What's The Odds That The Man Who Stops Hurricanes

[David Sklansky]

will be a religious Christian?

Also I think most will agree that the percentage of religious Christians who have a clue about the difficult science and math necessary to one day stop or divert hurricanes and thus save millions of lives is smaller than the percentage of people not in that category who have that knowledge. Why is that?

[einbert]

I'll take a "wild guess" and say that it's the tendency of many Christian parents to basically teach their kids not to doubt that causes them to eventually shy away from the tougher science and engineering fields.

This lack of ability to doubt leads the kids to eventually not refine their rational thinking process as well as people who do learn to somewhat and eventually systematically doubt everything they "know" or have been told. With a much weaker rational problem solving process, the Children kids are at a huge disadvantage throughout school and well into college. For whatever reason, some eventually learn to abandon the inability to doubt while others never grow out of what their parents have preached to them.

I think X generations down the line this will be considered a horrific form of child abuse by the vast majority of humanity, the same way beating kids is viewed by humanity today.

Of course it should go without saying that I'm not saying all Christian parents do this, but from what I have seen it exists among Christian parents (and as a result in the children of Christians) much moreso than nonChristians, at least in the United States.

[David Sklansky]

Assuming I am correct (slight chance I am not) then the reason you give is one of two possibilities. The other possibility is that the smarter people who were born Christian are more likely to become non religous than the less intelligent ones. Or it could be some combination of both.

I posted this question after seeing the devastation on TV and listening to a pastor talking about how he was praying for people's well being. It reminded me of when BluffThis, responding to my comments about how a non Christian is more likely to find a cure for cancer said something like "we are more interested in the next life". But the pastor was plenty interested in this life and finding a way to divert hurricanes is a noble goal for religious and non religious people alike. In fact religious people tend to claim that they are more concerned with the earthly plight of strangers than agnostics are. Then why the hell don't they get good in the subjects that will most likely accomplish those goals? Why do they tend to leave it in the hands of those who are not as religious? My answer is that for the most part they have no choice. Anymore than someone who thinks dice can be beaten does.

[einbert]

I apologize for the extreme length of this post, but I took a lot of time and effort writing it so I hope you guys (who are reading this thread) will give it some attention and maybe we can get some good discussions on this subject going.

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The other possibility is that the smarter people who were born Christian are more likely to become non religous than the less intelligent ones. Or it could be some combination of both.

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Many people on earth claim to believe in a personal God. For most of the people that make this claim, the concept of God and everything they understand about God have basically been handed down from their parents. People who accept a belief system simply because it was handed down to them and never question or doubt those beliefs are something, let's call it a "weak will" as opposed to the "strong will" of someone who at some point finds the capacity to doubt everything he has been taught and everything he knows is true. I say that because it really does take a lot of strength to do these kinds of things, and it is the kind of strength that most people will never find throughout their entire lives.

Of those people that are strong willed, they very frequently end up believing something other than what their parents taught them. There is a very good reason for this--the belief systems of their parents (who are probably weak-willed, since most people are) are very simplistic and often extremely irrational. It is totally natural for the average adolescent strong willed person to begin totally abandoning these simplistic, irrational beliefs and of course the natural thing for these people to dive right into is the polar opposite of what their parents believed. For many this set of beliefs will fit so warm and snug on them that they will never have to look back. They will even look on their parents and say "Those poor people, they don't even begin to understand what reality is like because they simply accepted the viewpoints of their parents without ever doubting them or considering the opposite side. Their thinking is so irrational and their logical reasoning is so poor that it is obvious that they are wrong about God and the universe."

There are certain illusions in life that may be the result of evolution in one form or another. For example, people in their twenties, especially women, seem to have a great illusion that raising children is going to be more fun than work. Illusions like these have been totally necessary for the survival of the human race--they simply make life and all of its challenges so much easier to face. Easily the strongest of these illusions is the loving, all-forgiving, God that is the eternal seeker of justice and achieves this goal by striking the evil down to hell and rewarding the pious for their faithfulness with an eternal life of joy and contentment. Of course it would follow from what I have been saying that a weak-willed person would be more likely to latch on to these kind of illusions. Strong-willed people experience these illusions during their lives just like the weak-willed people, but they very frequently are able to doubt these kinds of feelings and eventually abandon them to some great or small degree. Since more people are weak willed than strong willed, it again makes sense that most people on earth are going to come to believe in this kind of a God.

So maybe we can finally get to the bottom of it. Most people are weak-willed, so most people are going to latch onto this illusional God of fire, brimstone, and pearly gates. They pass their simplistic, irrational belief systems on to their children. If their children are weak willed, they will probably never venture far from this comfortable blanket their parents have fashioned. If the children are strong willed, there is a great chance that they will jump out of this blanket and into the very next one, generally atheism or agnosticism. But here's where it gets really tricky. Since these strong-willed people can so clearly see the fallacies and ridiculousness of their parents, it becomes very difficult for many of them to ever again consider the possibility of this loving God. Some of them even go so far as to avoid subjecting themselves to consideration in the belief of ANY personal God. They fear getting back to where they started, and they fear passing on to their children the kinds of philosophies their parents attempted to pass on to them. In particular agnosticism lends itself well to the philosophy of "doubt everything except religion--of course that is false."


Most people who will accomplish something worthwhile in a scientific field are naturally going to be strong willed. It makes complete sense that these people are going to achieve considerably more than weak-willed people, especially if they focus their fierce ambitious mindsets onto something like how to divert hurricanes. And for the reasons I've stated, most strong-willed people will spend most of their lives considering the concept of a personal God to be quite ridiculous.

So I guess what I'm really saying, is that I kind of agree with you, but I believe the truth is much more complex than you have made it sound by stating that "intelligent people are less likely to become religous". I agree with you that strong-willed people tend to believe in a personal God far less frequently. I think, however, that reality is a lot more complex than "that's silly, there's no way that's true." The fact that most people that accomplish great scientific achievements don't believe in a personal God isn't actually direct evidence against the existence of a personal God.


One last thing--I really pity weak-willed people. Weak-willed people, from what I can tell, don't have a chance for success in this world. They simply don't have that thing in the back of their minds that drives you and I to question everything around us, to try to understand reality and the universe and to try to solve every problem, accomplish any task and achieve any goal. No matter how much you try to explain reality to a weak-willed person, it is just too easy for them to hang onto what they have been taught all of their lives than it is for them to doubt for a minute that precious blanket that keeps them warm. So I try to spend as little of my time as possible worrying about the weak-willed people, instead focusing my time on my own quest for truth and reality. Maybe one day I will understand the situation more clearly than I do now, and maybe one day I can even help them.

[xniNja]

I agree with most of your post, but the definition of "weak-willed" becomes of key importance.

I would tend to think it had to do more with base intelligence, rationality, and exposure to an environment where critical thinking was necessary rather than simply having a strong or weak will by conventional definitions. This does tie in to your point about people not wanting to throw away their security blankets, but the key difference or distinction I want to make clear is that even people with a "strong will," are not necessarily prone to break out of this comfort loop without either that base intelligence, rationality, or exposure to critical thinking.

Also, for most stuck in this loop, I don't think religion is so much of a crutch as it was for their ancestors. They probably don't have to endure the same degree of hardships and they certainly have much more knowledge of the actual world.

Instead, I would argue that these people simply a) are not concerned with reason, b) do not understand reason, and c) would view any break from the tradition of their ancestors as a rejection of their family, friends, and so on... not as a logical or personal choice.

In this sense, it is true that they might be weak-willed (those that fear being ostracized or ridiculed by their friends and family) but I think the more reasonable explanation is that they never gained any foundation for any logical or critical analysis.

When they asked where babies came from, God was the answer. When someone wronged them, it was of no consequence, because God still loved them. When they had a problem that they should have been solving, they were told not to worry because God would provide.

Why would you need to think about anything critically or logically if everything can be explained by God?

Now, on the other hand, if they were Christian by birth, (I say this to imply their parents forced it upon them) and then faced with a difficult situation in which logic and reason were necessary, one where simply having "faith" and/or "praying" were useless, they would be much more likely to come to conclusions based on reason than their parents teachings.

[NotReady]

[ QUOTE ]

will be a religious Christian?


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This post and the replies typify a bogus approach to the questions involved. The false syllogism implied by this is:

1. Smart people will try to solve human problems.
2. Christians don't try to solve human problems.
3. Christians aren't smart.

A similar bogus syllogism is:

1. Smart people will only believe what's true.
2. Smart people don't believe Christianity.
3. Christianity isn't true.

None of this really tries to discuss the basic questions mankind has about himself, the universe and God. Mankind is stupid relative to God. Einstein 1X10 to 1,000,000 th power is an idiot compared to God. If someone with an IQ of 80 believes the truth and every other human being believes the lie, taking a poll does no good.

Your post is really just a subtle form of ad hominem. I don't go into the number of brilliant people who have been Christians because I believe the poll taking is a false approach in the first place.

I'm sure there's someone in Tennessee that is sure he was able to turn Katrina into a tropical storm before it hit his town.

My first reaction, though, was to wonder if man would ever be able to stop hurricanes.

One major reason, but not the only reason, that I believe that a Christian is less likely to figure out how to stop a hurricane is because there is a very dangerous cultural bias within the Christian community. This bias is both anti-scientific and anti-academic. For example, if you are a young impressionable Christian and you are told by your religious leaders or parents that creationism is correct and evolution is wrong, you are likely to believe them. Then when you are told that it is the "scientific community" that is behind the theory of evolution, you will start to naturally gravitate away from the path of these "godless" scientists.

Also combine this with the fact that political leaders of the Christian right consistently rail against the "liberal elites" in those ivory towers of academia and you've just gone a long way toward pushing a young Christian away from ever getting a Ph.D. from Harvard.

Throw in home-schooling and we've got an anti-science, anti-academia crisis on our hands. The kind of epidemic that might very well topple the empire, or at least allow many other nations to blow by us. Chris Rock jokes about the problem in the black community of the anti-academia bias where if you are studying books, you're not "keeping it real." How do you think a young Christian must feel today if he's caught reading Darwin.

A previous poster smartly observed how future generations may look at how dangerous a religious upbringing was to impressionable minds because of not teaching them to question and doubt. That is true. But there is also the danger for an impressionable mind of going too far in the other direction and doubting science and academia to the point of dismissing it all and going into something supposedly more potent like joining churches instead of universities. You could join both but any hour spent at church is one more hour that you can't spend in the lab.

On that note, the governor of Louisiana was on the Today Show this morning and in her brief opportunity to effect the greatest help to her beleaguered state, her call to action for the country was for everyone to pray today. No mention of sending money to the Red Cross of maybe donating blood or anything helpful like that.

Thanks governor. I'm sure no one thought of that as the hurricane was approaching or that would have surely avoided this whole problem in the first place.

[BluffTHIS!]

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will be a religious Christian?

Also I think most will agree that the percentage of religious Christians who have a clue about the difficult science and math necessary to one day stop or divert hurricanes and thus save millions of lives is smaller than the percentage of people not in that category who have that knowledge. Why is that?

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You are trying to assign a probability to assumptions for which you have given no factual basis. And even if granted those assumptions are true, then you have really not shown that a high degree of scientific understanding leads to religious unbelief, since you cannot show that such people who were raised in a certain religious tradition were "true believers". In the Catholic Church to which I belong, as well as other Christian denominatins, we see a great turnout for religious services during holidays and occasions like weddings and funerals. We call these type of people Christmas/Easter Catholics. These people do not really practice their faith, and likely were only nominally raised Catholic in the first place. Even those who might attend every single Sunday are not necessarily very fervent, and likely do not possess a greater theological understanding of their faith, especially one which would equip them to answer the apparent contradictions that non-believers so readily claim between science and religious belief.

But the real answer here is that whoever might figure out how to prevent or divert hurricanes, if even such a thing is possible short of using an air-burst nuclear detonation which might have side effects, and regardless of whether that person possesses religious belief or not to any degree, will nonetheless be merely an instrument in God's grand design, which uses mainly processes consonant with the physical laws of our universe, and it will be to God, as with everything in creation, that the ultimate praise and glory is due.

But of course prideful self-centered man doesn't like to think like that. He likes to think that by virtue of the talent possible because of his genetic coding that he had nothing to do with, and by dint of his labors to put that talent to good use, that it is he, the man, who has single-handedly conquered nature and shown himself to be the master of his own fate and thus due all the approbation due his grandiose actions.

And yet as it says in the Bible in Ecclesiates, this is only vanity for we shall all die and take nothing of any earthly glory with us, returning to dust like the thousands of generations before who are no more. And after we are dead, it will not matter who helped to prevent or divert hurricanes, only whether that person knew or was ignorant of the true destiny of men as children of their Heavenly Father, who should instead seek to live here and now so as to be with that Father in the eternal life.

David, if God does indeed have a sense of humor, then he laughs at your attempts to refract everything through a sophistical lense of intelligenge and scientifc knowledge, when it is really what is in your heart that He cares about. Much as we would laugh at the assertions of 5 year old who thinks himself grown up.

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Throw in home-schooling and we've got an anti-science, anti-academia crisis on our hands.

[/ QUOTE ]There are many approaches to home-schooling, some would say as many as there are home-school students. Not all of them are non-secular or even have a non-secular bias. Institutional learning is not the only form of learning out there, and many would suggest that the institutionoften gets in the way of the learning.