Do you think less of theists intelligence?

For once, I agree with Jumboli. Very well put (except the part relating to Darwin).

 

I agree that some highly improbable events occur, and I'm willing to write them off to coincidence or simply a result of something we don't understand. But I think Jumboli illustrates why there comes a point where it seems foolish to do so. Much of science is built on probability theory. If we do a study and find high, statistically significant correlations among variables and these patterns recur in replicated studies, we can probably get that published in a peer reviewed journal. If we took your approach, we'd have to write everything off to coincidence. I think human advancement would suffer as a consequence. And as a betting man, if I had to choose between betting the person in Jumboli's example was cheating and betting it was all a coincidence, I'd go for the former and never get into a card game with the @#$%^cheating bastard.

I don't. Just guessing.

I've ordered the book. Just some anticipatory comments. Previc has obviously advanced a bold thesis (to put it mildly): that dopamine levels account of all major aspects of human behavior, and therefore, human history. He may be on to something, or he may be just another quack overgeneralizing from his own limited data and specilaization. On another thread, I've discussed a number of other books and articles that have identified different chemicals and neurological influences on religious behavior. Dopamine takes a back seat to serotonin, monoamine, hyperstimulation of the temporal lobe, the DRD4 gene, the VMT2 gene, theta waves, gamma rhythms, and oxygen deprivation. In particular, several studies explore the effects of reduced oxygen levels on the parietal lobe. Some have speculated that the tendency of prophets to have their revelations on mountain tops may be related to reduced levels of oxygen there. A Greek geologist even studied the cave at Delphi, where the famous oracle gave her prophecies, and found high levels of methane, ethanol, and carbon dioxide, which are known to suppress oxygen levels in humans. Not to go unmentioned is John Allegro's theory that Jesus was a psychedelic mushroom. In any case, none of these linkages has been definitively determined to be the "cause" of religion. I'll suspend judgment on Previc's theory until I read the book.

I stand by my original statement. Infants lack the intellectual development to be considered atheists in a meaningful way, since that involves an informed decision not to believe in God. All belief is a matter of choice or habit. We actually don't know what religion or lack thereof an infant, left to itself, would develop, because such an infant would never survive to develop any beliefs. We all depend on others to survive, and those others, directly or indirectly,unconsciously or consciously, will influence how we view the world. You're fortunate to have had a parent who did not try to mold you in a certain way religiously. I doubt, however, that you grew up in an environment in which no one you encountered--friends, neighbors, relatives, teachers--tried to do so. We live in a society of religious busybodies.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "for whom atheism was a complex." Do you think religion is a "complex--like and inferiority complex or something? That has connotations of psychopathology. I think you might have a narrow view of religion. Try William James' Varieties of Religious Experience.

Yes, I think even atheists are governed by unconscious influences that shape their beliefs. Some atheists I know (and I also know quite a few) became turned off or skeptical of religion early on, for whatever reason. They hated Sunday school, the nuns with rulers,preacher Bob or the televangelists, the uppity "holier than thou" neighbors and their snotty kids from the Christian school, etc. Or they had legitimate questions that were greeted with derision or condemnation. We used to have an anti-religious militant on these sites called Fedup American who said the latter was responsible for his atheism. At minimum, they grew up in a society full of religious hypocrisy, cant, platitudes, and obviously ridiculous beliefs held out as certainties by the True Believers. A thinking kid could easily be turned off by that. That's also a form of social conditioning.

I regularly attend meetings of a "freethinkers" group, and it's my impression that many (not all) atheists in the group have a strong attachment to a philosophy of naturalism or scientism which performs for them some of the same functions as religion: providing a coherent alternative belief system, as a defense against an environment dominated by intolerant religious believers;and security, in the knowledge that science will one day come up with the answers. Your inability to perceive this in atheists may be a reflection of your perception that it's simply the truth, not a "complex". Religion doesn't look like a "complex" to the religious.

I think all human belief is shaped by a combination of rational and non-rational (often irrational) influences, that can be loosely grouped under the categories of social learning (conditioning), ego defense, and cognitive balancing. Throw in some neurons firing and some brain chemistry (serotonin, dopamine, monoamine, etc.) and you have a set of powerful determinants that none of us can avoid, not even scientists. The best we can do is to be aware of them (presumably the goals of good education and psychotherapy) and to take steps to control them (e.g., logic, the scientific method). Some of us have more self-insight into them than others, but none is immune. To deny the grip of irrational forces on our psyches is to be their prisoner. To regard them as something only the other guy has is naive.

 

You contradict yourself.

Darwin's entire theory is based on assumption that development of species from most primitive to most advanced was direct result of random mutation and natural selection in the process.
Applying Theory of Probability and quantitative analysis it can be proven to be a false assumption.
So, you can't really agree with me on Probability Theory and at the same time disagree when it comes to the part related to Darwin.

In Spetners words: For the grand process of evolution to work, long sequences of “beneficial” mutations must be possible, each building on the previous one and conferring a selective advantage on the organism. The process must be able to lead not only from one species to another, but to the entire advance of life from a simple beginning to the full complexity of life today. There must be a long series of possible mutations, each of which conferring a selective advantage on the organism so that natural selection can make it take over the population. Moreover, there must be not just one, but a great many such series.

The chain must be continuous in that at each stage a change of a single base pair somewhere in the genome can lead to a more adaptive organism in some environmental context. That is, it should be possible to continue to climb an “adaptive” hill, one base change after another, without getting hung up on a local adaptive maximum. No one has ever shown this to be possible.

Now one might say that if evolution were hung up on a local Maximum, a large genetic change like a recombination or a transposition could bring it to another higher peak. Large adaptive changes are, however, highly improbable. They are orders of magnitude less probable than getting an adaptive change with a single nucleotide substitution, which is itself improbable. No one has shown this to be possible either.

Moreover, as I have noted in my book, the large mutations such as recombinations and transpositions are mediated by special enzymes and are executed with precision - not the sort of doings one would expect of events that were supposed to be the products of chance. Evolutionists chose the mechanism of randomness, by the way, because we can’t think of any other way beneficial mutations might occur in the absence of a law that might govern them. Genetic rearrangements may not be really random at all. They do not seem to qualify as the random mutations Neo-Darwinists can invoke whenever needed to escape from a local adaptive Maximum.

 

Oh, please. We were having such a nice conversation on a topic related to the thread. Let's stick to that.

 

I agree that some highly improbable events occur, and I'm willing to write them off to coincidence or simply a result of something we don't understand. But I think Jumboli illustrates why there comes a point where it seems foolish to do so. Much of science is built on probability theory. If we do a study and find high, statistically significant correlations among variables and these patterns recur in replicated studies, we can probably get that published in a peer reviewed journal. If we took your approach, we'd have to write everything off to coincidence. I think human advancement would suffer as a consequence. And as a betting man, if I had to choose between betting the person in Jumboli's example was cheating and betting it was all a coincidence, I'd go for the former and never get into a card game with the @#$%^cheating bastard.

I don't. Just guessing.

I've ordered the book. Just some anticipatory comments. Previc has obviously advanced a bold thesis (to put it mildly): that dopamine levels account of all major aspects of human behavior, and therefore, human history. He may be on to something, or he may be just another quack overgeneralizing from his own limited data and specilaization. On another thread, I've discussed a number of other books and articles that have identified different chemicals and neurological influences on religious behavior. Dopamine takes a back seat to serotonin, monoamine, hyperstimulation of the temporal lobe, the DRD4 gene, the VMT2 gene, theta waves, gamma rhythms, and oxygen deprivation. In particular, several studies explore the effects of reduced oxygen levels on the parietal lobe. Some have speculated that the tendency of prophets to have their revelations on mountain tops may be related to reduced levels of oxygen there. A Greek geologist even studied the cave at Delphi, where the famous oracle gave her prophecies, and found high levels of methane, ethanol, and carbon dioxide, which are known to suppress oxygen levels in humans. Not to go unmentioned is John Allegro's theory that Jesus was a psychedelic mushroom. In any case, none of these linkages has been definitively determined to be the "cause" of religion. I'll suspend judgment on Previc's theory until I read the book.

I stand by my original statement. Infants lack the intellectual development to be considered atheists in a meaningful way, since that involves an informed decision not to believe in God. All belief is a matter of choice or habit. We actually don't know what religion or lack thereof an infant, left to itself, would develop, because such an infant would never survive to develop any beliefs. We all depend on others to survive, and those others, directly or indirectly,unconsciously or consciously, will influence how we view the world. You're fortunate to have had a parent who did not try to mold you in a certain way religiously. I doubt, however, that you grew up in an environment in which no one you encountered--friends, neighbors, relatives, teachers--tried to do so. We live in a society of religious busybodies.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "for whom atheism was a complex." Do you think religion is a "complex--like and inferiority complex or something? That has connotations of psychopathology. I think you might have a narrow view of religion. Try William James' Varieties of Religious Experience.

Yes, I think even atheists are governed by unconscious influences that shape their beliefs. Some atheists I know (and I also know quite a few) became turned off or skeptical of religion early on, for whatever reason. They hated Sunday school, the nuns with rulers,preacher Bob or the televangelists, the uppity "holier than thou" neighbors and their snotty kids from the Christian school, etc. Or they had legitimate questions that were greeted with derision or condemnation. We used to have an anti-religious militant on these sites called Fedup American who said the latter was responsible for his atheism. At minimum, they grew up in a society full of religious hypocrisy, cant, platitudes, and obviously ridiculous beliefs held out as certainties by the True Believers. A thinking kid could easily be turned off by that. That's also a form of social conditioning.

I regularly attend meetings of a "freethinkers" group, and it's my impression that many (not all) atheists in the group have a strong attachment to a philosophy of naturalism or scientism which performs for them some of the same functions as religion: providing a coherent alternative belief system, as a defense against an environment dominated by intolerant religious believers;and security, in the knowledge that science will one day come up with the answers. Your inability to perceive this in atheists may be a reflection of your perception that it's simply the truth, not a "complex". Religion doesn't look like a "complex" to the religious.

I think all human belief is shaped by a combination of rational and non-rational (often irrational) influences, that can be loosely grouped under the categories of social learning (conditioning), ego defense, and cognitive balancing. Throw in some neurons firing and some brain chemistry (serotonin, dopamine, monoamine, etc.) and you have a set of powerful determinants that none of us can avoid, not even scientists. The best we can do is to be aware of them (presumably the goals of good education and psychotherapy) and to take steps to control them (e.g., logic, the scientific method). Some of us have more self-insight into them than others, but none is immune. To deny the grip of irrational forces on our psyches is to be their prisoner. To regard them as something only the other guy has is naive.

 

But that is an evasion of intelectually honest discussion and a deceptive one at that.

First you make a comment on my post which btw was directed to another poster in the context of his remark about coincedence:
You agreed with me on validity of PT, even used my argument to make a certain point, and at the same time maintained that DT, which is in direct contradiction of PT, is somehow still a valid scientific theory.

Once challenged that your statement is indeed self-contradictory your responce is to shrug it off with "Oh ,please, not again".

Well, if you don't want to engage in what you feel not to be related to a topic of the thread, then why respond with self-contradicting remark to the narrowly pointed post that wasn't addressed to you in the first place?

 

because.

 

I agree that some highly improbable events occur, and I'm willing to write them off to coincidence or simply a result of something we don't understand. But I think Jumboli illustrates why there comes a point where it seems foolish to do so. Much of science is built on probability theory. If we do a study and find high, statistically significant correlations among variables and these patterns recur in replicated studies, we can probably get that published in a peer reviewed journal. If we took your approach, we'd have to write everything off to coincidence. I think human advancement would suffer as a consequence. And as a betting man, if I had to choose between betting the person in Jumboli's example was cheating and betting it was all a coincidence, I'd go for the former and never get into a card game with the @#$%^cheating bastard.

I don't. Just guessing.

I've ordered the book. Just some anticipatory comments. Previc has obviously advanced a bold thesis (to put it mildly): that dopamine levels account of all major aspects of human behavior, and therefore, human history. He may be on to something, or he may be just another quack overgeneralizing from his own limited data and specilaization. On another thread, I've discussed a number of other books and articles that have identified different chemicals and neurological influences on religious behavior. Dopamine takes a back seat to serotonin, monoamine, hyperstimulation of the temporal lobe, the DRD4 gene, the VMT2 gene, theta waves, gamma rhythms, and oxygen deprivation. In particular, several studies explore the effects of reduced oxygen levels on the parietal lobe. Some have speculated that the tendency of prophets to have their revelations on mountain tops may be related to reduced levels of oxygen there. A Greek geologist even studied the cave at Delphi, where the famous oracle gave her prophecies, and found high levels of methane, ethanol, and carbon dioxide, which are known to suppress oxygen levels in humans. Not to go unmentioned is John Allegro's theory that Jesus was a psychedelic mushroom. In any case, none of these linkages has been definitively determined to be the "cause" of religion. I'll suspend judgment on Previc's theory until I read the book.

I stand by my original statement. Infants lack the intellectual development to be considered atheists in a meaningful way, since that involves an informed decision not to believe in God. All belief is a matter of choice or habit. We actually don't know what religion or lack thereof an infant, left to itself, would develop, because such an infant would never survive to develop any beliefs. We all depend on others to survive, and those others, directly or indirectly,unconsciously or consciously, will influence how we view the world. You're fortunate to have had a parent who did not try to mold you in a certain way religiously. I doubt, however, that you grew up in an environment in which no one you encountered--friends, neighbors, relatives, teachers--tried to do so. We live in a society of religious busybodies.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "for whom atheism was a complex." Do you think religion is a "complex--like and inferiority complex or something? That has connotations of psychopathology. I think you might have a narrow view of religion. Try William James' Varieties of Religious Experience.

Yes, I think even atheists are governed by unconscious influences that shape their beliefs. Some atheists I know (and I also know quite a few) became turned off or skeptical of religion early on, for whatever reason. They hated Sunday school, the nuns with rulers,preacher Bob or the televangelists, the uppity "holier than thou" neighbors and their snotty kids from the Christian school, etc. Or they had legitimate questions that were greeted with derision or condemnation. We used to have an anti-religious militant on these sites called Fedup American who said the latter was responsible for his atheism. At minimum, they grew up in a society full of religious hypocrisy, cant, platitudes, and obviously ridiculous beliefs held out as certainties by the True Believers. A thinking kid could easily be turned off by that. That's also a form of social conditioning.

I regularly attend meetings of a "freethinkers" group, and it's my impression that many (not all) atheists in the group have a strong attachment to a philosophy of naturalism or scientism which performs for them some of the same functions as religion: providing a coherent alternative belief system, as a defense against an environment dominated by intolerant religious believers;and security, in the knowledge that science will one day come up with the answers. Your inability to perceive this in atheists may be a reflection of your perception that it's simply the truth, not a "complex". Religion doesn't look like a "complex" to the religious.

I think all human belief is shaped by a combination of rational and non-rational (often irrational) influences, that can be loosely grouped under the categories of social learning (conditioning), ego defense, and cognitive balancing. Throw in some neurons firing and some brain chemistry (serotonin, dopamine, monoamine, etc.) and you have a set of powerful determinants that none of us can avoid, not even scientists. The best we can do is to be aware of them (presumably the goals of good education and psychotherapy) and to take steps to control them (e.g., logic, the scientific method). Some of us have more self-insight into them than others, but none is immune. To deny the grip of irrational forces on our psyches is to be their prisoner. To regard them as something only the other guy has is naive.

 

That explains it

 

Good.

 

I don't think that intelligence is the issue. I think that people who will believe in things without sufficient reason to, just because they wish that they were true, are intellectually dishonest and it's more a matter of character. Intellectual honesty and something like IQ or the ability to perform tasks or create ideas are completely different. If they've never even questioned why they believe what they do, I would call them ignorant. However ignorance and intelligence are different things as well.

 

Genrally speaking, most human beings are egregiously dimwitted creatures, regardless of any other characteristics they may possess.

 

not at all. my point was never that everything is a coincidence. i only said that in my opinion coincidences are not a doing of some supreme being. stop twisting this conversation around.

i don't think dopamine, or any other neurotransmitter would take the back seat to others. they're all important. and you can't put neurotransmitters and brain waves on the same level and say dopamine is less important than theta waves! they're incomparable because their physiology, mechanism, and functions are different. you're just picking bits and pieces from here and there but you don't see the overall picture.

that's what i said. do you not understand English?
also not believing in god does not require an informed decision. it's the other way around -- in order to believe in god you need information (which comes from outside sources -- parents, society, etc) about it. the default state is not having a god notion as such. which every infant has. it hasn't been exposed to religion yet. thus it's religionless, godless.

are you 7? take a look at your own post back there.

you don't need a belief system in order to have security or what not that you mentioned. also the environment is not dominated by religious believers. and there can be no knowledge that science will come up with any answers. don't try to bullshit me with your circular arguments.

 

i agree with you. i never said that everything was a coincidence. where do you get that? my only argument was that coincidences (and i made an innocent assumption here that we define coincidence as something random -- someone amassing trillions of $ can hardly be seen as random) are coincidences and not a work of some intelligent creature. i refuted coincidence being the proof/sign of god/etc. that's what i said.

 

I don't think you said that in your opinion coincidences are not the doing of some supreme being. I thought you said that even highly improbable events must be explained as coincidences and cannot be taken as evidence of anything more. So, apparently. did Jumboli. What I said is that statistically significant regularities can be taken as more than coincidence, and that intelligent causes of them sometimes shouldn't be ruled out.

Here again, my point wasn't that dopamine must be ruled out and that the other factors aren't part of the picture--just that none of these studies, as yet, proves anything like a connection between the phenomenon of religion and pathology,and most of them say so.

Why is this an important point for you? Without culture, starting from scratch would be the "default position'. Without information, the infant might ask questions and try to work out its own solutions, and who knows--maybe find religion the way his/her ancestors did; or not. More likely, (s)he wouldn't survive.

Say what? " are you 7"--is that some kind of slang? Yes, I used the word "complex" to make the point that atheism like religion can serve ego defense functions, but that one reason you don't perceive it as dong so might be that it seems like just the truth to you. When you say you never saw any atheists with complexes, you're not necessarily refuting the original point--because it still might be that you just don't notice it. Many Americans believe that ideologies are something only other countries have. You're the one who suggested religion was analagous to a mental disorder. I don't think that can seriously be argued with regard to religious folks or atheists, but neither side is immune to psychological influences.

I think many people find beliefs helpful, and some who have security in a physical financial sense might still find something lacking without them. Your introduction of the term "belief system" colors the argument, since the term connotes some elaborate and fairly stable set of interdependent beliefs and values. I don't recall suggesting this was a need. I was reporting first hand observations of atheists I meet with regularly, who seem to have great confidence in science's ability to come up with answers, and find comfort in that. I agree there can be no knowledge that science will come up with any answers, but some people have faith that will happen--no bullshit. As for the environment not being dominated by religious believers, I guess it depends on what environment you're talking about. Here in the Bible Belt, religion is hard to escape, and the evangelicals seem to have made headway at the national level, as well. I don't know whether or not you're from the United States. If you're not, you're living in a different universe from mine. But the basic point is the same. For example, if you're living in western Europe, where secularism is predominant, that will be the influence you're exposed to in your formative years.

 

Your reasoning seems a bit circular. If someone amasses trillions of dollars and says it's a coincidence, how do you know it isn't? How do you distinguish random from non-random events?

 

Intelligence is relative and so "most human beings" are of average intelligence. And most human beings are not egregiously dimwitted, by the very definition of egregious, the egregiously dimwitted ones are the ones who are far more dimwitted than most.

If you meant to say that most people are dumbfucks in comparison to you that would make sense. I won't call you arrogant

 

I think religion can be a mind crippling disease. Any set of beliefs that encourages blind obedience, whether to clerics or books, or discourages reason and critical thought, is bound to produce spiritually deformed and intellectually defective people. I agree with Dawkins that to fall down before the God of Gaps any time we reach an impasse in our knowledge is a big mistake. That said, I don't think it has to be that way. We weren't given this wonderful gift of reason to shackle it. One of my most disturbing experiences as a Christian on Hip Forums was to read a post by a young gay man wondering if Satan had made him, because no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't measure up to God's demands. What misguided self-righteous pharisees posing as Christians filled this kid's mind with such poison and inflicted this self-loathing on him? Is this what religion is about? I hope not.

 

i said coincidences even the improbable ones. we weren't talking about just any event there, we were talking about coincidences, thus the 'improbable' could only have been describing what was in the conversation not some added imaginary subject.

you didn't say other factors weren't part of the picture you said dopamine took a backseat to them.

and in the reply you didn't remember what the complex stood for.



i'm done. you aren't able to sustain a coherent rational conversation w/o twisting things around or manipulating the basic arguments made. this is completely pointless.

 

You seem to have a short fuse. Are you sure you're cut out for discussions?