Gene: Very thoughtful comments and very good!

Robert108: It is actually a bit sad to have someone invest so much time in commenting on so many subjects as does rbb, seemingly unable to debate facts or discuss matters is a rational way. Most of his comments are inane, nonsensical and a waste of time and space. Too bad really, but he never has anything positive to say or any positive contribution to make to any debate.

This is a scientific study you are trying to combat with your gut feelings. IQ tests gauge native intelligence. They do not test learned knowledge and they aren’t expected to go up between, say, the ages
of 16 and 30.

I realize that if you had a logical/factual argument, you would make it, Sparkie. The reason it’s not “scientific” is that they fail to demonstrate an actual cause and effect linkage here; all they do is imply it with statistics. Even so, the bias is clear: Academics are not hired because of their intelligence, but on their political beliefs in today’s academe. They made no allowance for hiring bias.

Just another meaningless personal attack.

robert108 on May 28, 2006 at 2:48 PM

Lots of people with higher IQ’s believe in god. Others pretend to as it is easier to pretend than tell the truth when it will cost you detrimentally in society. Devotion to a god of one sort or another isnt about intellegence, its about psychology and pathology. Fear and discomfort with the idea of death, the unknown things in and around our physical world that are not easy to understand by the smartest of us, religion and god smooth these areas over and make things more understandable, more comfortable to deal with. Of course it also promotes conformity. Thats a big draw for alot of people, smart or not so smart. PEOPLE BELIEVE WHAT THEY WANT TO BELIEVE

To bad your opinion is worth poo-poo. This is a scientific study you are trying to combat with your gut feelings. IQ tests gauge native intelligence. They do not test learned knowledge and they aren’t expected to go up between, say, the ages of 16 and 30.

The study goes in with the following assumptions and is therefore incorrect:

1. The rise in IQs is due to the decline in religion. (Though even if one believes the two must be inverse, and that religion is false, a rise in IQs would result in a decline of religion. Not vice versa. Strike one.)
2. That academics are smarter than average people. (This has often been proven false. Strike 2.)
3. That the Gallup poll results are accurate about IQ. (People tend to overestimate how smart they are. Strike 3.)
4. That religion itself is unintelligent. (A huge assumption.)

Far from being scientific, it’s shoddy, lazy..hell it’s not even pseudoscience, so I don’t know what to call it. But it’s nonsense, and adding the word “science” doesn’t make it less nonsensical.

Two of my uncles are tested ‘geniuses’. One is a butcher and the other runs the town dump. Both atheists, one democrat, one staunch republican.

And there are many geniuses who are Christian, not to mention highly intelligent people who believe so. Anecdotal evidence is not proof.

Move_Zig: Thank you for HIGH FLIGHT, an affirmation of so many noble things, and a beautiful poem.

It can be argued just as forcefully today IMO that if you are in academia, anywhere in the world and you are not a confessed atheist or agnostic you will not get published and your career is dead! It is true, IMO, that if scientists today do not tow the liberal, securalist, hostility to faith line in public and in their research, they have no future in the academic community.

I agree with that, but it doesnt change a thing. When god shows us how to build a better mouse trap I will promote him for university president. Until then, science should be trusted to scientists.

On the other hand, please provide proof that most of the great scientific minds of the past were deceitful in their professions of faith and were in fact atheists; or, admit that you are assuming facts about specific people that are not in evidence. That is not to say that in general you are incorrect in your charge that the Church (Roman Catholicism) did create an atmosphere of fear in academia throughout Europe for many centuries

We all know the churches have proclaimed heretics throughout history. Da Vinci wrote in code to cover is ass, Galileo was threatend with excommunication and imprisonment for suggesting the earth circled the sun. Kepler was always in trouble with the church. Its not a debate. The church squelched anyone who opposed doctorine. Its not disputable.
I will gather a few more examples for you later, but I am short on time right now.
I just want to add, Neiman is an honorable man, understands that we as humans dont know everything, and debates like a person who respects others, for the most part. I like you style, even if we disagree about alot of important things.

Neiman Argument:
I believe in God
People that don’t believe in God are fools
Therefore, I’m not a fool

Nice piece of sophistry on your part Nunez! A terribly flawed and dishonest analysis of my comments!

Could it be that such people are so puffed up with their own intellect, having feelings of superiority over other human beings, they cannot imagine anyone greater than themselves?

Only a fool would say in their heart there is no God. These people may feel they have no need of God and refusing to see his handiwork in the world and universe around them, despite their measured intellect they have all become fools!

By the way, were Newton, Galileo and most of the great scientists of the past included in the list of people with high Intelligence Quotients? I know they weren’t measured then, but mustn’t we assume they were of superior intellect? Problem is, almost to a man they were believers in God and devoted Christians or members of other religious faiths. They must have been morons, not having high I.Q.’s, like Sparkie?

Assume that when the contemporaries of Noah, Moses and Christ were but a short remove from the Stone Age. How would they describe highly advanced visitors?

Assume that when they spoke of the chariot that took Ezekiel into the sky, it did just that.

Assume that where in the Bible it states Man was created after the image of God, it meant just that.

Assume that where in the Bible it states that God was from Heaven, they did mean Heaven, but in that context, from the sky.

I know it sounds like sacrilege, but assuming that there, in reality, was an admixture of the spiritual and the physical, that has been handed down to us through the ages and through the filter of 2,000 intervening years, a 2,000 years which included the Dark Ages, the Inquisition, the loss of the Library of Alexandria and so on.

Shades of Chariots of the Gods?

That strikes me as at least plausible. Insemination would make a virgin birth possible.

Even if the visitors described in the First War in Heaven and describing the Sons of Gods going into the Daughters of Man were *physical* ,if they brought the Word, I don’t think that makes the Word any less valid.

There is a lot to think about and it should not be dismissed out of hand. Try reading the Bible, to include the Apocrypha as historical, then read also the Mahabharata, with descriptions of the Vimana, and also the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Posit for yourselves just what might have actually been historic as opposed to aspirational.

Keep in mind that until Heinrich Schliemann actually located and dug up the buried remains of Troy in 1871, it was considered to be merely a myth.

Try looking into Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision, if only to check his methodology of comparative mythology research. He studied the ancient texts from Meso-America, Lapp, Greek, Chinese, Hebraic, East Indian and a raft of others and found commonalities, and through astrological records, tried to establish a rough timeline for stated events.

I’m not saying that he was correct in his theories, but there may be avenues which we have not generally explored which would tend to validate much in the Bible that seems fantastic and illogical.

Logic, like math, is an exact science.

They both require faith in unprovable premises. So much for “exactitude”, eh?

Again, rbb parrot illustrates his lack of creativity.

Most people of high intelligence are deeply engrossed in logic.

Logic is only as good as its underlying assumptions. If you presuppose that the moon is made of green cheese, then you have no guarantee that anything that you “logically” posit after that will be correct either.

By the way, were Newton, Galileo and most of the great scientists of the past included in the list of people with high Intelligence Quotients? I know they weren’t measured then, but mustn’t we assume they were of superior intellect? Problem is, almost to a man they were believers in God and devoted Christians or members of other religious faiths. They must have been morons, not having high I.Q.’s, like Sparkie?

Back in the day, if you didnt believe in god, not god, but THE ONE GOD, you were screwed. You cannot judge anything by this as these smart guys back them were under threat of all kinds of nasty stuff if they didnt tow the line church wise. Even then most articulated opposing viewpoints and paid the price. That doesnt mean I agree that only mental midgets believe in god. Quite the opposite…I think intelligence has little or nothing to do with it. Its psychology mostly. Fear of death, the need to belong, the need for religion is very human.

Personally, I don’t believe in god, but I’ve never really thought less of the intelligence of those who do. I’ve always felt that it was a very personal decision. Some people need or want the comfort and pleasure that organized religion can provide. Others don’t.

I have a hard time believing that decision has anything to do with intelligence

Rob, I think you got off track here. Most people of high intelligence are deeply engrossed in logic. Maybe that is why they don’t believe in God. Logic, like math, is an exact science.

It is clear that we’re not talking about a direct measurement of Q here, but rather a simple correlation of membership to religious belief, which further obscures the already tenuous link of an IQ test to Q–and demonstrates that this particular professor’s abilities in logic are not up to the “atheist standards” he espouses.

Thanks for making my point in another way, BB. I think Sparkie is pissing all by himself here. I just questioned the validity of the premise of this study, and Sparkie has yet to present any sort of counter argument.
I know he would, if he had one.

Thanks fellas.

Hight Flight is particularly poignant.

I recall that MaGee was a Hurricane pilot in the early days of WWII, possibly during the Battle of Britain.

He wrote this and later was killed in action.

I think the erroneous premise here is to equate being in academe with high intelligence.

To bad your opinion is worth poo-poo. This is a scientific study you are trying to combat with your gut feelings. IQ tests gauge native intelligence. They do not test learned knowledge and they aren’t expected to go up between, say, the ages of 16 and 30.
Two of my uncles are tested ‘geniuses’. One is a butcher and the other runs the town dump. Both atheists, one democrat, one staunch republican.

if you have to go back that far for intellectual credibility

bullshit. the ‘commonfolk’ felt the same way about intellectuals in their day too. why do you think all the thinkers back then had to go live in holland?
remember when they wanted to lynch Galileo and Copernicus? I WONDER WHY NEWTON INCLUDED A ‘FINAL CAUSE’ IN HIS SCHEMA? Perhaps to avoid being hung. He kinda just tagged it on there, like an American flag sticker. Hume took him to town for it. Hume had cahones… and he loved to taunt the Christians.

kenny
Virgins do not give birth. Probability, schm-obability.
m_z

Heck I thought that String Theory was hyper-leveraged on unproven hypotheses wrapped around theoretical proofs.

Yep.

I would think that the more anyone learns, the more they come to understand how little we are actually certain about.

Yea. That’s also because they have an increased awareness of the things we could be certain of and aren’t. We do know a lot and its important to differentiate. Don’t forget that the universe is supposedly 76% anti-gravity-dark-matter and no one knows what the fuck that is. 8 percent is normal matter and 16 is dark matter. We also don’t really know what dark matter is. It pays attention to gravity though, not that we know what gravity is.

Yes it is. Making decision has everything to do with intelligence.