Pinoy Atheist: A journey of an atheist in Manila.

I never understand it why Christians loves to say that there are scientists (philosophers) that believe in a god (or a sort of a god?) What's the point?

Robert J. Sternberg, IBM professor of psychology and education at Yale and the hyperprolific editor or author of more than 60 other books, has compiled and edited "Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid," a volume of scholarly papers on the subject.

Sternberg's premise is that stupidity and intelligence aren't like cold and heat, where the former is simply the absence of the latter. Stupidity might be a quality in itself, perhaps measurable, and it may exist in dynamic fluxion with intelligence, such that smart people can do really dumb things sometimes and vice versa.

David N. Perkins lists eight deadly sins of the stupid smart person, which seem to sum it all up rather elegantly: impulsiveness (doing something rash), neglect (ignoring something important), procrastination (actively avoiding something important), vacillation (dithering), backsliding (capitulating to habit), indulgence (allowing oneself to fall into excess), overdoing (like indulgence, but with positive things) and walking the edge (tempting fate). That sounds like my entire life, actually. Yes, that explains a lot.

Stupidity, for Perkins, is best thought of as a failure of adaptiveness -- as "folly." And folly "in a strong sense involves recurrent foolishness that seems, in principle, within the intellectual reach of the person to discern" -- a matter of faulty switching in one's mental processes. Basically, Perkins says, you can be really smart but not know when to engage your smartness, and the extent to which this happens is "stupidity."

Let see...if Copernicus believe in a god, does that prove god exist? Even smart people believe in stupid things. For example, do you know that amids of his knowledge, Newton still believes on alchemy? Johanes Kepler was also into alchemy. According to Sir Francis Bacon, "...objects of the alchemists, says Bacon, are not absurd; what is absurd is their theories and the means by which they hope to reach their ends." Galileo argues that one should not begin with biblical passages in order to discover truths about nature, yet he believe that the Bible teaches one how to go to heaven and not how the heavens go.Boyle sincerely believed in miracles.

In the famous Leuba survey in 1914, US psychologist James H. Leuba found that 58% of 1,000 randomly selected US scientists expressed disbelief or doubt in the existence of God, and that this figure rose to near 70% among the 400 "greater" scientists within his sample [Leuba, J. H. The Belief in God and Immortality: A Psychological, Anthropological and Statistical Study (Sherman, French & Co., Boston, 1916).].

Leuba repeated his survey in somewhat different form 20 years later, and found that these percentages had increased to 67 and 85, respectively.

The result of the survey of Nature Magazine found near universal rejection of the transcendent by National Academy of Sciences (NAS) natural scientists. The survey, by Edward J. Larson of the University of Georgia, was intended to replicate one conducted in 1914, and the results were virtually unchanged. In both cases, participants were drawn from a directory of American scientists.

Disbelief in God and immortality among NAS biological scientists was 65.2% and 69.0%, respectively, and among NAS physical scientists it was 79.0% and 76.3%. Most of the rest were agnostics on both issues, with few believers. We found the highest percentage of belief among NAS mathematicians (14.3% in God, 15.0% in immortality). Biological scientists had the lowest rate of belief (5.5% in God, 7.1% in immortality), with physicists and astronomers slightly higher (7.5% in God, 7.5% in immortality).

To prove God's existence I think a believer needs more that the fallacy of reliance to authority to boost his claims.

Until next time,
John the Atheist