science-and-religionThe one thing I just can’t comprehend about religion is when a rather intelligent person is theistic.
Scientists tell us a ton of really weird things about our universe that we pretty much take on authority:
etc. The people I’m talking about do not deny any of these - in fact, usually strongly support these ideas. Even though none of them actually performed even the simpler experiments to actually confirm these (I sure didn’t).
Additionally, we believe scientists when they tell us that there isn’t something, despite the commonly quoted fact that non-existence can’t be proved:
These smart theists support these ideas too.
And yet, people who are otherwise very smart, rational thinkers, and take all of the above on authority with no problem, go ahead and completely disregard the conclusion that there is no god; a conclusion given by the same people who propose some rather more weird and yet accepted ideas than the non-existence of god.
Why do smart theists do that? Double standards? Very strong indoctrination? Fear of not believing?
For the pedantically minded, when I say “there is no X” I mean that we estimate that our chances of being wrong about this are very, very low. I’m also not talking of anyone who rejects the above scientific ideas - I can see why someone who rejects these might also believe in god.
Your assumptions are not correct. While most of the world's leading scientists disbelieve in God, only around 61% percent of "ordinary" scientists claim to be atheists, according to a survey taken by Nature in 1996.
Regardless, it's not as if these numbers represent some sort of official scientific "consensus" as much as they represent personal beliefs among scientists from various disciplines. There isn't a body of empirical evidence or a prevailing scientific model that definitively rules out the existence of God. Rather, most atheist scientists reject God due to parsimony, i.e. they simply find God unnecessary. (See Laplace's infamous remark to Napoleon.) While this is a compelling reason to disbelieve in God, it is not definitive in the eyes of the general public.
Where you always an atheist? Probably not. Were you always smart? Most assuredly. Smart people are not necessarily less flawed or imperfect than their intellectual inferiors. In reality people are not raised in a vacuum and then told as adults to study up and pick a religion or check the “None” box. Everybody, smart people included, emerges from a cultural and family context that is designed to make it painful and scary to reject the norms of that context, religion included.
I think you will find that higher levels of education correlate to higher rates of religious rejection in general, including acceptance of atheism. Some will “split the difference” and you’ll see more liberal religious beliefs where the “God loves everyone” view predominates and the harsher religious teachings are played down or minimized.
No scientist ever said that the luminferous aether didn't exist. They were just able to show that an alternate model explained the same phenomena as aether theory, this model also explained other phenomena, and that specific predictions of the aether theory (e.g. the Michaelson-Morley experiment) were not supported by experimental data.
The same fate befell phlogiston theory and other explanatory models that have since been supplanted.
If the god theory generated testable predictions, it could be subject to the same sort of scientific confirmation as aether.
Honestly? Because many of these intelligent, educated people were taught their theism as children. Very small children — pre-verbal, pre-school, pre-memory. And when you learn something that young, from people you love and trust, it’s extremely difficult to step back from it and evaluate it objectively.
And when you believe something that deeply, at an almost unconscious level, you will go through a lot of mental gymnastics and a lot of denial to keep believing it. It’s really hard to choose to shift, or destroy, the ground you’re walking on.
It can be done, of course. But churches work very hard at making the nasty parts palatable, or ignorable, so people can continue to deny the scientific evidence and keep believing what’s comfortable to believe.
Your question is why do theistic scientists disregard the conclusion, drawn by other scientists, that there is no god. I think a large number of them disregard it because they feel that it is not a question of science, but philosophy, and that the scientists who draw this conclusion are not working within their field of expertise. Within philosophy, the concensus on god is not quite so clear.
I just want to point out the difference between scientific consensus and consensus among scientists.
As others have noted, because theism generally doesn’t make specific predictions about the natural world, it’s hard to say that it is a scientifically investigable subject. Rather it may be a question relevant to the domain of philosophy.
Nonetheless, because it is not a scientific question, there can be no scientific consensus.
What you have listed is a consensus among scientists, who, while they may be much more qualified to make statements on scientific issues, are not necessarily any more qualified than many other individuals to make a consensus on these issues.
As such, people do not defer as they would in scientific cases, and thus these intelligent people may come to a different conclusion that happens to be consistent with something other than the scientists’ consensus.
If one considers the way that we bias our information search and processing, it is of little surprise that many intelligent people end up believing in god if they started out believing in god.
Being smart, in the grand scheme of things, is actually painfully dumb. The problems we are facing in this world are way beyond our mental capacity. They are beyond the capacity of our biggest computers. A simple example:
“So, you are smart, eh? How would you design a society that would last 10000 years?”
And you say: “Non-religious, of course! Full of smart atheists!”
And I say: “How do you guarantee they will not nuke themselves within next 100 years?”
And you simply can’t. You can’t guarantee anything about a planet with 6 billion people and natural laws that you don’t fully understand. All you can do is to say, “Well, we’ve had this religion for several thousand years, so maybe if we stick to it and are extremely conservative, it would work for several thousand more.”
So the smart thing to do would actually be - religion!
Or admitting we really have no clue, religious or atheists, and simply do our best.
Please cite the backing for your statement of “scientific consensus of the existence of deities”.
Weither you believe in them or not - I think it is a very far cry to say that there is “scientific consensus” on their existence, or lack thereof.
I believe the question is not “off-topic”, but ill-constructued because it is based on a statement that inherently has to be readily verifiable to be true - and yet seems to be false - and no references are given to support it.
score: 0
I want to give another reason. Scientists just (mostly) want to go about their work. For quite a few the last thing they want to do is throw gasoline onto the religion versus science thing. If they start running around saying “you’ve got to be an unbeliever, otherwise you’re just a dunce”, or other things that the faithful find disturbing, that just adds fuel to the anti-science forces. So many would like to separate this issue from current affairs, and defer it until the indefinte future, when maybe the playing field won’t be stacked against science.
All content is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.