critical, scientific, analytical or logical process. It’s possible to be capable of critical thinking and still believe in gods, but it is less likely that critical thinkers will believe in gods than that they won’t. Even the smart people who do have religious beliefs tend to be a lot more abstract, less dogmatic and less literal about them.
By contriving a completely unsupportable hypothesis that makes even less sense that what the hypothesis is invented to explain.
This is not true at all, actually. Stupid people are quite capable of curiosity and hypothesis. More significantly, they are more likely to simply accept whatever explanations they are given by others, which means they are more likely to accept religious explanations without question.
That’s actually not what believers have done, that’s what critical thinkers have done. Believers just accept whatever is told to them withou questioning it. It’s not like rall religious people just uniquely come to those conclusions on their own, or by observing the universe. They receive it as a cultural artifact and accept it uncritically.
There are a number of things wrong with this paragraph. First of all, evolution isn’t supposed to explain the origin of life or the universe. Evolution explains only what happened after life got started. Evolution refers to nothing but the (absolutely incontrovertable) fact that the frequency of alleles changes within biological populations. To put it more simply, mutation and heredity, when subjected to a orting mechanism such as natural selection, will result in adapation and eventual speciation in biological populations. Not a single bit of this is taken on faith. All of it is demonstrable fact. So, for that matter, is the proven fact (not belief) that all living species are commonly descended from a single ancestor. None of this is taken on “faith.” It’s astonishing that you could have posted here so long without knowing that.
Your incredulity regarding abiogenesis (a separate process from evolution, and something that is irrelevant to evolutionary theory) is not a result of “intelligence,” but (I’m sorry) simple ignorance. These are not questions without answers, just questions that you personally haven’t tried to find the answers to. Deciding that something must be magic because you don’t personally understand it is the opposite of critical thinking.
No, science isn’t faith based. Nothing in evolutionary theory relies on faith.
This is called the ad populum fallacy. If lots of people believe it, it miust be true. A couple of thousand years ago, virtually all of humanity believed that the sun and the moon were gods. So what? You know who figured out they weren’t gods? Smart people.
Sure, AGW skeptics comes to mind.
So you’re defining religion as the belief in theistic evolution, as opposed to Biblical (or Islamic) fundamentalism?
Which ancient religious tradition says, “In the beginning God created evolution”?
Those aren’t skeptics, they’re true believers.
Some people belive that humans are incapable of harming the Earth because it’s sooooooo big, or because God will fix it for us.
Others are skeptical.
Because they find the truth to be inconvenient. 
You’ve posted lots of words that don’t address my point. To be honest, I don’t care to get involved in the argument, but continue as you wish…as thankless (and fruitless) a pursuit as it may be.
The words “not all conservatives are stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives” are clear and specifically do not say “most conservatives are stupid”. You consider yourself conservative, right? Fine – you can be an embodiment of Dio’s argument simply by insisting on the correctness of the fallacy you’ve had pointed out to you.
Rather amusing, if I do say so.
Not necessarily. Religious beliefs are largely the result of what people are told by their parents, grandparents, other relatives and loved ones, and, secondarily, I believe, by their culture. Thus these beliefs become deeply ingrained at an impressionable age and it takes quite a lot to overcome them. When you combine that with the fact that most people are simply too busy living their lives and that the other side leaves too much unanswered on its own, there is little that the average citizen is exposed to that is sufficiently strong to overcome these deep-seated beliefs…or at least not to the point where one is ready to discard them wholesale. They may morph and change somewhat as time goes by but it seems the kernel of belief in some sort of creator remains largely intact.
I’m willing to grant you that. What I’m not willing to grant however, is that focusing on this particular absense of critical thinking equates to an overall lack ability to think critically. People can be quite capable of critical thinking even though they may not be applying it in ways that you think it’s obvious that they should. A person can be a brilliant engineer or architect or surgeon, capable of developing new methods and blazing new trails that no one before had thought possible, and yet still believe in God. They may also be in error as to the best ways to care for their lawns. Everyone has areas where they either lack or do not use critical thinking, but that doesn’t mean they are incapable of it or too stupid to use it. You are attempting to single out one particular area where people you disagree with politically don’t use critical thinking and are trying to claim that it proves they have no or very little critical thinking ability at all. And that just isn’t so.
Sort of like myself, you mean.
I’ll accept that many people are largely inclined to accept explanations they are given by others. But like I said above, this usually comes at a time when they are at an impressionable age, and it comes from people they know, love and trust, and who are regarded as the people one should listen to even if one doesn’t understand because they have the big-picture perspective and supposed adult wisdom that children and young people lack. And like I said, it takes a lot to overcome those teachings, especially if there are so many apparent holes in the alternative explanation, as we’re about to get into downthread.
But what people who are believers hear coming from the evolution crowd is that creationism is stupid and evolution disproves its validity. What they don’t hear is people defining evolution down so finely that it isn’t supposed to explain creation. And of course, since an important part of religion is to explain creation, evolution does little to dissuade them since it can’t explain it either.
It’s taken on faith that random molecular activity somehow created life and reproductive ability and a splitting of that reproductive ability into separate entities that not only require those entities to meet in reproductive activity in order to create reproduction (something that seems anti-intuitive to me in terms of being advantageous in furthering the species, which is supposedly a key driving force in evolutionary mutation), but to become able to do so without the species dying off in the process .
We’ve discussed this before and you haven’t been able to answer the questions that have arisen. You simply take evolution back to where there is no answer and then state that evolution isn’t intended to answer those kinds of questions.
No, but the idea that life as we know it is the result of random molecular activity followed by evolutionary process is. And that is the idea that people among the general population have in mind when the subject turns to what appears to be the dueling hypothoses of evolution vs. some sort of intelligent design.
No, that isn’t the point at all. The point is that if most people throughout history and in every part of the world believe something, then that something is intrinsic to human nature and cannot therefore be singled out as indicative of stupidity…unless you just want to maintain that humanity as a whole, which I think is pretty obviously wrong when you consider all that mankind, many of whom were unquestioning believers, has accomplished in terms of agriculture, architecture, engineering, science, mathematics, etc., prior to the advent of today’s technology which gives greater credence to certain aspects of evolution…or at least aspects that many people think of as belonging to evolution.
I understand the phrase perfectly well. I just wanted to see to see if Dio thinks that belief in God = stupidity, given that so much has been accomplished throughout the world’s history by people who believed in God.
ETA: Damn, that’s one hell of a TLDR mofo (or "muh-fuh, as I was corrected by a black acquaintance once upon a time. 
“What is it with you white people? It’s not like we say ‘mowther fowcker’. It’s ‘muh fuh’, just like it sounds when we say the whole words”).
Ah yes. Like most climate scientists believe in AGW
From here
May I suggest employing the “ad populum fallacy” rebuttal isn’t exactly a worthy debating point ?
AGW is not a belief, but a demonstrable fact.
Yes. Agreed. One trait of intelligent people, however, is to question these assumptins.
I haven’t said that it does. I think that critical thinkers who have religious beliefs simply do not TRY to think critically about religion, or if they do so, they adjust their beliefs to (as I said before) a more abstract and non-literal model which at least avoids contradicting any obvious evidence. They still believe in spite of their critical thinking skills, not because of them, even if they find ways to modify their beliefs so as to avoid cognitive dissonence, or conflict with what their critical thinking ability tells them about the universe. I think you’ll agree, for instance, that people who have any sense at all will quickly abandon a literal reading of the Genesis creation story, even they don’t abandon a belief in a creator.
Most people who accept evolution are believers, so let’s be careful about suggesting that there’s any necessary divide there.
I agree that part of the problem with explaining evolution is the widespread misunderstanding of what it actually explains and doesn’t explain, and I myself usually try to take the time to tell people what it isn’t before I talk about what it is, but this misperception is actively encouraged by the creationist industry. That is, these misunderstandings are encouraged and perpetuated by people who make money by selling books and videos and lecture tours to people who they want to stay in the dark and who they want to contnue believing that evolution is atheistic, or anti-theistic.
This is not only not t"taken on faith," it’s not even a hypothesis. Nobody thinks this is what happened. This is not an accurate representation of eithjer abiogentic or evolutionary theory.
[quote]
We’ve discussed this before and you haven’t been able to answer the questions that have arisen. You simply take evolution back to where there is no answer and then state that evolution isn’t intended to answer those kinds of questions.[/quoite]
It isn’t. If you only want to talk about abiogenesis then don’t call it evolution.
Abiogensis is not that mysterious either, by the way. There are multiple workable models of how it coul have happened, even though it will probably never be possible to definitively confirm the correct process. What matters is that it has been confirmed that magic was not necessary.
This is not a hypothesis held by any biologist.
I’m not saying it’s indicative of stupidity. I’m saying that questioning those things is indicative of intelligence.
The study referenced in the OP seems to me something more in the realm of pseudoscience, which the skeptical ought to be the first to reject.
It already has been basically rejected once examined.
Sorry, Dio, but I’ve been pressed into duty to take our carpet cleaner and go clean my neice’s carpet (as a birthday present, no less. How could I say no? :D). Anyway, there’s only a little about your last post I would disagree with and most of that lies in areas of exposition, so for now I’ll just let things ride. I’ll return later perhaps.
And others are skeptical that corporate money corrupts scientists but government money doesn’t.
The great thing about science is that you don’t have to take the scientists’ word for anything.
Your insinuation also implies that the government would have some kind of motive for engaging in a massive conspiracy across multiple administrations (and the governments of every developed country in the world) to deceive the populace into believing in climate change that isn’t really occuring. What is the motive?
I think this is an especially curious thing to suggest given the fact that the US government is very much a pro-corporate government. Whatever is in the corporate interest is in the government interst. Whatever is not is not. So what’s the reason for the giant global conspiracy, and how do they keep all those hundreds of thousands of scientists from letting the cat out of the bag? Is the Antichrist involved? Do you also believe that evolution is a government conspiracy? How about gravity?
Actually, govt is an evolutionary and gravitational conspiracy.