Intelligence and God

[Jon Miller]

No, it isn't even that. It is your comment that 'absense of evidence is evidence of absense'. This statement is to general to hit the point.

We can have evidence of something... (Neutrino oscillation implies Neutrino mass)

We can have evidence against something.... (like Neutrino Mass being against the SO5 (I could be misremembering the theory) expansion to the Standard Model)

We can have absense of evidence (Like them looking for the mass of the neutrino for all those years, but not finding it)

None of these three things have any relation to no evidence for God, the supernatural, or 'flying spaggethi monsters' . Basically we have had not experiments that could possibly measure God... we have not set any limits to His existence.

It is the setting limits to something's existence, like that of the Higgs (which I do believe they will find at LHC), that gives evidence of absense.

Applying your statements as you are is entirely unscientific.

Jon Miller

[Jon Miller]

Your reply, btw, entirely missed the point.

Please think about my posts, before you reply again.

JM

[Pekka]

drs, that statement has lots of problems.

Because you are basically saying, that superstisious people are intelligent because they recognize the patterns in superstitions, and therefore you are saying that superstitions themselves are connected to intelligence.

That is not logical. It is usually like numerology, you see what you want to see. I thought you would have made the exact opposite conclusion. As in, we understand the superstition, but we also see that it makes no real sense. Just because it doesn't make sense in the real world doesn't mean it's intelligent.

Case and point most tribes hundreds of years back. They had all kinds of weird things going on, you consider it to be intelligent action, or even more so, you have to connect pattern recognitiion to superstition, something you have not yet done.

[Blake]

Blake, you say that your atheism rests on your intuition. Many Hard atheists say that it is just logic. As such, you passed at least the first test of intellectual honesty that many hard atheists fail.

Most intuition can be rationalized, but curiously there are questions which rational thought cannot answer, but intuition readily does so.
I also choose to believe things that actually go against rational thought - Karma is one such thing, my reasons may well be pragmatic, while Karma the spiritual concept is rationally bogus (actions have consequences and that's it), the idea of "what goes around comes around" is quite solid. I believe in Karma basically because I admit I'm not able to fully evaluate the consequences of my actions, so I choose to believe that actions taken in the spirit of goodness have generally good consequences (for me, personally) even if the exact mechanisms lie beyond my understanding/foresight and may not actually eventuate.
I certainly recognize that if all people had a strong belief in Karma the world would be a good deal nicer (and by strong belief, I mean acting on that belief and not just believing it).

I suppose that's diverging off-thread, but my point is that spirituality can be beneficial and thus I don't reject it on the basis of rationality alone. Ultimately I'm pragmatic.

Funny that many hard ("fanatic") atheists hold rationality and logic to be sacred with some divine quality . They don't realize just how much blind faith they have in logic - treating logic as an ends and not a means.

[DrS]

Jon,

In the cases of SO5, neutrino mass, Higgs, etc... there is a priori reason for the hypothesis, even if that reason is mathematical fitting (Dirac and the antimatter for example). In the case of FSM, there is no a priori reason to hypothesize it's existence.

You claim to be agnostic towards FSM. I'm arguing that its a fundamentally different agnosticism than that towards say... tachyons, which may ultimately fill a mathematical niche, but not ever make a light go on, so to speak.

[DrS]

Pekka,

I'd also argue that people able to properly discern correlations and causations are yet more intelligent (though maybe not hardwired so). Classical IQ tests tend to test pattern recognition.

[Jon Miller]

Remember, I was arguing against hard atheism based upon logic/scientific reasoning alone.

JM

[DrS]

I don't know what you mean by hard athiesm. If I take a default position of 'false' on anything that isn't yet observed (if phenomenological) or shown mathematically (if not), does that count as 'hard' athiesm, or soft?

I'd guess that hard athiesm would be a position of false, regardless of the future state of any data. That would be irrational.

[Meticulous Man]

Could it be that the concepts of intelligence and God actually are interdependent, in the sense that an intelligent person in the Western tradition originally was supposed to better see into the nature of God (or later on Nature, the Universe etc)?

[Jon Miller]

It would be a wrong statement to say that God doesn't exist then. A statement, which I would disagree with but is more defensible, that lacking evidence God's existence, God is a concept that doesn't warrant beleif.

From Wiki:

"Weak atheism is a very broad category. It includes, among others:

* those who have never been introduced to the concept of God (implicit atheists)
* those who don't care enough about God to believe or disbelieve (apatheists)
* those who consider the question of God to be meaningless (ignostics)
* those who don't believe it is possible to be certain of the existence of God (skeptics).
* those who state that they personally have no knowledge of God (agnostics)
* those who haven't made up their minds
* those who have made up their minds, deciding that the evidence doesn't warrant belief

The only requirement is to be neither a theist (theists believe god exists) nor a strong atheist (strong atheists believe god does not exist)."

"Types of Strong Atheists

Strong atheism also has plenty of room for variation. This group includes, for example:

* those who believe that God does not exist based on current evidence (including both those who would and those who would not change their belief based on new evidence)
* those who claim to know that God does not exist
* those who believe that the concept of God is contradictory
* those who do not claim any logical reason for their belief

The only requirement is to accept as true the proposition "God does not exist"."

Do you see the difference (btw, I am surprised to see in weak atheism so many statements which I would think as more agnostic... I bolded the one that I think of when I discuss weak atheism)?

JM

[DrS]

What's the difference between the bottom choice of weak, and the top choice of strong?

[Jon Miller]

Lack of beleif in God versus Beleif that there is no God.

JM

[Robert]

I notice that nowdays more and more atheist are indeed claiming wisdom and intelligence.
As a christian I would never dare to claim wisdom or intelligence. I think it's not a sign of intelligence to claim intelligence or wisdom.

Everybody who is able to think rational understand that our ratio is limmited and would therefor never claim full ratio.

Let's take a darwinistic look at our brains, darwinism learns us that our brains have evolved through countless of random mutations to what it is right now. There's no plan or intelligence behind the evolution of our brain. It's amazing how people who claim that our brain is a result of random mutation also claim that our brain is 100% capable of rational and intelligent reasoning. Who says so?

Perhaps our brains are perfectly able to keep us alive and keep our species alive but are in fact not so rational. They may even have evolved in such a way to shroud true ratio from us because real rationalism may prevent us from reproducing. Or whatever else reason.

Anyway, if our brains are the result of random mutations, how can we trust them?

[Barnabas]

Newton, Gauss and Archimedes were probably the three greatest geniuses ever by far, I know the first 2 were very religious, I dont know about Archimedes

[DrS]

Lack of beleif in God versus Beleif that there is no God.

those who have made up their minds, deciding that the evidence doesn't warrant belief

those who believe that God does not exist based on current evidence (including both those who would and those who would not change their belief based on new evidence)

lack of belief = unbelief. lack of belief =! belief in not.

However, 'belief' is a squishy term. You need to define it more clearly to avoid philosophical sophestry. I don't think I would define belief as a synonym for predict.

Does one believe that the sun will rise, or does one predict it? A prediction would be a guess based on the state of the evidence, while a belief not necessarily so. A belief in no gods is different than a prediction in no gods (depending on your definitions). I'd argue that a prediction of no god (depending on its-gods definition) is reasonable.