Nope. I do not know everything.
It could be. Got any evidence? Anything at all?
Wel… The fact that you read this … written by a human… Who happens to be me…
Start questioning how you come to reading and go further back and then at last you come to the famous theory of the Big Bang.
I am also waiting for that to be explained because as far as I am informed at this moment, it is not explained what caused this. It is of course also not certain this whole theory is the correct one).
This example I give you is of course a very simple approach of questioning the cause of life and the cause of the existing of the universe.
The more is discovered about the universe the more intriguing and unanswered questions rise.
Salaam. A
… or because they chose religion for themselves. Also, most of your trumpeted people who were “raised religious and brainwashed into it” aren’t “true believers” - they are casual people who believe vaguely in God and Jesus, say they follow the Ten Commandments, maybe have their dad’s old Bible laying around, but otherwise only set foot inside a church for weddings. THAT is where most “theists” are.
Um, well, when you have a group of 85 people and another group of 15 people, which group is more likely to have a statistical variation, and by how much?
(Ugh, I think I had a question like that on a final once)
I spit on IQ tests. I know people with very high IQs who couldn’t write a 5 page essay about any chosen topic in history, and if they did, it would be blathering and wildly inaccurate. I don’t consider that “intelligent.”
I mean, a good chunk of the same people you trumpet as “intelligent critical thinkers who question what they are taught” probably think that Abraham Lincoln led the Civil War to free the slaves (granted, a goodly number of theists are the same).
They may be able to solve logic puzzles quickly, but that doesn’t make them any smarter than anyone else. Big whoop, I can dish out a 20 page essay on the Scythian influence on modern Russia, or the water distribution issues in Central Asia… doesn’t mean I’m any smarter or dumber than someone who can score high on an IQ test.
For the record, I did score rather high on IQ tests in my childhood, and they crammed me in the “gifted” classes, but I refuse to take them today. I prefer my knowledge of history and culture. I also scored in the 98th percentile on the ASVAB test, which got the military humping my leg for years. Much like my first love - she scored something like 1560 on the SATs, worked for NASA intern programs throughout high school, and was generally a genius on both sides of the equation. She ended up teaching english in Burkina Faso and being an editor/writer. She COULD be a math genius, and her IQ is probably in a high percentile, but she doesn’t care about that. IQ means nothing to me. I’ve known too many people with high IQs who are just plain stupid individuals.
So if you want to do a test for intelligence, I suggest something more along the lines of a combination between logic/solving and written sociology. :-p
To further this IQ hijack, I know people with high IQs who have little common sense and not a great deal of wisdom. IQ tests can’t measure these things, but to me, they are most important. Granted, someone who is a slow learner and can’t retain information probably has their own set of problems, but a person who has average or above average intelligence and a good dose of common sense and wisdom has it all over the freakin’ genius who is deluded and without a clue.
Thank you… You just solved the dilemma I posted about earlier in this thread…
Salaam. A
[QUOTE=ZagadkaI spit on IQ tests. I know people with very high IQs who couldn’t write a 5 page essay about any chosen topic in history, and if they did, it would be blathering and wildly inaccurate. I don’t consider that “intelligent.”
I So if you want to do a test for intelligence, I suggest something more along the lines of a combination between logic/solving and written sociology. :-p[/QUOTE]
So, are you saying it would be impossible to scientifically study the relationship, if any, between intelligence and religiosity? Or merely that standard IQ tests would not be adequate for the purpose?
Both.
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There is no method of measuring “intelligence.” There is not even a definition of what “intelligence” is.
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There is no way you can pull a sample from such a diverse group of people. You have people who go to expensive private religious schools, and you have people who never graduated high school. An average or median measure of “intelligence,” if such a thing were possible, would have a HUGE standard deviation.
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Given questionable polling practices, high standard deviation, unbalanced groups, no control group, and other situations, any such study would be dismissed as stastically irrelevant.
In other words, ironically, only an idiot would accept it, while a critical thinking, intelligent person would point out that it was a flawed study.
Personally, I’m quite sure such a study would rate theists lower than atheists, but there are a number of factors behind that.
If you were going to do such a study, it wouldn’t be a one-issue questionairre. You would break it up by economic class, religion, sect, age, region, etc. I’m quite sure you’d find more correlation between “intelligence” and region or economic class than intelligence and any specific religion…
I would like to offer up two people I have known personally for a number of years. I know their ins and their outs.
The first, we will call Steve. Steve is an auto mechanic. He never did well in school, grew up poor, never went to college, and describes himself as stupid. However, when something new (say, a new model of car) comes along, Steve sits down with the manuals and diligently each night and studies. It is hard for him to learn, and he is slightly dyslexic, but nonetheless, he gets by, and does well for himself. He is highly respected by everyone he knows, and after a lifetime of hard work, provided for his family.
The second we will call Tom. Tom has a high IQ. He is a very smart person, and graduated from a prominent university in 4 years with a degree in engineering. However, he is very sloppy. He likes to give everyone nicknames, and rarely thinks before saying anything. He isn’t a mean person, he is just, well, unrefined. He does things like call his girlfriend “woman” and wakes her up to ask her to get him some orange juice. People don’t dislike him, but they find him annoying to the point of physically removing him from their presence.
Which sounds like a more “intelligent” person?
(hint: The second person has been physically assaulted for his mere annoyance three times since I’ve known him)
Oh, how perceptive of you. Of course that is exactly what I meant—virgin sacrifice and Thor were right at the tip of my tongue.
But then again, perhaps not being open-minded or, as I said before, “never believing anything that is outside of your rigid area of knowledge or your belief system” could be a good thing in an atheist? I mean, why not? In being an atheist, they obviously got it right on the first try, so what reason would they have to think about anything else outside of that?
Actually, you are. There are some great Scandinavian epics and morality tales.
But don’t let your disdain for anything “not real” get in the way of your education. 
Yes, all theists believe in volcano gods and sacrifice virgins, and all atheists are amoral heathens and rapists.
Your enlightened view of the world and fellow mankind, surely arrived at after careful thought and years of study, has intrigued me. May I subscribe to your magazine?
Brrrt!
You might want to check out the username on that person you’re debating…
The ability to do well on IQ tests?
Ever hear of deductive reasoning? Maybe they’ve proven to themselves there’s no God, but just haven’t quite made their way around to all that Big Bang stuff yet.
As for the question of an athiest’s perception of theists:
I believe the stereotypically athiest perception of religious people as stupid, or just weak-minded (and I know many athiests who feel this way), has something to do with the fact that arguing religion seems to really bring out a person’s critical thinking defficiencies. Generally speaking, the only time athiests knowingly interact with Christians (they interact with them all the time, but they don’t know they’re Christians, so they can’t make any kind of intelligence/beliefs correlation) enough to make a judgment as to wether or not they’re stupid, is when they’re discussing religion with them. These religious discussions can get pretty heated, and when they do, they usually leave a bitter taste in the participants’ mouths, and the bitter tastes are the ones that get remembered.
Not to mention that starting out in this thread with “as an atheist” earlier in the thread. :smack:
Yup, I’m paying attention.
OK, playtime over. The universe has always existed.
Sorry if I seemed evasive or insincere but, frankly, this thread and others like it stinks of intolerance and hypocrisy. The superior attitude of many fellow atheists I come across is simply unjustified given the enormous gaps which appear in their own belief system upon the briefest examination.
Physicalism, a rigorous explanation of which I linked to in my second post in this thread, requires a great deal of bullet-biting and jumping through logical hoops in order to be applied convincingly to concepts, maths, truth and the like - one cannot simply dismiss the metaphysical out of hand. But if one does not deny the metaphysical then one is left with a dualist universe, and Ockham’s Razor insistently demands that one of the two be chopped away.
Let us, each of us, put our own house in order before we judge the solidity of the foundations of others. That is what this message board is about.
So your answer to the question “What is the cause?” is “There is no cause”. How is that more convincing than “I don’t know that particular detail, but why should that convince me of something totally imaginary and fabricated?”.
If there is a hole in my worldview, why should that lead me to switch to another one that is nothing but a hole?
Now this is the aspect of the OP that I find most intriguing.
Let’s say my friend told me for real (as he did facetiously one time to some Jehovah’s Witnesses) that he worshipped Thor, the Norse god of Thunder.
In other words, thunder and lightning happen because Thor wills it so, and any other manifestly physical cause is merely subordinate to the will of Thor. In other words, when we point out to him that thunder and lightning are caused by electrostatic differences in adjacent clouds, he either steadfastly maintains that they are caused when Thor violently connects his mighty hammer Mjolner with something. Tha, or he claims that the ancient writings are not clear in their interpretation, and that if one thinks of one of the clouds as Mjolner and the other as the shields of the Cloud Giants (or what have you, I’m not up on my Norse mythology), then clearly the influence of Thor is at work in manipulating the air currents, humidity, and adiabatic pressures in such a way that the clouds come together to make thunder and lightning.
While we might consider that the most important thing about the workings of thunder would be how it increases our understanding of that phenomenon and how it helps us understand other related physical phenomena, he insists over and over again that the most important thing, no matter how you have to abstract the interpretaion of Thor or manipulate the facts to fit, is that the will of Thor as he is described to us is behind it all.
You can’t exactly prove he’s wrong, but why the insistence when it is not necessary to explain what is observed, and adds absolutely nothing to our understanding of thunder? He replies that belief in Thor is the only thing that provides comfort and guidance in a dark, thundery world, and we would all be happier in our lives if we believed in Thor. So just cram him in however he fits, mmmkay?
Eventually, you have to throw up your hands and accept that you are dealing with an obsessed, crippled mind. This might not have been the case when Thor was an actual, going concept in the absence of any real understanding, but it makes not one bit of sense now to keep insisting that belief in him is essential.
Yet, somehow, we are encouraged to be more respectful when the God mentioned is the Judeo-Christo-Muslim god or any of the others people today believe in.
You can’t just make a blanket statement that they are stupid, or childlike, or irrational. It’s just that you’re left staring at this short wall that the person’s otherwise intelligent mind refuses to jump over.
I feel the same sadness for those devoted to any limited, supposedly “complete” explanation of the Universe that I feel for those limited in any other way. I am perhaps less tolerant, however, because it’s all based on choice.
Priceguy, I have nowhere advocated switching to become a theist - surely I would have done so myself!
My complaint concerns the attitude that atheism is some kind of ‘default’, and that atheists are justified in judging the intelligence or childishness of those who believe in God without any rigorous introspection of their own. I certainly wouldn’t describe theism as ‘nothing but hole’ - I might have no need of God, or indeed of the metaphysical, but it is certainly no walk in the park to set forth a consistent atheistic position covering every philosophical detail and argument.
Well, it is an explanation borne of General Relativity, the predicted consequences of which have been verified against all the odds. “I don’t know” is not an explanation, and bold propositions without any accompanying explanation are almost the definition of “unconvincing”.
Religious affiliation is not, in and of itself, a big clue about another person’s intelligence. I grew up Catholic, and some of the sharpest critical thinkers I’ve known have been Jesuit priests. Catholics run the gamut from well-rounded renaissance men/women to hateful, drooling scabs and I suspect it’s the same in most other denominations. And of course, there are hateful, drooling, scabby atheists and Wiccans as well. And cool, beautiful ones.
Do you use your religious beliefs as a guide to help you make hard moral decisions? Good. That’s what they’re for.
Do you ask your clergyman to make those decisions for you? Bad. Religious doctrines are guidelines, not crutches. I stopped attending church about the time they started trying to tell me who to vote for. And any churchman who offers to make hard decisions for you should be defrocked and feathered.
Do you think a person must be defective for embracing a value system that includes, say, the Virgin Birth, avoidance of pork products, aliens in volcanos, or uncaring pagan deities whose intrigues affect human history? Whatever. Any religion will have some kind of bullshit (“Beliefs that would embarrass a gorilla,” as Philip Roth put it) that’s there mainly for symbolic value. The adherants who fixate on these as Truth From God’s Mouth are defective; the ones who see it in context of a larger tapestry are well-adjusted (in that one regard, at least).
Then what is your beef with me? I said I don’t know what caused the Big Bang. What’s your big problem with that?
It is. Nonexistence is the default assumption. If there is no evidence for X, the conclusion is that X doesn’t exist, not that I have to show evidence that X doesn’t exist.
Compared to setting forth a consistent theistic position, it certainly is. I’ve never claimed to have perfect understanding of the universe, just that my explanation is heaps better than the theists’.