/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.4711649]

Do smart people really believe in God? Even in the old days, when Leibniz and Descartes argued for God's existence, did they really believe in what they were saying?

I find it really hard to understand how people who are so good at science, mathematics and philosophy can believe in the existence of a being for which there's no mathematical proof, no scientific verification, no good philosophical argument and who is not self-evident.

This is not a thread to debate God's existence. What I want o know is:

1) As far as our biographical knowledge goes, did the great thinkers of the past really believe in these things or did they fake their belief in order to please the church and their superiors?

2) What is it like to be a smart person - well read, who can think critically etc. - and yet believe? Is there someone like this here? What is it like?

[Anonymous No.4711657]

>>4711649
Science describes physical things.
God is a METAPHYSICAL being, therefore he cannot be explained by science.
You,well you are retarded.

[Anonymous No.4711656]

No only goofballs believe in God

[Anonymous No.4711663]

>1) As far as our biographical knowledge goes, did the great thinkers of the past really believe in these things or did they fake their belief in order to please the church and their superiors?
i don't know why don't you ask them

>2) What is it like to be a smart person - well read, who can think critically etc. - and yet believe? Is there someone like this here? What is it like?
yes; p rad

[Anonymous No.4711664]

>>4711649
There is a phase of smart which is an analog to the mortality moment of childhood, and the sexual moment of adolescence. This phase is the dismissal phase of smart. "Oh, ho ho, sky fairies, the gospels were crescendoing anti-semitic agitprop, etc."

Beyond this, there is another phase of smart, in which it is impossible to deny the grandeur of that which this science describes. In this phase of smart, the Bible, the Torah, the Talmud, and the Koran shrink in significance to the status of doodles by petty despots, with entirely localized concerns.

There is something behind the curtain. There must be. We have chased it all the way back to the Planck epoch. We have decoded one of its programming languages, back to the amino acid transcriptase. Whatever it is, it is vastly larger than the conceptions enshrined in the world's local scriptures. If it is within our experience to discover it, by whatever agency there may be, I suspect we will be awed by our meager conceptions. Ants' brains receiving pilot downloads for a B-212 helicopter.

[Anonymous No.4711666]

OP are you this guy as well?

[chopan !!SmntMPo4MGM No.4711682]

I would want to say that many smart people, even geniuses, believe in God. Intelligence does not preclude the ability to hold faith.

As for your other questions, it is very likely some great thinkers did indeed fake their theist stance in order to save themselves or their thoughts. To claim all of them did however, would require a very solid case.

As for "being a smart person and yet believing", I think someone who is very, very intelligent will necessarily give up on arguing and embrace God through credo quia absurdum. Although I do not think a sound logical argument for God exists, faith is all that is needed. Reasoning toward faith is much easier than reasoning toward God.

On a side note: If I recall correctly, analytic thinkers are less likely to be religious than the "median" thinker. However, there is little correlation between IQ and analytical thinking. In general, I would advise to be careful not to bunch up all theists as your intellectual inferiors, which is what could be construed from the way you posed the problem.

Thank you for the interesting question,

[Anonymous No.4711685]

>>4711657
As soon as you invoke this argument, anything goes and there's no point in arguing any more.

[Anonymous No.4711691]

>>4711649

>mathematical proof

Show me mathematical proof that mathematical proof actually really exists....if you appeal to a higher concept (i.e.-the idea of mathematics) as evidence of mathematical proof then you are appealing to an authority which exists outside of temporal experience and is thus, as another anon has stated, a metaphysical truth. In other words, you can't have mathematics without truth. Truth is beyond physical and can not be proven according to method and standard of the scientific method.

You appeal to higher forms of truth without acknowledging you've done so and yet act as though there can not be any form of higher existence.

To answer your troll post, yes, many highly intelligent people really believe or have believed in God, and yes they really believed what they were saying.

Is this some revisionist attempt to turn theistic thinkers into atheistic thinkers? Because, if so, it is an utter failure.

[Anonymous No.4711693]

>>4711657

[Anonymous No.4711694]

>>4711682
>Reasoning toward faith is much easier than reasoning toward God.
But how can you reason faith?

[Anonymous No.4711699]

Only the irrational would try to argue there's different types of truth. God is for women.

[Anonymous No.4711700]

>>4711657

[Anonymous No.4711702]

Philosophers are slaves to the cultures that produce them. Naturally, many have used their sophistries in service of the great lies of theism. Whether they believed it themselves or not is irrelevant. The damage has already been done and continues to be done.

[Anonymous No.4711705]

>>4711691
Math is empirical.

[Anonymous No.4711710]

>>4711649
Well, it sort of was a real taboo to be an atheist back then and a rather scary position too (the belief in God was still thought as something that fundamentally prevents the society from descending into beast like barbarians), so there were most likely many psychological aspects to the belief too. Imagine, if your conclusions about life contradicted everything that was thought to you as apparent, sane, rational and fundamental to humane existence. You would be definetily motivated to find a reason for the existence of God, rather than nonexistence.

That being said, there are many very intelligent people who believe in a higher being to this day. I am not one of them (that being - very intelligent or a believer), but I presume that arguments would include analysis of the concept of divinity itself (where you conclude that Universe must be divine or something) and highly personal experience or feelings.

[Anonymous No.4711707]

>>4711682
Awwww shit! In after chopan! Write the story nigger, don't waste your time on these thick plebeians.

[Anonymous No.4711713]

>>4711657

[Anonymous No.4711725]

>>4711657
The scientific method is universal.

[Anonymous No.4711728]

>>4711694
I'm going to bite the bullet and answer for him.
He most likely means it in the style of Kierkegaard. That faith is to be held precisely because you cannot argue for God. Therefore the intellectual dissociation from the ethical to the religious is the greatest act a human can make.

[Anonymous No.4711732]

Hate to tell you this, but you're the rustic illiterate pleb who wasn't read enough philosophy and literature to see the evidence of God. Atheism is a phenomenon of the past 200 years and very few serious philosophers were atheists before then.

[Anonymous No.4711735]

Most "smart people" or scientists nowadays acknowledge that we can't know for sure whether or not god exists and are agnostics.

[Anonymous No.4711737]

>>4711732
see
>>4711710
>>4711732

[Anonymous No.4711739]

>>4711735
This. It is an unintelligent response to assume one way or another if god exists. Whereas an intelligent person can admit that he or she does not know the answer, and can leave it at that. There is a lot of shit in the universe we don't know, so rather than filling that void with "oh, god did it" or "oh, some scientific phenomenon did it, but we don't know that phenomenon just yet" are both poor answers. The best thing one can do is admit he or she does not know, and then move on and live his or her life, as the existence of a god, at this stage in humanity, should be completely irrelevant to how a life is led.

[Anonymous No.4711757]

I was always critical of religion but today I consider myself as a theist. I've been reading the Christian tradition and trying to see many facets of it, as well as the criticism. I don't know, I don't see how an intelligent person cannot be a theist. When it comes down to it it's about personal feeling, but supplanted with a very rich intellectual tradition of the western world that makes theism a very valid choice.

[Anonymous No.4711763]

If God designed our Earth, universe, and being, he could design it so that we could never discover who or what he is.

Science would then not be able to find or explain god no matter how hard we try.

[Anonymous No.4711765]

>>4711735

While we can never know for sure whether a God does or does not exist, it is not logical to believe in an asserted deity without any supporting evidence, therefore while the issue is fundamentally unprovable, the default position is skepticism.

Most people who call themselves Atheists hold this position, I don't think I've ever met a single person who says with 100% certainty that God doesn't exist.

[Anonymous No.4711769]

>>4711739
Major difference: 'a scientific phenomena did it but we don't know what it is' keeps you asking questions. It's still a what if. 'God did it' is not, and stops questions.

There are some exceptions: Thinking god did it, and it can be explained by scientific phenomena. But this doesn't apply to unthinking foundationalist claims masquerading as theism.

[Anonymous No.4711772]

My parents are atheists and I was raised without any religion. For years I thought that believing in God was absolutely stupid. But then I started questioning how could people believe in it like that? The answers were simple: wishful thinking, tradition, etc. Except... That doesn't explain it at all and is just a mindless answer, a quick judgement, a way of telling "people are just stupid, that's why". I couldn't buy this crap and I had to see it for myself, so I had to humble myself down for it. I began thinking what was the difference between my family and all others, actual differences. One had a "God bless you" refrigerator magnet and got together in a church every once in a while. But how did it change their morals or their outlook in life? I realized that the intelligent people are questioning what does it mean to believe in God (or what does it mean not to). That every religion says in some way "don't stick with the image of it, go for the thing". And that the metaphysical debate over God was a clash between definitions of it and that my idea of what God meant was outright simplistic. That we often discuss it to feel superior or by taking what is said over what is meant in what is said. I don't have religion and I don't think I'm either atheist or theist, because I see little difference, only cultural ones over each tradition. But I only gained peace of mind when I stopped to listen to intelligent men talking about their God.

[Anonymous No.4711775]

>>4711649
Get off your high horse, faggot. Science was in it's infancy when Newton and Leibniz were around and the scientific method was only starting to become applied. You'd probably believe in God too, if you'd had a 17th Century education and upbringing.

[chopan !!SmntMPo4MGM No.4711774]

>>4711694
To believe beyond reason. What if reason or empirical evidence sufficed to prove God exists? Would the act of believing in him be rendered less great? How easy it is for me to sit on my chair knowing it has held my weight a million times before, but what does this say of my trust in the chair? Nothing. Simply that I trust the experience I have of this chair.

What are we, then, to understand of trust in God? Surely one might say trust is a part of love, which we also owe to him.
For me to trust, to love the chair, I must sit on it as though it could do nothing else than the absolute. Requiring specific proof of the chair's stability in the form of previous experiences of sitting in the chair is a debasement of the complete trust it requires of me.

Whose trust is more complete, the man who believes without any reason or the one who withholds his belief for the sake of certainty? If a small proof is offered in the instantiated form of there being a chair (something which supports your weight as you sit on it), the unsure may still claim "I would trust you if you gave me more proof".
But God has given us the chair. Only those who would trust Him, who would use the chair without asking further, are able to claim faith and a true relationship to Him.

Can you see the chair? It is uncluttered in its complexity; it is ancient and derelict and it burns and it freezes. If you require more to sit in it, then by all means stand.

[Anonymous No.4711781]

>>4711657
>>4711685
Yes, there is. Really, when did everyone's minds go to hell in a handbasket. Ok I'll start with basics.

The Natural Sciences [such as biology, chemistry, physics, etc], describe material things. Matter, energy, tissues, organs, chemicals, etc, and work on the principles of induction and empiricism. Simply put, one does science by studying the physical world and trying to induce its laws by the behavior of its components. You are determining the universal, by way of the constant study of the particular. It has a few philosophical problems [such as the problem of induction, and Cartesian Doubt], but I'm optimistic enough to think those can be solved and Science is a possible tool to determine truth about the outside World.

That however means, that its ONLY domain of study, is things that are material and can be observed. There are many fields [such as, Mathematics, Logic, Ethics, etc] that do not work on the Scientific Principle or the Scientific Method. They work by a deductive methodology, where you reason a priori. Things such as Analytic Statements, that is to say truths of definition or relation [such as, All Bachelors are unmarried, or All Brothers are Male] or axioms [The Law of Identity, the Law of Noncontradiction]. Basically you determine truth in this system in reverse, by taking something you already know, and then deducing things from that. You determine the particular by way of the universal. Then you just make sure your principle you were deducing from is true/valid, make sure your argument is true valid, make sure you applied proper syntax and rule of inference, and off you go. Its a perfectly logical system that is NOT scientific because it has nothing to do with the physical world, at least not directly. This is the domain of Logic, Mathematics, and all of Philosophy.

Now the Deity [and pay attention], is in most religions an immaterial, eternal [in the "outside of Time entirely" sense, not the "has existed forever" sense], unchanging, infinite, etc etc etc. To put it bluntly, although most religions do make CLAIMS that can be tested in science, or at least in history, the actual existence of a Deity [or not] is a matter of Reasoning from principles. The Deity is by DEFINITION unobservable, because He is not a thing that is observed. He is not composed of observable things, He is an abstract Intellect.

Which is why the arguments for the Deity are all attempts at deduction. Such as taking the principles "All [qualified] Effects have Causes" and "An infinite regression is impossible" and getting the Cosmological Argument. Or attempting to prove the Deity must exist because it would lead to a logical contradiction if He didn't [Ontological].

[Cont]

[Anonymous No.4711784]

>>4711781
Which is ultimately how you HAVE to prove or disprove a Deity, because as an immaterial Being, you can't prove Him by physical demonstration. Even if an avatar of God came down from the sky and started doing miracles, we could easily hypothesize that He was merely an alien, or a superbeing. Not an omnipotent Monad.

The only way to prove that He was a Monad [or anything LIKE the traditional monotheistic conception of Deity] would be through a priori deductive rational arguments.

I'm not even a theist and I understand this. This utter collapse of understanding of the difference between synthetic/analytic statements, or deduction and induction, or a priori and a posteri [and this is ignoring some new thinkers saying they're the same, I'm talking purely about people who aren't even aware of the problem or supposed difference] is a complete travesty of modern thought. There is an entire group of well-off, educated persons who proudly say "The only truth is through observable science" and then immediately start using logic and arithmetic in their work. Its completely absurd.

OP if you want to know why some otherwise entirely educated persons could believe in a Deity, first get a grasp of what exactly they meant by a Deity [and hint, if they were anyone important, they weren't imagining Zeus in the sky], and then figure out that not all truths are empirical/scientific [and no I'm not a mystic arguing for aesthetic or blind-faith or authority truth, I'm arguing for math and logic and other axiom/validity/deduction based methodologies], and THEN go into the works and start analyzing the proofs they use.

Rant Over.

[Anonymous No.4711788]

>>4711774
This trip's something special.
I'm still calling bullshit on English being a second language though.

[IMPERATOR BERTRANNVS ARTORIVS (...) !nl4OKiRPjQ No.4711789]

But these great minds - such as Spinoza, Leibniz, Descartes, Kant, Berkeley, and Godel - DID believe there is a good philosophical, or, as in the case of Godel, purely formal logical argument for God's existence. It's not altogether foolish to believe this: Kant's and Godel's arguments in particular are difficult to refute.

[Anonymous No.4711790]

>>4711784
I see someone just got out of his class on Kant and outdated philosophical categories.

[Anonymous No.4711793]

>>4711781
>>4711784
Thank you, I'm tired of this empirical absolutism.

[Anonymous No.4711794]

>>4711790
>>4711784
>[and this is ignoring some new thinkers saying they're the same, I'm talking purely about people who aren't even aware of the problem or supposed difference]

[IMPERATOR BERTRANNVS ARTORIVS (...) !nl4OKiRPjQ No.4711800]

>>4711656

I see you're being sarcastic, but I would be entirely willing to say that Kierkegaard - and indeed all Continentals - ARE goodballs, to a greater (as in the case of, say, Derrida) or lesser (as in the case of Husserl and Heidegger) degree.

[IMPERATOR BERTRANNVS ARTORIVS (...) !nl4OKiRPjQ No.4711804]

>>4711790

It's not like you can say that these categories are outdated in an absolute sense. Some people oppose them, some support them. Your opinion does not constitute the entirety of philosophical truth.

[Anonymous No.4711814]

The same way that a right triangle is defined by the squared length of its hypothenuse being equal to the squared sum of the two legs, God is necessarily defined as existent in his perfection.

[Anonymous No.4711820]

>>4711649
Being smart is not about treating science and math as an alternate dogma.

An awareness of how your belief systems shape your world is important.

Living in a state of dogmatic disbelief is just as ignorant as living in a state of dogmatic belief.

The human experience is more than just logic. Its more than empirical reduction. Its more than utility. Its more than dominance of the senses through science and math.

The willingness to be inspired, to feel vulnerable, to sense beauty; that is where you will find smart people with the balls to admit they believe as well as they reason and order.

[Anonymous No.4711827]

galileo, copernicus, isaac newton...all christian.

depends on how you assume others look at God. i see a lot of strawmen that base their judgements on the idiotic things a few people of different faiths say. faith is incredibly personal and if you were to say there being NO God is the most obvious thing in the world someone could legitimately say that God IS the most obvious thing in the world and would be equally justifiable.

people like to stick to odd or extreme stories and try to pin the whole of faith on these things when i've never needed any book nor other proof beyond my own existence.

[Anonymous No.4711843]

>>4711820
This, many people are fooled by the belief that humans are inherently guided by reason and should only follow empirically based positions.
The very things that make like worth living are faith-based or irrational. I can't remember who, but someone said that we convince ourselves of fifteen different beliefs by the time we get out of bed - I love my wife, I don't hate my job, life is worth living.
Theology is all well and good, and it's important to build on your faith so it doesn't crumble from the most simplistic atheist arguments, but when it comes down to it it's about personal speculation, poetry, feeling, FAITH. I can't know if God cares about me. I pray that he does.

[Anonymous No.4711850]

>>4711843
“I try to believe in as many as six impossible things before breakfast. Count them, Alice. One, there are drinks that make you shrink. Two, there are foods that make you grow. Three, animals can talk. Four, cats can disappear. Five, there is a place called Underland. Six, I can slay the Jabberwocky.”

[Anonymous No.4711865]

>>4711843
>>4711820
You are everything wrong with religion. Everything. Literally everything. People come saying superstitions, idiocies, and the worst heresies and barbarisms, or the most convulsed idiotic eloquent arguments for atheism and apatheism and who knows what else, and you throw down Reason, your only weapon against this retardation in the world, and throw up this pompous emotionalistic romantic bullshit.

REASON, I say, is the sole and only guide of human understanding and conduct. And by denying this you make yourself more like a beast than a Man. You haven't gone beyond Reason, you've stumped under it. You haven't risen to Heaven, you've slid down a canyon. Every attempt to explain religion in a rational sense, of attempting a divine philosophy, is constantly arrested by laymen such as yourself who ACTIVELY fight for the opposition by promoting blind faith and emotion-based thinking as alternatives.

You, you personally, are why threads like this one exists. Because the name "God" has been permanently marred by association with people who ASSUME, inherently, that theism is irrational [or arational], that it cannot and shouldn't be proved, that its allowed to self-contradict, and all manner of other hogwash.

[Anonymous No.4711902]

>>4711865
I'm not throwing down reason, bud. I'm saying that from a religious perspective, reason can't grasp the knowledge of God without faith. The way you capitalize the word just makes it seem ridiculous.

[Anonymous No.4711911]

>no good philosophical argument

The Unmoved Mover is really a logical necessity and trumps any logical argument for atheism I've ever seen. Personally, I believe that an Aristotelian God is the only belief that makes sense at our current understanding of the universe.

[Anonymous No.4711914]

Are we really doing this? Here? Again?

[Anonymous No.4711923]

>>4711902
>reason can't grasp the knowledge of God without faith

That is completely and utterly ridiculous. The problem here is, if I attempt to use reason to prove/disprove the divine, or to analyze it, or to do any other thing, you have no defense but to give up, or try reasoning.

Because its not a reasonable matter of question, that reason is the organ of truth as surely as the stomach is the organ of digestion.

There is absolutely nothing higher than reasoning in the matter of determine truth, because determining truth is by definition a matter of reasoning.

To be willing to blindly believe anything is foolish, not to mention unethical. I don't want to be the fedora guy, but in any philosophy or idea, believe without evidence can easily lead to fanaticism or idiocy. And thats on both the religious and atheistic side of the issue.

To think that there is any methodology or instrument in human nature higher than Reason isn't just wrong, its unethical. Its you begging the cosmos to throat-fuck you, either by having one of your precious beliefs turn out completely wrong at the worst possible moment, or having them blow up in your face [in the case of extremist Islam, quite literally].

Not to mention that it defeats the possibility of a strong-belief in the first place, and only leads to cognitive dissonance. People don't have crisis of conscience over the existence of the Sun, or Paris, France. But they do the Deity. Not to mention that with blind faith its not even POSSIBLE to truly believe anything in any sense that matters. People betray their disbelief all the time. They mourn for the dead, often for months at a time [despite believing in immortality of the soul, and in the case of Christianity/Judaism/Islam, the body too], they perform evil deeds, often intentionally [that is to say, not mere flights of passion but actual planned evildoing].

At the end of the day the blind-believer is not a believer at all, because he knows nothing. And the reason he knows nothing is because he knows not Reason.
>Which I refuse to stop capitalizing at my leisure. It looks cooler.

[Anonymous No.4711930]

>>4711923
>muh enlightenment

[Anonymous No.4711961]

>>4711911
So you believe god is a place holder for human knowledge?

An atheist is someone who doesn't buy placeholders? Religious people are those who do? Agnostics are not sure placeholders exist? You're an idiot?

Here's what would happen if an unmoved mover were proven to be the origins of the universe: Immediately, the religious would say god caused it to be.

Turtles all the way down isn't some wacky thought experiment to consternate the religious. It's what religious people actually do.

[Anonymous No.4711965]

i dont listen to the answers of the thread, but i think that people feel obligated to think in that thing from child, and from there they feel like the idea of god is something to think about. something important and solemn. maybe are somethind they couldnt broke... the knowledge like something escalated is an invention, a system...

[Anonymous No.4711974]

>>4711923
>At the end of the day the blind-believer is not a believer at all, because he knows nothing. And the reason he knows nothing is because he knows not Reason.

That is what I meant when I said a dogmatic state of disbelief is just as ignorant as a dogmatic state of belief.

I'm not making a claim that the world is incomprehensible and shouldn't be understood.

I don't like the OP, which says to me that smart people should close their eyes to the difference between the world as it is thought about and the world as it is experienced.

That involves a lack a reasoning, and a lack of awareness of beliefs molding perception.

[Anonymous No.4711977]

>>4711961
Oh, hey guys, turns out it was evolution, but god totally set it in motion. Checkmate, athetits.

[Anonymous No.4711978]

>>4711911
>can accept an "unmoved mover" presumably always existing
>can't accept a universe springing into being of itself

Yeah, that's real logical, man.

>the only belief that makes sense at our current understanding of the universe.

Lel. Clearly you know nothing about what you speak. Our current understanding of cosmology leans heavily to the idea that our universe is just one of many, and that we live in this one simply because the laws in this universe happen to allow. (For example, see the recent BICEP-2 finds.)

But who gives a shit about what science says, rite? Muh faith and all that.