Is it reasonable to believe in 'God?
7 months ago
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It was once commented that "the only reasonable response" is agnosticism. What do you think? To be Helpful the answer depends somewhat on definitions of faith/belief, religion and what you think would actually constitute a suitable reason for a theistic belief
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This topic was started by Dionysus on April 10th, 2008. 35 grupies have voted on one or more of the 6 answers.
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The only way to believe in god(s) is to abandon reason. As soon as one attempts to reason their beliefs those beliefs will be shattered, unless one is dumb-as-fuck, of course.
;-)
From an armchair biological view (tongue in cheek), it would seem to take more mental energy to be agnostic, as you still have to devote time in thinking about the unknown, requiring more food, whereas the atheist devotes no mental energy to pondering god, leaving more time to do other things, like reproduce ;)
For the purpose of economizing my energy (among other things) I moved from my declared agnosticism to a much better lived atheism. It does feel good.
"A friend, an intelligent lapsed Jew who observes the Sabbath for reasons of cultural solidarity, describes himself as a Tooth Fairy Agnostic. He will not call himself an atheist because it is in principle impossible to prove a negative. But "agnostic" on its own might suggest that he though God's existence or non-existence equally likely. In fact, though strictly agnostic about god, he considers God's existence no more probable than the Tooth Fairy's.
Bertrand Russell used a hypothetical teapot in orbit about Mars for the same didactic purpose. You have to be agnostic about the teapot, but that doesn't mean you treat the likelihood of its existence as being on all fours with its non-existence.
The list of things about which we strictly have to be agnostic doesn't stop at tooth fairies and celestial teapots. It is infinite. If you want to believe in a particular one of them -- teapots, unicorns, or tooth fairies, Thor or Yahweh -- the onus is on you to say why you believe in it. The onus is not on the rest of us to say why we do not. We who are atheists are also a-fairyists, a-teapotists, and a-unicornists, but we don't' have to bother saying so."
~Richard Dawkins
This quote is the reason I now consider myself an atheist as opposed to a philosophical agnostic.
I grew up as an Atheist. Both my parents and their entire families are Atheists. All my life I have been confronted with idiots who "believed" they had to "save me", while spewing all sort of nonsense at me in the "belief" that this rubbish would somehow make me realize that their insanity and delusions are actually something desirable.
Needless to say that all they have managed to make me realize after nearly 50 years of listening to their arguments is how dangerously gullible one has to be to be a "believer".
Oh, and those attempts to convert me included some serious bullying by "fine christian kids" starting when I was around 8 years old in our neighborhood. All it did was make me an experienced fighter and able to kick about anyone's ass by the time I was eighteen.
Disclaimer: This post is purely informational and has no intent to offend any religious bigots, zealots, puritans, Calvinists or any other person who abandoned rational thought to replace it with irrational gibberish.
http://video.google....8496740157371
Intelligent people less likely to believe in god:
http://www.telegraph...n-God%27.html
I had a look at this article and I don't think it is convincing. It talks in percentage terms about a link between high intelligence and atheism. I don't disagree with the percentages; I am quite prepared to accept them. But like some who commented in the article, the results are taken out of any broader context. The moment cultural and historical context are added, I think the picture changes. Just go back in time 450 years and most people expressed a belief in God. The historical evidence, especially theological writings show that these believers were far from stupid. In fact, quite the opposite. They were highly intelligent. The fact that they may have been discussing and writing about a fiction is not the point. The argument/thinking processes are elegant and complex. Stupid people cannot do that.
The article suffers in another way; it seems to indicate that the researchers believed intelligence could be developed, that it could increase. This is absolutely the position of some psychologists, but other psychologists do not agree, believing that intelligence in an individual is largely fixed. If intelligence cannot grow, say like the muscles in our bodies, and we accept that theologians of the past were not unintelligent, then it follows that intelligence alone does not account for the increased incidence of atheism in our times.
We are back to cultural and historical context and setting intelligence into that context. I am prepared to accept that ever increasing scientific knowledge, greater materialism/consumerism and a myriad of other factors have influenced intelligent people. They have concluded that there is no God. They may well be right.
If we could go back in time and bring back with us as babies those we know to have been both intelligent and believers, put them through a western education to the highest levels, I am willing to bet most of them would be atheists.
We could conclude that intelligence plus scientific knowledge equals atheism:
I + SK = Ath
We could also conclude that intelligence plus cultural and historical context equals atheism or belief:
I + CHC = Ath or B
The first is absolute, the second is relativist.
I guess an atheist influenced strongly by science would say that there is no going back. Once science has revealed certain truths, the intelligent (and honest) can never go back to religious belief. However, it is possible that scientific knowledge is in its infancy and that there is plenty more left to discover that might change the minds of intelligent scientists towards a belief in God. Just because there is little to suggest that at the moment, it does not follow that there never will be. It always has been true to say ""We don't know what we don't know".
I will conclude by stating a few things that I do believe:
1. Intelligent minds have not increased as a percentage of the population, but the product of intelligent minds reaches more people than it ever did before because of improved communication.
2. Intelligent minds of the past and intelligent minds of the present are “made of the same stuff”. The intelligent theologian of 1355 is essentially using the same ability that the intelligent physicist uses now.
3. It is the historical and cultural context that influences what the intelligent mind will study.
4. The intelligent mind is greatly influenced by the historical and cultural context of its time, but less so than is the unintelligent mind.
5. Belief of lack of belief in a God or Gods will always be influenced by historical and cultural context.
6. It is possible that scientific advance may lead scientists to take the idea of God seriously.
7. None of these beliefs clinch it for me – they lead me to a position where I must say I can neither believe nor disbelieve in God.
you forgot to question the validity of IQ as a measure of intelligence too.
http://www.grupthink.com/answer/13163
I thought of putting that in but decided I wanted to stay with the point that "intelligence" does not necessarily equate with a tendency towards atheism. Defining intelligence was not my primary aim, nor whether it may be measured by IQ tests or in any other way. Even if intelligence had been satisfactorily defined, understood and proved, it does not follow that knowing absolutely what intelligence is and how to measure it would throw any light on intelligence and its link to atheism/belief. In the end, I preferred not to attempt an objective definition of intelligence and simply allowed people to think of intelligence in any way they chose as I did not believe it mattered in relation to the argument.