Are People Who Believe in God Stupid?

[Coito ergo sum]

She says that to all the boys. Just ask anyone.

...except your boyfriend?

[Coito ergo sum]

All good points - but, like I said, I was addressing your point about the theist who "chooses to learn science from the Bible." Naturally, music is not science, etc., and there may be plenty to be gained from the Bible. I've read it, and there are some very interesting stories, some very poetic portions, some interesting moral lessons, and whatnot. It gives one a basis for much of English literature, which contains many Biblical references. An appreciation of the Bible is very important to a good knowledge of English literature.

It's more than that of course. To all people who love things like the arts, culture, or even just the development of our human be-ing and our mind, and of course, spirituality, the Bible is, just as other religious books, the outcome of a thinking process, much as a book on philosophy is the outcome of a thinking process (but the axioms, or parameters, are different of course). It would be very arrogant to posit that ancient people didn't think, just because they happened to be acquainted with what we (only now, and in modern interpretatin) call 'religion'.

If that is directed to me, as opposed to a general comment, then I would say that I never suggested the Bible was put together thoughtlessly or that ancient people didn't think. Beyond that, I don't disagree that people can gain a lot by reading the Bible and other ancient writings. The Bible is the outcome of about 1,000 years of book writing, most written at different times and for different purposes.

I'll just have to point out, once again, that you're the one that referred to theists who choose to get their science from the Bible. That's what I was responding to. But, now I see we are in agreement - there is no science to be gotten from the Bible. Fair enough.

I'm not sure if we were in agreement. The starting position was more like a suggestion that all theists are de facto mad at science and want to set a religious book as the standard for science.

I don't believe that was my starting point.

Which is what some do - but clearly this is ridiculous. On the other hand: there's humans involved, and humans are the ones who invented science, and who are doing science too. So religious people are not by any standard rejecting science,

Some are. Some aren't.

although they will normally all share the rejection of the idea that science is the only epistomological tool in our toolbox. History, for instance, is also a scientific discipline, and so is textual criticism, and experts on the subject of culture or linguistics or sociology are also involved in scientific means of knowledge - none of these of course using the same methodology as the natural and exact sciences, for obvious reasons. When it comes to certain domains of research such as textual criticism, ancient documents do not contain science, but they provide the source for the data: it is to be taken serious, and the authors are to be taken serious (framed within their own time and culture, before we interpret what they wrote, and so on).

And, to that extent, they are. I see no shortage of Bible criticism, study, analysis, and other work - there are shelves of the stuff at the library and in bookstores. The Bible has been seriously studied down to almost every jot and tittle, and the translations have been compared and contrasted, the original Hebrew and Greek texts have been re-studied and re-translated. There have been more archeological expeditions searching for evidence of biblical cities, biblical wars, exoduses from Egypt, crossings of the Red Sea, Sodom and Gomorrah, Biblical characters, etc. There is hardly a book that has been taken more seriously.

But, it isn't science, and there is no science in it. None. Not a drop of it. I've read the entire thing cover to cover more than once. i have also taken advanced courses in science at the college level. There is no resemblance between the Bible and a science text. That, of course, is o.k. The Illiad and the Odyssey, as well as the Eddas, the Gitas, the I'Ching, the Tao Tse Tching and the like also have zero "science" in them, but they're very valuable books.

Sources of data are not less serious just because they are not the domain of study of biologists for instance.

Maybe this is where there is a misunderstanding. I've never suggested the Bible isn't serious. I've suggested it's not "science." Plato's Socratic Dialogs are not science either, but they are serious and very valuable.

Fossils too are 'not science', but they are important to science. If you look at it from this perspective, then a phrase like "there is no science to be gotten from the Bible" makes just as much sense as "there is no science to be gotten from the fossil record". Admitted: I know you were perhaps addressing 'religious fundamentalists', yet, nevertheless, taking them as the standard doesn't make much sense.

I don't agree with that. Fossils aren't science because things aren't science, science is a methodology. The Bible is not science either for the same reason. It's a book. The science is in the words on the pages. However, the words on the pages of the Bible don't contain science. Take the Song of Solomon, for example. Wonderful poetry, but not science. The historical books of the Old Testament - great stories - might be true, might not. Not science.

Look - Schleman (sp?) took Homer's books and searched for City of Troy. Schleman's work was archaeology. Homer's writings were ancient mythological writing, not science. The Bible is like Homer's writings.

Arguing that science disproves some religious assertion is not the same thing as "learning about religion from science."

At this point we agree - but it's obvious.

I was responding to what was typed.

...Love is not rational and not scientific - but it is human. A part of the sciences (natural sciences, physics) are 'exact' but not all things are exact and certainly not humans. So what are you talking about and what is the problem I am supposed to see for me here?

Your the one who made some assertions to which I responded. What I would say to you at this point is that man's capacity to love says nothing about the existence of gods We don't have to believe in a god or gods in order to experience love and appreciate other abstract concepts.

True, but it's also true that for a lot of people god (or, beyond 3.5 billion monotheists, "gods" indeed) is in important concept related to their being human - and this does not necessitate the presumption that god "must be this concept" in order to experience love, it just means that the experience of love can cross over into a domain which is not the domain where science as we know it is interested in (apart from parapsychology and some other sciences). It is not just about existence, because existence at this level is not existence as we define it philosophically in terms of our human existence.

Well, that's the sort of thing that needs to get sorted at the beginning of these kinds of discussions, and it's something I will do sometimes when faced with the prospect of discussing atheism with god-believers. If I see the possible confusion, I try to clarify that we can be discussing two different things - one, does this being or entity you call god or gods actually exist in the real world? Or, two, are you talking about god as an abstract concept?

I define my atheism to refer to the former. I don't think any god ever described to me by any person, whether verbally or in writing, actually exists. I do not believe that any other god, as that word is defined in conventional dictionaries, like dictionary.com, actually exists in the real world. I am, however, capable of recognizing, however, different usages of the term "god" wherein people use the term differently - sometimes as something that is purely a placeholder or a meditation reference point.

Even at the human level, our brains are, as far as even the best neuroscientists know at this moment, too complex to be fully understood - and we are always subjectively researching these things too, so... 'existence' is already not something one can fully grasp in terms of any one particular 'science' known today.

This comes up a lot. No scientist that I've ever talked to or read has ever said that we fully understand anything. Of course there is more to learn. That doesn't mean we just fill in the blanks with whatever makes us happy or whatever our parents drill into us. The blanks are blanks. Saying "I don't know" is not a crime.

It is all patchwork - and we know very much of our brains today, but not so that we would be able to define our own existence. The concept of God does not belong to our human existence at all - no more than the big bang singularity belongs to it. We know very little about the absolute beginnings, and what we know is not known as facts but as mathematical and physical models that depend on many numerical parameters (more than twenty, in physics and cosmophysics alone). So who are we to claim that the existence of a god has nothing to do with the human experience of love or whatever experience there is - human longings beyond the things we can see, what can science 'decide' about that?

By the same token, who are we to claim that the existence of the god has anything to do with the human experience of love or whatever experience there is. What we do know is that there is no good evidence that any of the 10,000 or so gods that people have ever worshiped are actually there. As such, there doesn't seem to be much reason to bother about them. If and when something is discovered that demonstrates that one or more of these gods, or some other god, is actually there, then I'll be happy to convert. However, until then, I will continue to love my wife and family, secure in the knowledge that I do so whether or not there are no gods or 1,000's of them. Heck, I'll keep loving my wife and family even if there are gods and those gods are actually love inhibitors. I seem to have overcome their nefarious powers thus far, so that's good.

Science has never been developed to either confirm or deny 'what is', it just addresses 'what is within reach' of these tools. The truth is, we don't know much beyond that level. And denial is not a theory. But to *doubt* the existence of gods or a god is agnosticism, which is a reasonable position in my opinion. It is not a certitude.

Kind regards.

That, of course, has never been denied by anyone who knows anything about science at all. Of course science can only see what it can see. That's axiomatic. Our eyes can only see what they can see, and what they can't see they can't see. There may be things we can't see that are there. As Isaac Asimov put it once, "There are many aspects of the universe that still cannot be explained satisfactorily by science; but ignorance only implies ignorance that may someday be conquered. To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today."

The reality of that is not in question. The question is - what do we do with that which is beyond our sight - or "reach" as you put it? Well - we have two choices - make something up, or don't. I choose don't.

Agnosticism, however, is not merely "doubt," and atheism is not necessarily "denial." Agnosticism is the intellectual doctrine affirming the uncertainty of all claims to ultimate knowledge. Many atheists are agnostics. There are even Christian agnostics. An agnostic is a person who holds that the existence of the ultimate cause, as god, and the essential nature of things are unknown and unknowable, or that human knowledge is limited to experience.

People who affirmatively deny the existence of gods are one sort of atheist, but not all atheists are that sort. Some just do not believe that a god exists.

For me, I see no reason to believe a god or gods exist at this time. I also think that that modern god-concepts build in an almost required agnosticism, because the gods are unfalsifiable, existing by definition in a place where we can never reach while alive. So, I'm an atheist. I'm agnostic about whether there is a god in another plane of existence which I can't ever reach and which no instrument could ever be used to confirm anything about.

One of the main reasons I have no problem calling myself an atheist is the several thousand year pattern of humanity having to find farther and farther places store their gods. People on volcanic islands used to think gods lived inside volcanoes. Ancient greeks thought Hades was a place you could travel to if you went underground through the right secret passages. The Norse used to think Thor was up in the clouds causing lightning and thunder with Miolmir, his mighty hammer. People thought demons actually infested people to make them ill or crazed or sexually excited.

As the light of knowledge was shined on all these areas, the gods left these locations, and humans were ultimately perfectly happy to be without them. We didn't need gods living in the volcanoes, in the earthquake faults, writhing under the oceans making the waves rougher, throwing thunderbolts down from the sky, and all that sort of thing. Eventually, we knew so much about the world that gods needed to be moved not only off world, but off-universe. The heaven that used to be physically miles above our heads, and the hades that was literally under the ground, was moved to astral planes where we couldn't reach until we were dead and our souls were transported there.

See a pattern here? The gods haven't been anywhere we thought they were - ever. If I were a bettin' man, I'd put good money that these gods aren't where we think they are now, and aren't like what we think they are like. The bottom line is they're probably not there, and on balance the idea of them has a more negative than positive effect.

This quote from Asimov sums it up for me - "I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time."

[Eriku]

I wouldn't say they're stupid... luminaries like Kenneth Miller, Francis Crick and so on are staunch believers... it's just a clever little program that bypasses certain sub-routines in your critical thinking... getting rid of it requires different things for different people... for me it was the result of the problem of suffering being disposed of in a naturalistic universe... for others they'd possibly need therapy to deal with fear of death... for others an education into the brain and how we invest into purposes without the need of them being given from on high.

I was the result of a Christian family that didn't really push the issue too much, and which allowed me to question... had they been more fervent in their faith, and in the notion of passing it down to their kids, I might not have felt as free to reason as I do... so I can empathise with those who are stuck in a theological world.