weswelker#83

God makes you stupid, researchers claim

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/12/god_boffins/

godef

OK, so you borrowed the headline from the article you linked to to title your post, but in fact it's not very accurate per the research cited. The gist of what I read is not that belief in God makes you stupid, but rather it's stupidity that makes you believe in God. Not that this makes much difference.

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Wildo7

I think he was joking. But I'd put it like this: Having a lower IQ makes it easier to believe in god.

otis p. driftwood

I don't believe in "god" but I know a lot of really smart people who do and a lot of really stupid people who don't. So I'm not sure what you were trying to say, Wildo...beyond just taking a cheap shot at people who believe, I mean.

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Wildo7

That really has nothing to do with what I said. A lower IQ person is more likely to believe in god. That's a statistical correlation, not a causation. The smartest man in the world could believe in god and that statement would still be true. But, if you have a lower IQ, you are more likely to believe in god than someone with a higher IQ. That is all it means, there's nothing else to read into it. And it's not a "cheap shot," it's the logical conclusion of the results of the study, sorry if you don't like it.

Lifer

a logical conclusion if you choose to believe the study. thanks for sharing.

otis p. driftwood

Didn't read the study, just answering your post which I thought could stand on it's own.

You never said "according to the study" you just stated flatly that unintelligent people (like Carl Sagan, right?) find it easier to believe in god.

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godef

Yeah, that nails it.

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Wildo7

haha ok, sorry, responding to the study by making that statement doesn't intrinsically mean "according to the study." Common, that was well understood.

PatsFanInVa

The flippant disregard of complex causality, or even the arrow of causality, in the OP's summing-up was pretty obviously a joke. Dissecting it further probably serves no function.

It's worth noting that we all say "God" and mean different things.

At a certain level of intelligence, at a certain point of history, it becomes impossible to believe certain things.

For example: If I believe strongly that the sky is green, to continue to believe this and simultaneously incorporate the knowledge that, for example, the University of North Carolina team color is Carolina Blue, I have three choices:

1) I can rename the UNC color, for my purposes, Carolina Green, therefore rendering moot the faculty of language (but not mute, thereby allowing for the phenomenon of vocal conservativism); In forumulation (1) I insist that everybody is wrong to call the color Carolina Blue because really everybody but me has misnamed "green" and "blue"
2) I can simply believe different things at different times. If there is no Carolina jersey around, I can believe green is blue and vice versa. If there is one around, I can say they have miscolored this particular jersey.
3) Having discovered this objective reference for "blue", and realizing I have been wrong, I can incorporate this new information and move forward, admitting that what I use to call "green" is in fact "blue."

Early in our history, we could believe, for example, that God physically dwelled somewhere in the area of the clouds. In fact, a russian cosmonaut radiod back that he could put the whole question of God to rest, having gone higher than all the clouds and not having made contact with said Supreme Being. By that time, of course, none of us really literally believed that God physically lived in the clouds.

So, among religious people, these ideas changed. Things that were literally true became allegorical.

The problem is that religions change slowly and conservatively. They are also subject to periods of so-called fundamentalist backlash. Such movements try to "return" to a literal meaning from a different time, and a different context - or more accurately, a reconstruction of what that return would constitute.

This leaves our modern era awash in ideas of "God." Many of them are at odds with data about our natural world gleaned from empirical research. Some ideas of God are not so encumbered.

The intellectually honest man, who has seen the Carolina Blue jersey, and who knows that the sky is approximately that color, can not call the sky green. If he belongs to the "Greenist" church, which insists green is blue and vice versa, and that the idea of God is inextricably bound up with the greenness of blue and the blueness of green, he will henceforth likely say he does not believe in God.

The intellectually astute man is more likely to seek out experience and ideas which call various conceptions of God into question, and is more likely to value the conclusions of reason, than the intellectually impoverished man. In the above example, he is more likely to go out in search of the UNC jersey in question and hence create the dilemma in the first place.

He also feels bound to meet the challenge of new data, whereas the non-thinker is more likely to say "doesn't matter, XXX still din't happen," and construct his argument based on disbelief in mounting evidence to the contrary of a church's dictates.

One can not help notice that not ALL intelligent people are atheists; there is a reason for this. Not ALL concepts of God are incompatible with reason. Similarly not all concepts of God demand mental gymnastics to make facts fit a preestablished pattern.

But those on which established religions rely are quite likely to.

To many people, this is the only definition of religion or God available.

Just my .02,

PFnV