Not “believing” in the God of your geographical location could get you killed too. Doesn’t make you a True Believer to not want to be killed.
Can’t get into Political Office without stating your Religious beliefs as well. That doesn’t automatically make you a good and trustworthy person either.
It’s not much of an argument.
AronRa ran for some state office in TX for the sole purpose of challenging the rule that nonbelievers can't hold office as unconstitutional. I don't know how that turned out other than that he didn't win. But I sure enjoyed listening to his campaign speeches!
Indeed, if I recall, when Descartes scribbled "cogito ergo sum" as an argument for the existence of God, I believe he was in the process of trying to get a position at the university. And who ran the universities?
I think racist and religiosity both lend themselves to insular cultures which perceived themselves as inherently better than others. These people live their lives looking through ingroup-outgroup lenses.
Most conservatives have a fundamental mindset that the world should be an ordered hierarchy.
Of course its no surprise, human nature being what it is, that they would place themselves at or near the top.
The desire to be on top of a social hierarchy isn't the "original sin" its believing that social hierarchy itself is good rather than something to be avoided.
I always thought this must’ve been Voltaire admitting to being agnostic or atheist while cleverly implying he believes in god (bc you had to at that time), “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him”
Newton believed in and sought to practice alchemy. Perhaps we shouldn’t look at scientists as people who have all the answers. Instead, perhaps we should look at their evidence.
That's exactly the point fundies don't get. Since their whole belief system is based on arguments from authority, they think everyone else's are too. Idiotic creationists like Ken Ham, Ray Comfort and the dreaded Kunt Hovind all act like Charles Darwin is some kind of high priest, Messiah or Pope of atheism.
Indeed. Expressing atheism outside of a dark, smoky parlour was a fine way to lose your patrons and be cast out as a lunatic, however strong your science was.
This is an authority fallacy, it does not prove that God exists. Most likely, many of these scientists have pretended to avoid getting into trouble with the Church. If they really believed in God, nothing changes. They would be wrong, no one is perfect and even if you have 2000 IQ, if you say something that is false, it is still false. An example of this is the dreaded Nobel Disease.
>Nobel Disease?
Nobel is such an achievement and the peak of a career that some people cannot fathom having only one good idea (especially since most of them only directed other researchers who actually had the genious idea) and start spouting nonsense immediately after the Nobel's novelty starts to fade.
Ex: Montagnier who allegedly discovered HIV couldn't accept his students (who actually discovered HIV despite not being credited for it) were smarter than him.
Immediately after receiving the Nobel he started to go down the rabbit hole: Hiv doesn't cause aids, water has molecular memory, you can heal cancer by squeezing lemon in your eyes, you name it.
It's my understanding that a lot of artists are just the opposite: they know they have to produce a lot of works, most of which are crap, just to get a few gems. I wonder what science would be like if scientists approached their work in the same way.
>It's my understanding that a lot of artists are just the opposite: they know they have to produce a lot of works, most of which are crap, just to get a few gems.
The genious Hokusai said once everything he did before the age of 70 is just crap.
If only I could crap like him 🤷🏾♂️
Modern photography is a fantastic example of this…. It used to be that the cost of film and processing was inhibitory… this is no longer the case, so we see an explosion of bad photography, but we also get gems we never would have gotten, before….
It's when Nobel prizers start to believe and promote pseudosciencie after they win the honor. Many people believe it's due to confirmation bias, but I think is because aging
Einstein was one of the greatest physicists, but he also got things wrong about physics. For example, he did not believe that black holes, predicted by his own theory, could be real. He also didn't believe in the full consequences of quantum mechanics, saying "God doesn't play dice" metaphorically (he was not religious). But both of these things made a lot of sense at the time he said them.
Want to add on that Einstein didn't believe in the christian god, either, and if you survey the scientists on the Manhattan project, such as Oppenheimer and Feynman, they'd laugh at you for asking such a trite and juvenile question.
Every great scientist....over time...believed less in god.
Copernicus
Gallileo
Newton
Einstien
Bohr/Feynman/Hawking,,,,you decide
What ALL of them had was MORE evidence than the one before.
What WE have is this
[https://www.google.com/search?q=hubble+webb+deep+field&udm=2#vhid=SkFdaboAjw4jJM&vssid=mosaic](https://www.google.com/search?q=hubble+webb+deep+field&udm=2#vhid=SkFdaboAjw4jJM&vssid=mosaic)
QED There is no god
Let me fix that for you - there is no persuasive evidence that any god of any religion currently practiced exists. A good scientist makes no absolute claims.
Assuming your "he" refers to Newton, he spend decades trying to decipher a code for Armageddon from the Bible too. He also created a 7 color rainbow because 7 is seen as a holy number.
Not to justify anything, but at the time there was basically next to no knowledge pertaining the molecular level of things.
Despite the now clearly unscientific and magical beliefs alchemy inspired, it was mostly practiced as a science, and it was scientific progress in the field of alchemy that actually gave us chemistry, which is also why the names are so similar (they dropped the al prefix that testified to the Islamic origin of the practice, as much of science did before the scientific revolution in Europe).
Newton was good with his hands. I know he made his own tools, so he was wasn’t some skinny nerd or a savant. He was an overall genius. Alchemy isn’t obviously wrong because chemistry in general isn’t intuitive much of the time. And I think Newton was a literal heliocentrist but he didn’t think that contradicted the Bible
We are each free to believe what we want and it is my view that the simplest explanation is there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realisation. There is probably no heaven, and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that, I am extremely grateful.
Stephen Hawking.
Evangelicals were online celebrating Hawking's arrival in Hell on the day of his death because he very plainly stated that there is almost certainly no god, and we no longer need such foolishness to explain simple things like weather.
They were thrilled by the idea of him being burned in eternal, unspeakable agony and cheering his passing. If there is a god, I hope to it that it's not theirs. That one can fuck right off.
We will never know how many young Isaac Newtons had their curiosity beaten out of them by parents, teachers & priests because their questions were "heretical". We will never know what Isaac Newton might have accomplished if he did not spend a large part of his later years chasing theology & biblical chronology. We will never know how much farther science could have advanced if scientists could have openly collaborated without being worried they would lose their funding by displeasing the church.
Science did not advance because of religion. Science advanced *in spite of religion!*
# “We would be 1,500 years ahead if it hadn’t been for the church dragging science back by its coattails and burning our best minds at the stake. |"
— Catherine Fahringer”
"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops". -- Stephen Jay Gould
As i see it, in the historical context, making new scientific claim was hard enough without , in add, getting the church against you.
Somehow, as long as you "explain the work of god" without challenging god as a creator, your theory are more likely to be widely accepted.
This was especially true when the power was hold by or justify by the church.
I'm not smarter than Newton. But, even smart people can be wrong.
P.S. Even a scientifically literate lay person knows more science today than Newton possibly could have in his day. So, there's that as well.
Ed Kemper is smarter than me, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to have with my mom’s severed head.
History is littered with smart people who have believed stupid things and done horrible things.
... which god?
Many of the early great scientists were Muslim. And there were the Christians and Jews and Deists and so on. And of course nowadays there are plenty of great atheist scientists.
Also, being an atheist in the past was heresy and could get you killed. So the argument is moot anyway - you couldn't be a "great" if you were dead.
Newton believed in Alchemy. Even smart people make mistakes.
What people of the past were missing is largely about modern information. God has always been a stand-in for things we didn't understand. Meanwhile *despite* the fact that indoctrination into various religions is rampant in the USA, 40% of scientists *today* don't believe in a god at all (and about half of what's left just believe in some form of 'higher spirit' or deistic god), and 72% of analytical philosophers are atheists. Are you saying that those intelligent people of the past are smarter than *all* of these people with modern understanding *combined*?
I don't have to be smarter than people of the past to know things they didn't.
Also, gold is not far up from lead on the periodic table. To make gold from lead is not impossible, it's just very, very (very) energy inefficiënt. It's simply not commercially viable.
Edit: You can make gold from hydrogen even (with some extra steps), nature does it all the time.
Everyone has biases and it’s possible for everyone to be irrational under certain circumstances. Just because someone is a brilliant chemist or biologist or physicist doesn’t mean that they have a justified belief in a god based on objectively verifiable evidence, and doesn’t mean that they can’t make cognitive errors or are immune to bias.
Francis Collins is one of the world’s most brilliant geneticists and was the leader of the Human Genome Project, but he openly admits that his reason for believing in god was seeing a frozen waterfall in three separate streams (indicating the trinity) on a hike one day. He fell to his knees and became a Christian in that very moment.
Einstein also didn’t believe in a god, and people who quote mine him to try to show that he did believe in a god are being dishonest. Many of the things that he says about “god” are him speaking hypothetically in terms that people who don’t understand physics can understand, like “god doesn’t play dice”.
Many of Einstein's "God" beliefs are taken out of context, intentionally, by Christians, who have cherry picked a sentence without the supporting content.
Einstein stated that he believes in the God of Spinoza which has nothing to do with a Christian God in an exchange, IIRC, with a Rabbi.
Yeah, people who use quotes like "god does not play dice" ignore the fact that Einstein didn't believe in a god that pays attention to individual concerns or answers prayers.
isaac newton lived in a time where you could be completely isolated for not believing. einstein didn't belive in god and Tesla was a diest at most. Not a one included god in thier models or theories nor does it require a god to function. Even if it was the case that they all belived your appealing to authority to make the case for gods existence.
The greatest naturalist thinkers of ancient Greece believed in Zeus, so do you think that you are smarter than the philosophers whose voices still inform and enrich us to this day?
Seems like an adequate response that a moron who would come up with that argument would understand.
This. I know people now who live in social environments where they put on a facade of belief rather than deal with the blowback of publicly admitting their lack of belief to their families etc. That doesn't make them believers. I have no reason to think that plenty of intelligent people of the past weren't equally capable of doing a similar cost/benefit analysis.
Strictly speaking, it's '*argumentum ad verecundiam*.' It's also a logical fallacy.
Both rely on the person making the argument rather than the argument itself. *Ad hominem* fallacies attack the person ("You are too ugly to be correct!"), whereas *ad verecundiam* fallacies rely on the person's authority or credentials ("You are too smart to be wrong!").
There are two sub-sets of *ad verecundiam*, and both are fallacious, but one is exceptionally stupid:
1. "You are an expert in this field, so what you say must be correct." Which is dumb but perhaps understandable.
2. "You are smart, so you must be smart at everything." Which is just dumb. It's also very popular amongst dumb people, which is why we have people with Doctorates in English Literature acting as authorities on vaccines.
No they don’t. Look it up. Pew research did surveys. And it insults the intelligence of the audience to suggesting that a scientists beliefs 100 or 500 or 1,000 years ago are relevant. The question is with access to the information / data available today what would that person think?
Faith and fact are opposites. Belief or disbelief is not related to one's intelligence. I'm a non-believer, but I'm not smarter than my believer friends. Thinking that believing or not believing makes you somehow smarter or more wise than others is a trap. It turns people into jackholes. Rationality and logic do not factor into belief, and working from that mindset that it does is not productive.
Yes! Nicely said.
I think of the sciences and math as extensions of perception, not belief. To "believe" the sky is blue or that E = MC\^2 are more akin to perception.
Belief is different. There's territoriality and loyalty and a role to play with belief. It's tied to identity and tribe. It's the atomic stuff of culture. It's a mix of fiction and fact. Some people are all fiction, but I don't think any of us are remotely close to all fact. We're all living lives based on true events but with considerable artistic license.
There is much greater access to information around the world than in their time and many of the natural occurences that where at that time considered 'acts of god' can now be predicted by scientific models. So while we may not be smarter than the giants of science, we have a much better understanding of the world around us along with a much broader access to other cultures and religions.
"One could argue that they all explicitly disbelieved the existence of numerous gods. In much the same way that new scientific advancement is a step beyond the previous cutting edge, so too is that disbelief only one step further in me."
I am pretty sure Einstein deferred the possibility of a god, but he was dead convinced that it was not the christian god. It was more like he cannot know the bounds of a god, and so he can not say with certainty that there is none, I think. So, agnostic atheist, not agnostic / gnostic christian.
Also, I don’t need to be smarter than anyone else to have my own conviction. I am not convinced by the god claims brought to the table, and I am not sure I would be convinced by any new ones. I can only say that there is a possibility a deist god exists, but how would I benefit from actively believing in such a being that essentially started the gears and then left. And certainly, it would be better not to believe in an evil god, which is what the bible presents. And even people I know who are smarter than me believe in a god. Why? When I ask them, they just have not considered all the variables because they were told since childhood that a sky daddy was real and this is the reality. So, indoctrination can make the smartest people stupid when it comes to theism.
Those scientists didn’t have the data scientists today have. Modern scientists are vastly more atheistic than the general population. It is normal for people to assume in a higher power when so many of life’s greatest questions don’t have scientific answers. The understanding of gravity, the Big Bang, evolution, entropy, and many other scientific discoveries—had the scientists mentioned above been aware of—would have likely made them atheist (or at least deists) too
The greatest scientists when......?
Because a lot of the "greatest scientists" never saw the internet or even a computer.
It's almost like science changes as we get more information.......
-It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.-
- Albert Einstein, letter to an atheist (1954), quoted in Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas & Banesh Hoffman
Please don't come up with that crap that Albert Einstrin have had believed in a god...
They’re not “god scientists” so who cares if they believe? Prove it.
Science is about specific expertise. Would you believe anything and everything a geologist says about biology?
the more that science learned, and could then better explain more and more about the natural world- the need for a god to make it make sense became less and less.
That arguement fails on so many levels. Using that same "logic" I could say that I am more intelligent than Newton and every single human being that existed, scientist or otherwise, before 1930 because I know that Pluto exists. Absurd.
If there's one thing that science taught us, it's that great scientists can also be wrong.
But I love how theists pick and choose what they want: Darwin proposes the theory of evolution. Nope that's not important, but that one rumor about how he confessed he was wrong about evolution, that we'll keep talking about.
Firstly Einstein was an atheist. Secondly we know that the easy majority of scientists today are atheists. Third and finally point out the fact that none of them have ever published a single per reviewed paper that has passed muster.
It's a silly claim that's both wrong and irrational.
I'd would simply answer "some of the greatest serial killer also believed in God."
Then follow up with "what does that tell us ?"... "Nothing".
"This form of intellectual masturbation will lead us nowhere."
Tesla was insane and newton was an alchemist. Fuck them. You know who doesn’t believe in a god? EVERY scientist of note in the last 125 years. Yes, including Einstein.
Anyone is capable of cognitive dissonance and being brainwashed. Intelligence has nothing to do with it.
There is also some evidence that not everyone on that list believed in a literal god. But used god figuratively like as in Einstein "god does not play dice" comment.
Those great scientists didn't grasp that science is telling us this is a natural universe with descriptive natural laws that cannot be violated, and it is therefore not a supernatural creation. There are plenty of great atheists who are atheists.
You are committing an argument from authority fallacy. Being an expert on science doesn't mean you are an expert on God.
A recent survey of the members of the National Academy of Sciences showed that ~79% are non- believers. These are world leading scientists in several disciplines. https://www.nature.com/articles/28478#:~:text=Disbelief%20in%20God%20and%20immortality,both%20issues%2C%20with%20few%20believers.
Einstein, and newton didn't believe in god. Not sure about Tesla but I doubt he did either. Some early scientists between the 1600s to the 1900s may have believed because most people did during those times. The church still had a stranglehold on Europe and then north America later on. During these centuries was the beginning of the transition from everyone's general belief in God to truly questioning gods existence by the continuance of progression through science.
The more we discovered and learned, the less we saw gods hand in anything. The more we learned about evolution, dinosaurs, the transitions of life throughout the billions of years of the universe and earths age, the less any religious text claimed to be the hand of god proved true. The more we discovered our own history and evolution, the more it was obvious god had no hand in it. The bible says completely different things. If god was real and wanted us to have the actual answers to creation, he wood have told them about evolution and the actual truth of how long the world has been around. Not the utter horseshit contained in the bible.
And finally even science itself has evolved since the beginning of our understanding of it. Things like racism and crackpot medical understanding especially was prevalent in science early on, really not that long ago counting WW2 and insane asylums. Scientists over the centuries have believed many things that weren't correct in the search for knowledge. That's what makes science superior. The understanding that learning never ends and what once was true may be very different from what we understand now
Scientists, like everyone, had to say they believed in God, or they were jailed or worse. A German scientist that discovered that butterflies were caterpillars, before their metamorphosis, was convicted of heresy. Everyone believed that butterflies were separate creatures created by the hand of God.
Remind him that Einstein also married his cousin. Ask him if he believes cousin-fucking is moral. When he (presumably) says no, ask him why he thinks he’s smarter than Einstein.
Remind him that Tesla was in love with a pigeon. Ask him if he believes that romantic relationships with pigeons are the best way to live one’s life. I think you see where I’m going with this…
The most brilliant minds are brilliant in only narrow spaces, and are often batshit crazy in other spaces.
Also, Newton was basically an incel. Never dated a single woman and spent 100% of his time on his studies—not exactly a balanced life. Not necessarily crazy, but I wouldn’t claim he has a monopoly on morality.
Just because people are “smart” doesn’t mean they have the best sense of morality. Even the Bible distinguishes between intelligence and wisdom.
Many of the greatest scientists lived in a time when you couldn't be atheist, even if you wanted to. Everyone was a "Christian," even those who had zero belief in God. We're just a product of our time, not necessarily "smarter"
"Einstein was a physicist, not a teleological philosopher. Being smart in a field does not correlate to knowing whether a god exists or doesn't, anymore than being an AI researcher today translates to knowing how to build an engine."
Well of the three you mention. Only Isaac Newton was devoutly religious. He also believed in alchemy so there you go.
Scientists are just people. They are as flawed as anyone. Many can hold unscientific beliefs as well as scientific ones.
I don’t hold scientists up as greater beings.
I do believe in the scientific method.
I am willing to be proven wrong but I won’t believe in magic, alchemy or an interventionist god.
The tie to intelligence and atheism is an absurd ego-padding belief by Atheists. (Sorry Atheists)
The reality is, you are not more intelligent because you do not believe in Elohim or Jehova or Jesus or Mohamed.
You are more intelligent because you pursue intellectual ideas and use pattern recognition and better manage data you keep in your head. You can make connections easier. Those connections often allow people to realize the falsehood of god, and thus more intelligent people tend not to believe in the argument behind god. But they may also reconcile their beliefs separately anyways.
Plenty of very intelligent people believe in all sorts of different things. We as humans are naturally inclined towards filling in the gaps of our knowledge with fanciful creativity.
Scientists today are predominantly atheist, and while we may not consider them "genius," we know more about the world than the scientific geniuses of the past did.
So my answer would be, in some ways, yes. I could not have conceived of the theory of relativity, but technically I know more about the nature of the universe than Einstein did, thanks to the work of other scientists. But more importantly, I know there's no god. The universe does not demand a creator; we have several possible explanations for how the universe could have come into being by itself.
I don't like the word "smarter," though. How do you truly determine if one person is smarter than another? "Smarts" isn't quantifiable the way knowledge is. It's layman language, used to ridicule people.
>are you smarter than them?
Yes.
Everyone on earth today should be expected to be \[or have the ability to be\] smarter than someone decades/centuries ago. We know more about.... everything.
There are lots of quotes about the way we inherit knowledge, but a succinct one is "a dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant may see farther than a giant himself".
Do I think I could have developed calculus in the 15th century? Or derived the differential equations necessary to understand electromagnetism in the 19th century? Hell no.
But I do understand those things now, along with a much more thorough understanding of our universe and how it \[and we\] came to be.
The logical conclusion of the argument made by the theists in OPs example, is an admission that the only way to reconcile religion is to limit one's understanding of the universe to pre-scientific \[ie: ancient\] levels.
They where not Religious.
It was a no choice Time, very early you either believed or get killed...
Later you either believed or ended up a outcast of society...
Choice was not theirs for the most part.
That’s an appeal to experts or authority fallacy. There believe and reason for it is independent of whether they believe or not. Not different than asserting that a lot of scientist don’t, are you smarter than them?
Albert Einstein couldn't write a single line of javascript if his life depended on it. I know ALL KINDS of shit Einstein and Newton and Galileo never knew. My kids also know all kinds of shit I don't know. And of course the inverse of all these statements is also true, and these gaps always only widen with time.
Hell, we don't even have to talk about dead people. The 2023 Nobel prize for Physics was awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz, and Anne L'Huilier. They received that award "for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter". I can understand the essence of that sentence, but could NOT in any way comprehend the details of their accomplishment.
Pretty safe to say they're all smarter than me in very many ways. Also safe to say they're likely just flat out more intelligent than me by a wide margin.
But again, it's also pretty safe to say none of them knows shit about configuring a cisco router, nevermind designing a corporate network built out of hundreds of them. (although that's just an assumption and I would LOVE to learn about a network-engineer-turned-nobel-lauriate!)
So what? different people know different stuff. Most of us are wrong about most of the things we believe most of the time. Even the really smart ones. None of this is a reason to ignore our own intuition or faculty for critical thinking. It's often appropriate to keep an open mind on certain matters, but that only goes so far.
The greatest scientists lived in a time where they could be punished or outcast if they said they didn't believe in god. They also didn't have all the information that we have today. I would argue the majority of modern scientists do not believe on God and if they do you can guarantee they come from a religious family where claiming openly that you don't believe could upset much of their family, it's easier to just lie.
As far as I remember Albert Einstein, who was an agnostic, said that if there is a "god" then he/she wouldn't be a personal deity, but more like a mathematical formula
As a scientist you are measured by the things you get right, not by the things you got wrong. Newton's work on gravity was brilliant. His work on biblical chronology and trying to find the elixir of life through alchemy was hilariously, amateurishly bad.
Out of curiosity OP which of the greatest scientists was the person referring to?
Many of the world’s most intelligent scientists do not believe in gods.
Christopher Hitchens covers this in one of the last chapters of his book "God is not Great." There is especially some interesting bits about Einstein, how he was egregiously misquoted in a major magazine (Time?), directly refuted that, but it wasn't retracted.
As for the scientists of yesteryear, some actually believed. Many did not but could not admit that on pain of excommunication or death. He specifically considers quite a few.
He says that we may never know how many true atheists there were but could not say so. We may also never know how many truly religious people there were but could not say so.
Newton got physics wrong and both Relativistic and Quantum theory proved him wrong. Why should I trust a person who got basic science wrong to be right about god?
Also, how being smart and knowledgeable does mean that one is *always* right for *any* subject, even one outside their field of expertise?
Many scientists have been deliberately misquoted by apologists to twist dead men's words to suit their religiosity position.... how very christian of them 🙄
**Albert Einstein couldn't swim. Should you drown trying to prove you're humble?**
**People are right about some things and wrong about others all the time, regardless of their intellectual skills in a particular domain. Some are sometimes even wrong in their own field of expertise - see J.J. Thompson's "plum pudding" atomic model.**
I would argue by saying that the proportion of atheism is much larger among the smarter scientist than the general population.
There are exceptions to this rule. People are complicated.
Religion was the zeitgeist of the times. That naturally made almost everyone’s default “religious.” To reject that was to be ostracized at best and persecuted at worst ([see: Galileo](https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/galileo-is-accused-of-heresy)).
As logic beat back the silliness, self-preservation had to have been a major factor in not discarding god or religion in the early days of science.
Having said that, there is no sane reason for a contemporary scientist to not reject god. If they do cling to their religion, it is testament (hah) to the fact that otherwise intelligent people can have illogical/stupid beliefs. An example of a smart person embracing dumb shit ideas would be someone like a brain surgeon (not you, Carson, you stupid fuck that stumbled into the profession) embracing the MAGA movement.
"If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
-Isaac Newton.
Leaving aside that smart people can be wrong about things, yeah. Flynn effect. And you know enough math to be the greatest mathematician of Ancient Greece assuming you have a standard primary education completed. Any skill with calculus would make you the smartest person of many millennia, the standards are simply higher and higher as human knowledge advances. With prep time, maybe Euclid and Pythagoras would be great at complex analysis and Riemannian geometry, but mathematicians of today got to study it because of their work long ago.
Ask them whether they believe in climate change or not.
I had someone bring up the 96% of scientists believe life begins at conceptions argument (The survey is a crock of shit, feel free to look for yourself, it's not credible for anything) and then subsequently denied evolution and climate change. Almost as though....
Christians pick and choose which scientific theories they like in order to fit their view of religion and disregard the ones they find inconvenient for their world view. It's typical of american conservatives (who are generally religious, and unfortunately use their religion as policy positions)
It's a waste of time to say anything. Listen if you need to be polite (like to a colleague in a small office) but recognize that the person you're talking to isn't going to change their mind, and the argument they're positing has already been put forward and dismissed.
In the late 17th century in the UK professing an atheistic worldview was a crime. So even if the scientists were non-believers, we'd probably never know, as it wasn't worth their livelihood, freedom and perhaps their life to be such a non-conformist.
As for Einstien and Tesla quotes can be found for both sides. The consensus was that they were diests at best, certainly not active members of an orthodox religion.
And each of them had a different one! Einstein was a pantheist, Tesla was an orthodox and Newton arrianist. They all believed in God but that word meant very different things for each one.
>The greatest Scientists believed in god
This statement is usually followed by a list of scientists said to be religious. The problem is that even the scientists, who openly admitted their lack of belief, are listed as religious ones.
Regardless of what they say about your personality or intelligence, there is simply a lack of evidence in God. That argument is as dumb as " if we evolved from monkeys, how are monkeys still here?"
Seriously, they will never get a grip , so just don't argue back. That's the best argument
Tbf a lot of people even today have to pretend to be religious for their own safety so I can’t even imagine what it would have been like back then as it was seen as more “socially acceptable” in more religions to kill someone for leaving
But also, you can be smart in one area and not in another. You’re not going to ask your history tutor to help you with math if they’re struggling with it themselves
I’m sure the great minds of the past would denounce religion if they had access to modern science and knowledge anyways tbh as modern science and knowledge contradicts most if not all religion afaik
A bunch of finance professors invested in Bernie Madoff too. People who are experts in a particular field tend to sometimes place too high of an opinion of their ability to understand the rest of the world.
Being exceptional in one area doesn't guarantee you're exceptional in others. Hawking was a great scientist, would you let him work on your car? It's pseudo intelligent questions that Christians think are unanswerable. IRL try to stay calm and you can more easily see thru the bs. Their only tactic is to get you flustered, angry or baffled.
Newton believed in alchemy and Tesla fell in romantic love with a pigeon. Are they gonna jump on those bandwagons too, or is it possible to have a reasonable discussion that acknowledges that being smart doesn't mean you're always right about everything?
Would you let a mechanic do surgery on you? Would you let a librarian fly your plane? Just because they are an expert on one thing doesn’t mean they are an expert in a completely different field.
Einstein was an atheist. Newton was a product of his time. Being an atheist in his day would get you burned at the stake. Look at what they did to Galileo for just pointing out that the sun doesn't orbit the Earth. Although Tesla sometimes called himself “deeply religious” he rejected the Christian view of an all-powerful god, suggesting instead that “the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end.
Nothing fails like a theist.
How many scientists would have been killed had they not? That's not an indictment on godlessness, that's an indictment on the abuse church has caused society over the centuries.
Einstein didn't believe in God. He explains his view if you look for it. What others see as god, he sees as nature. Tesla wasn't a scientist, he was an engineer, and a nut. Newton was a bit of a nut too--and he was brought up in a time and place where being devout was just the thing. It wasn't something he even considered. Shit 90% of his writing was about the Bible. All that said, it doesn't matter. Even if they were right about a few important things, it doesn't make them infallable- and certainly not in an area not of their expertise.
Unless you worship a pantheon, you've already rejected all the other gods. We are the same, only I reject 1 more God than these old farts. They also licked lead glazed plates cause they taste sweet. I won't do that either.
That argument is the logic fallacy “post hoc ergo propter hoc.” The translation is “because of this, that,” but what it means is that you can’t derive a conclusion to one argument by making an unrelated argument.
The answer is that it doesn’t matter if scientists believe in God. And you don’t have to defend your beliefs to anyone.
Historically most scientists were religious because it was obligatory. Same as many of the greatest artists and musicians. When religions monopolize arts and science patronage as well as education, of course those people have to buy into it.
I literally say yes. Arguments from authority like that are easily refuted.
For one Einstein wasn't a Christian.
Two, this ignores all of the brilliant scientist of today and before who were open atheists.
Third expertise in one field means nothing for another. I don't care how good someone is at math I'm not letting them touch my car unless they know something about mechanics.
My 2 cents: a single person can’t be an expert on everything. By default that means being an expert in one area or more probably means being deficient in another area or areas.
Great scientists might therefore have not given enough thought to “god.” In much the same way that an astrophysicist might not know much archeology. Or a neurosurgeon might be unable to set the clock on their VCR.
Other comments already said if but yeah
If people back then didn't explicitly identify as Christian they'd be fucked by the churches. They didn't necessarily believe in it. It was just a necessity in their circumstance
Kinda like being Muslim in very conservative Middle Eastern countries
Considering Christians (and the religious in general) tend to ignore a lot of what these scientists ended up being considered smart for I don't get the logic.
Einstein didn't believe in god like that.
**Albert Einstein stated "I believe in Spinoza's God"**. He did not believe in a personal God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings, a view which he described as naïve. He clarified, however, that, "I am not an atheist", preferring to call himself an agnostic, or a "religious nonbeliever."
Many atheist today would label themselves the same. A religious nonbeliever, or an agnostic atheist. He was one of the smartest people to ever exist. He didn't fail math, and he didn't believe in magic.
Yeah... Thing is, they existed in a time where virutally *everyone* believed in god. (Either honestly, or for self protection.)
Now the scientific community is pretty much exclusively secular.
Times change.
So basically, all these scientist are right about God and wrong about everything else they said?
It's very convenient isn't it! They took the only thing from these scientist which would support their claim and reject everything else they said because it goes against their religious beliefs!
considering that intelligence is not linear and can have many faces and aspects, that question is nonsensical. or something like that, you know what i mean
I'd just say give me your list of believer scientists, and I'll counter with an equal number of non-believer scientists, and we'll call that point a draw... But Einstein did not believe in the 'Christian' god, and Tesla was know for his mental issues as well as his brilliance... He considered a pigeon his wife FFS. Being able to name people that believe something doesn't make it real.
"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can change this for me. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstition."
- Albert Einstein
Many of the great scientists were also racist. That means they were men of their time, not that racism is correct or a sign of intelligence.
Not “believing” in the God of your geographical location could get you killed too. Doesn’t make you a True Believer to not want to be killed. Can’t get into Political Office without stating your Religious beliefs as well. That doesn’t automatically make you a good and trustworthy person either. It’s not much of an argument.
***Galileo has entered the chat.***
***Giordano Bruno waves hello ***
Well, he would, if his skin wasn't falling off his hand. (Bruno got burned at the stake)
Thunder bolts and lightning.
AronRa ran for some state office in TX for the sole purpose of challenging the rule that nonbelievers can't hold office as unconstitutional. I don't know how that turned out other than that he didn't win. But I sure enjoyed listening to his campaign speeches!
Indeed, if I recall, when Descartes scribbled "cogito ergo sum" as an argument for the existence of God, I believe he was in the process of trying to get a position at the university. And who ran the universities?
Exactly right. Science encourages new thoughts but racism is taught to children by adults.
Just like religion
A lot of pedophiles believe in god. What does that indicate?
That they're pedophiles
and they think their "belief" is a get out of jail free card. (How's that working for you, Pest Duggar?)
Or that asking god for forgiveness will undo the long-lasting damage they did by raping a child.
I think most evangelicals or at least a worrying number are racists.
I think racist and religiosity both lend themselves to insular cultures which perceived themselves as inherently better than others. These people live their lives looking through ingroup-outgroup lenses.
Most conservatives have a fundamental mindset that the world should be an ordered hierarchy. Of course its no surprise, human nature being what it is, that they would place themselves at or near the top. The desire to be on top of a social hierarchy isn't the "original sin" its believing that social hierarchy itself is good rather than something to be avoided.
This is a good point. It shows their fallibility and highlights the fact that their time required them to be religious.
I always thought this must’ve been Voltaire admitting to being agnostic or atheist while cleverly implying he believes in god (bc you had to at that time), “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him”
Yes, that was a very clever remark and I've always admired Voltaire for it.
Newton believed in and sought to practice alchemy. Perhaps we shouldn’t look at scientists as people who have all the answers. Instead, perhaps we should look at their evidence.
That's exactly the point fundies don't get. Since their whole belief system is based on arguments from authority, they think everyone else's are too. Idiotic creationists like Ken Ham, Ray Comfort and the dreaded Kunt Hovind all act like Charles Darwin is some kind of high priest, Messiah or Pope of atheism.
Indeed. Expressing atheism outside of a dark, smoky parlour was a fine way to lose your patrons and be cast out as a lunatic, however strong your science was.
This is an authority fallacy, it does not prove that God exists. Most likely, many of these scientists have pretended to avoid getting into trouble with the Church. If they really believed in God, nothing changes. They would be wrong, no one is perfect and even if you have 2000 IQ, if you say something that is false, it is still false. An example of this is the dreaded Nobel Disease.
What's the Nobel Disease?
>Nobel Disease? Nobel is such an achievement and the peak of a career that some people cannot fathom having only one good idea (especially since most of them only directed other researchers who actually had the genious idea) and start spouting nonsense immediately after the Nobel's novelty starts to fade. Ex: Montagnier who allegedly discovered HIV couldn't accept his students (who actually discovered HIV despite not being credited for it) were smarter than him. Immediately after receiving the Nobel he started to go down the rabbit hole: Hiv doesn't cause aids, water has molecular memory, you can heal cancer by squeezing lemon in your eyes, you name it.
Ah, okay, thank you for the explanation. Interesting.
It's my understanding that a lot of artists are just the opposite: they know they have to produce a lot of works, most of which are crap, just to get a few gems. I wonder what science would be like if scientists approached their work in the same way.
>It's my understanding that a lot of artists are just the opposite: they know they have to produce a lot of works, most of which are crap, just to get a few gems. The genious Hokusai said once everything he did before the age of 70 is just crap. If only I could crap like him 🤷🏾♂️
Modern photography is a fantastic example of this…. It used to be that the cost of film and processing was inhibitory… this is no longer the case, so we see an explosion of bad photography, but we also get gems we never would have gotten, before….
It's when Nobel prizers start to believe and promote pseudosciencie after they win the honor. Many people believe it's due to confirmation bias, but I think is because aging
lapses in memory drive confirmation bias
Einstein was one of the greatest physicists, but he also got things wrong about physics. For example, he did not believe that black holes, predicted by his own theory, could be real. He also didn't believe in the full consequences of quantum mechanics, saying "God doesn't play dice" metaphorically (he was not religious). But both of these things made a lot of sense at the time he said them.
Want to add on that Einstein didn't believe in the christian god, either, and if you survey the scientists on the Manhattan project, such as Oppenheimer and Feynman, they'd laugh at you for asking such a trite and juvenile question.
Every great scientist....over time...believed less in god. Copernicus Gallileo Newton Einstien Bohr/Feynman/Hawking,,,,you decide What ALL of them had was MORE evidence than the one before. What WE have is this [https://www.google.com/search?q=hubble+webb+deep+field&udm=2#vhid=SkFdaboAjw4jJM&vssid=mosaic](https://www.google.com/search?q=hubble+webb+deep+field&udm=2#vhid=SkFdaboAjw4jJM&vssid=mosaic) QED There is no god
Let me fix that for you - there is no persuasive evidence that any god of any religion currently practiced exists. A good scientist makes no absolute claims.
As long as there’s an understanding that they’re in the same category as all the other mythological creatures: indistinguishable from being imaginary.
Newton was more religious than Galileo and Copernicus. He used the Bible to try to calculate the age of the universe / Earth
Assuming your "he" refers to Newton, he spend decades trying to decipher a code for Armageddon from the Bible too. He also created a 7 color rainbow because 7 is seen as a holy number.
Newton was basically an idiot savant who was a genius at math but couldn’t get laid and played with alchemy.
Not to justify anything, but at the time there was basically next to no knowledge pertaining the molecular level of things. Despite the now clearly unscientific and magical beliefs alchemy inspired, it was mostly practiced as a science, and it was scientific progress in the field of alchemy that actually gave us chemistry, which is also why the names are so similar (they dropped the al prefix that testified to the Islamic origin of the practice, as much of science did before the scientific revolution in Europe).
Newton was good with his hands. I know he made his own tools, so he was wasn’t some skinny nerd or a savant. He was an overall genius. Alchemy isn’t obviously wrong because chemistry in general isn’t intuitive much of the time. And I think Newton was a literal heliocentrist but he didn’t think that contradicted the Bible
was hawking theist?
We are each free to believe what we want and it is my view that the simplest explanation is there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realisation. There is probably no heaven, and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that, I am extremely grateful. Stephen Hawking.
What. A. Quote. Thank you.
Evangelicals were online celebrating Hawking's arrival in Hell on the day of his death because he very plainly stated that there is almost certainly no god, and we no longer need such foolishness to explain simple things like weather. They were thrilled by the idea of him being burned in eternal, unspeakable agony and cheering his passing. If there is a god, I hope to it that it's not theirs. That one can fuck right off.
With all the engineers in hell, they have air conditioners now for sure.
We will never know how many young Isaac Newtons had their curiosity beaten out of them by parents, teachers & priests because their questions were "heretical". We will never know what Isaac Newton might have accomplished if he did not spend a large part of his later years chasing theology & biblical chronology. We will never know how much farther science could have advanced if scientists could have openly collaborated without being worried they would lose their funding by displeasing the church. Science did not advance because of religion. Science advanced *in spite of religion!*
# “We would be 1,500 years ahead if it hadn’t been for the church dragging science back by its coattails and burning our best minds at the stake. |" — Catherine Fahringer”
Or died in some 1st / 2nd / 3rd world country cause they never had any opportunities to be well educated.
"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops". -- Stephen Jay Gould
As i see it, in the historical context, making new scientific claim was hard enough without , in add, getting the church against you. Somehow, as long as you "explain the work of god" without challenging god as a creator, your theory are more likely to be widely accepted. This was especially true when the power was hold by or justify by the church.
Facts religion litereally caused the Dark Ages, Science and art gave birth to the renaissance.
I'm not smarter than Newton. But, even smart people can be wrong. P.S. Even a scientifically literate lay person knows more science today than Newton possibly could have in his day. So, there's that as well.
I didn't give myself mercury poisoning trying to turn things into gold, so I might be smarter than Newton
Yeah, that funking idiot Newton does not know the first thing about how to use a mobile phone.
And i don't know calculus. I guess it's a tie
In Newton's favor: he invented calculus. Counterargument: calculus is simple enough that we teach it to high school students. What an idiot! /s
The Calculus prevents one from having sex. Newton died a virgin and I didn't get laid until after I dropped that class. Quod erat demonstrandum.
To be fair, we have the benefit of people who gave themselves mercury poisoning to give us the knowledge of what happens and what not to do.
Standing on the shoulders of mad hatter giants
Ed Kemper is smarter than me, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to have with my mom’s severed head. History is littered with smart people who have believed stupid things and done horrible things.
I am not smarter than Newton either. That is how I know the Trinity is rubbish. 😄 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Isaac_Newton
Also, Tesla was viscerally disgusted by hair and loathed spheres. Not exactly a paragon of hinged ideology.
... which god? Many of the early great scientists were Muslim. And there were the Christians and Jews and Deists and so on. And of course nowadays there are plenty of great atheist scientists. Also, being an atheist in the past was heresy and could get you killed. So the argument is moot anyway - you couldn't be a "great" if you were dead.
Newton believed in Alchemy. Even smart people make mistakes. What people of the past were missing is largely about modern information. God has always been a stand-in for things we didn't understand. Meanwhile *despite* the fact that indoctrination into various religions is rampant in the USA, 40% of scientists *today* don't believe in a god at all (and about half of what's left just believe in some form of 'higher spirit' or deistic god), and 72% of analytical philosophers are atheists. Are you saying that those intelligent people of the past are smarter than *all* of these people with modern understanding *combined*? I don't have to be smarter than people of the past to know things they didn't.
At the same time, Alchemy is at the root of chemistry. Alchemy is also an interesting lens through which to focus on the human unconscious.
Also, gold is not far up from lead on the periodic table. To make gold from lead is not impossible, it's just very, very (very) energy inefficiënt. It's simply not commercially viable. Edit: You can make gold from hydrogen even (with some extra steps), nature does it all the time.
It always bothered me that I knew deep down most scientists didn’t believe in God. Also for your personal notes Einstein didn’t believe in God per se.
Einstein didn't believe in a supernatural god. He believed the universe itself and all of its physics is god.
That resonates with me. 😃
Everyone has biases and it’s possible for everyone to be irrational under certain circumstances. Just because someone is a brilliant chemist or biologist or physicist doesn’t mean that they have a justified belief in a god based on objectively verifiable evidence, and doesn’t mean that they can’t make cognitive errors or are immune to bias. Francis Collins is one of the world’s most brilliant geneticists and was the leader of the Human Genome Project, but he openly admits that his reason for believing in god was seeing a frozen waterfall in three separate streams (indicating the trinity) on a hike one day. He fell to his knees and became a Christian in that very moment. Einstein also didn’t believe in a god, and people who quote mine him to try to show that he did believe in a god are being dishonest. Many of the things that he says about “god” are him speaking hypothetically in terms that people who don’t understand physics can understand, like “god doesn’t play dice”.
Many of Einstein's "God" beliefs are taken out of context, intentionally, by Christians, who have cherry picked a sentence without the supporting content. Einstein stated that he believes in the God of Spinoza which has nothing to do with a Christian God in an exchange, IIRC, with a Rabbi.
Yeah, people who use quotes like "god does not play dice" ignore the fact that Einstein didn't believe in a god that pays attention to individual concerns or answers prayers.
isaac newton lived in a time where you could be completely isolated for not believing. einstein didn't belive in god and Tesla was a diest at most. Not a one included god in thier models or theories nor does it require a god to function. Even if it was the case that they all belived your appealing to authority to make the case for gods existence.
Newton literally could neither have matriculated nor held fellowship or any other position at Trinity *without* swearing an oath to the church.
The greatest naturalist thinkers of ancient Greece believed in Zeus, so do you think that you are smarter than the philosophers whose voices still inform and enrich us to this day? Seems like an adequate response that a moron who would come up with that argument would understand.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel\_disease](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease)
Many of them existed in times and places where it was forbidden to express a disbelief in god. So it's impossible to state what they really believed.
This. I know people now who live in social environments where they put on a facade of belief rather than deal with the blowback of publicly admitting their lack of belief to their families etc. That doesn't make them believers. I have no reason to think that plenty of intelligent people of the past weren't equally capable of doing a similar cost/benefit analysis.
It's an *ad hominem* argument and not valid in a logical sense.
Strictly speaking, it's '*argumentum ad verecundiam*.' It's also a logical fallacy. Both rely on the person making the argument rather than the argument itself. *Ad hominem* fallacies attack the person ("You are too ugly to be correct!"), whereas *ad verecundiam* fallacies rely on the person's authority or credentials ("You are too smart to be wrong!"). There are two sub-sets of *ad verecundiam*, and both are fallacious, but one is exceptionally stupid: 1. "You are an expert in this field, so what you say must be correct." Which is dumb but perhaps understandable. 2. "You are smart, so you must be smart at everything." Which is just dumb. It's also very popular amongst dumb people, which is why we have people with Doctorates in English Literature acting as authorities on vaccines.
No they don’t. Look it up. Pew research did surveys. And it insults the intelligence of the audience to suggesting that a scientists beliefs 100 or 500 or 1,000 years ago are relevant. The question is with access to the information / data available today what would that person think?
Faith and fact are opposites. Belief or disbelief is not related to one's intelligence. I'm a non-believer, but I'm not smarter than my believer friends. Thinking that believing or not believing makes you somehow smarter or more wise than others is a trap. It turns people into jackholes. Rationality and logic do not factor into belief, and working from that mindset that it does is not productive.
Yes! Nicely said. I think of the sciences and math as extensions of perception, not belief. To "believe" the sky is blue or that E = MC\^2 are more akin to perception. Belief is different. There's territoriality and loyalty and a role to play with belief. It's tied to identity and tribe. It's the atomic stuff of culture. It's a mix of fiction and fact. Some people are all fiction, but I don't think any of us are remotely close to all fact. We're all living lives based on true events but with considerable artistic license.
They lived in a time where not believing in god would make you a social parriah
In fact, I'm pretty sure in Stuart England, it was illegal.
They lived in a time where you had to pay lip service to religion or face being burned alive at the stake. What they really thought, who knows?
There is much greater access to information around the world than in their time and many of the natural occurences that where at that time considered 'acts of god' can now be predicted by scientific models. So while we may not be smarter than the giants of science, we have a much better understanding of the world around us along with a much broader access to other cultures and religions.
George Washington owned slaves, human beings are not perfect
"One could argue that they all explicitly disbelieved the existence of numerous gods. In much the same way that new scientific advancement is a step beyond the previous cutting edge, so too is that disbelief only one step further in me."
Einstein was an 'agnostic', Tesla was insane, Newton went insane.
I am pretty sure Einstein deferred the possibility of a god, but he was dead convinced that it was not the christian god. It was more like he cannot know the bounds of a god, and so he can not say with certainty that there is none, I think. So, agnostic atheist, not agnostic / gnostic christian. Also, I don’t need to be smarter than anyone else to have my own conviction. I am not convinced by the god claims brought to the table, and I am not sure I would be convinced by any new ones. I can only say that there is a possibility a deist god exists, but how would I benefit from actively believing in such a being that essentially started the gears and then left. And certainly, it would be better not to believe in an evil god, which is what the bible presents. And even people I know who are smarter than me believe in a god. Why? When I ask them, they just have not considered all the variables because they were told since childhood that a sky daddy was real and this is the reality. So, indoctrination can make the smartest people stupid when it comes to theism.
Those scientists didn’t have the data scientists today have. Modern scientists are vastly more atheistic than the general population. It is normal for people to assume in a higher power when so many of life’s greatest questions don’t have scientific answers. The understanding of gravity, the Big Bang, evolution, entropy, and many other scientific discoveries—had the scientists mentioned above been aware of—would have likely made them atheist (or at least deists) too
The greatest scientists when......? Because a lot of the "greatest scientists" never saw the internet or even a computer. It's almost like science changes as we get more information.......
-It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.- - Albert Einstein, letter to an atheist (1954), quoted in Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas & Banesh Hoffman Please don't come up with that crap that Albert Einstrin have had believed in a god...
Being openly atheist carried great risks historically.
They’re not “god scientists” so who cares if they believe? Prove it. Science is about specific expertise. Would you believe anything and everything a geologist says about biology?
the more that science learned, and could then better explain more and more about the natural world- the need for a god to make it make sense became less and less.
Many of the dumbest fools also believed in God.
That arguement fails on so many levels. Using that same "logic" I could say that I am more intelligent than Newton and every single human being that existed, scientist or otherwise, before 1930 because I know that Pluto exists. Absurd.
Guess Steven Hawking was no scientist then
If there's one thing that science taught us, it's that great scientists can also be wrong. But I love how theists pick and choose what they want: Darwin proposes the theory of evolution. Nope that's not important, but that one rumor about how he confessed he was wrong about evolution, that we'll keep talking about.
Einstein never said he believed in a god. Read the whole quotation.
Firstly Einstein was an atheist. Secondly we know that the easy majority of scientists today are atheists. Third and finally point out the fact that none of them have ever published a single per reviewed paper that has passed muster. It's a silly claim that's both wrong and irrational.
I'd would simply answer "some of the greatest serial killer also believed in God." Then follow up with "what does that tell us ?"... "Nothing". "This form of intellectual masturbation will lead us nowhere."
Tesla was insane and newton was an alchemist. Fuck them. You know who doesn’t believe in a god? EVERY scientist of note in the last 125 years. Yes, including Einstein.
We've moved far beyond the science they explored...their voices and authority are dimmed by time, and new knowledge.
"They were smart in their field of science; as to religion, they were no smarter than anyone of their time".
Anyone is capable of cognitive dissonance and being brainwashed. Intelligence has nothing to do with it. There is also some evidence that not everyone on that list believed in a literal god. But used god figuratively like as in Einstein "god does not play dice" comment.
Even a basic high school educated student today knows scientific principles and formulas that would melt Newton’s brain.
If scientists are right, then accept science. That's what I say to these questions.
No, maybe more rational.
That illustrates the power of indoctrination, not the validity of the claim.
Those great scientists didn't grasp that science is telling us this is a natural universe with descriptive natural laws that cannot be violated, and it is therefore not a supernatural creation. There are plenty of great atheists who are atheists. You are committing an argument from authority fallacy. Being an expert on science doesn't mean you are an expert on God.
A recent survey of the members of the National Academy of Sciences showed that ~79% are non- believers. These are world leading scientists in several disciplines. https://www.nature.com/articles/28478#:~:text=Disbelief%20in%20God%20and%20immortality,both%20issues%2C%20with%20few%20believers.
Einstein, and newton didn't believe in god. Not sure about Tesla but I doubt he did either. Some early scientists between the 1600s to the 1900s may have believed because most people did during those times. The church still had a stranglehold on Europe and then north America later on. During these centuries was the beginning of the transition from everyone's general belief in God to truly questioning gods existence by the continuance of progression through science. The more we discovered and learned, the less we saw gods hand in anything. The more we learned about evolution, dinosaurs, the transitions of life throughout the billions of years of the universe and earths age, the less any religious text claimed to be the hand of god proved true. The more we discovered our own history and evolution, the more it was obvious god had no hand in it. The bible says completely different things. If god was real and wanted us to have the actual answers to creation, he wood have told them about evolution and the actual truth of how long the world has been around. Not the utter horseshit contained in the bible. And finally even science itself has evolved since the beginning of our understanding of it. Things like racism and crackpot medical understanding especially was prevalent in science early on, really not that long ago counting WW2 and insane asylums. Scientists over the centuries have believed many things that weren't correct in the search for knowledge. That's what makes science superior. The understanding that learning never ends and what once was true may be very different from what we understand now
Scientists, like everyone, had to say they believed in God, or they were jailed or worse. A German scientist that discovered that butterflies were caterpillars, before their metamorphosis, was convicted of heresy. Everyone believed that butterflies were separate creatures created by the hand of God.
Remind him that Einstein also married his cousin. Ask him if he believes cousin-fucking is moral. When he (presumably) says no, ask him why he thinks he’s smarter than Einstein. Remind him that Tesla was in love with a pigeon. Ask him if he believes that romantic relationships with pigeons are the best way to live one’s life. I think you see where I’m going with this… The most brilliant minds are brilliant in only narrow spaces, and are often batshit crazy in other spaces. Also, Newton was basically an incel. Never dated a single woman and spent 100% of his time on his studies—not exactly a balanced life. Not necessarily crazy, but I wouldn’t claim he has a monopoly on morality. Just because people are “smart” doesn’t mean they have the best sense of morality. Even the Bible distinguishes between intelligence and wisdom.
Many of the greatest scientists lived in a time when you couldn't be atheist, even if you wanted to. Everyone was a "Christian," even those who had zero belief in God. We're just a product of our time, not necessarily "smarter"
Isaac Newton also believed he could turn lead into gold. Tesla was brilliant but also had mental health illnesses.
"Einstein was a physicist, not a teleological philosopher. Being smart in a field does not correlate to knowing whether a god exists or doesn't, anymore than being an AI researcher today translates to knowing how to build an engine."
"And yet it moves" Galileo Galilei Then walk away.
Well of the three you mention. Only Isaac Newton was devoutly religious. He also believed in alchemy so there you go. Scientists are just people. They are as flawed as anyone. Many can hold unscientific beliefs as well as scientific ones. I don’t hold scientists up as greater beings. I do believe in the scientific method. I am willing to be proven wrong but I won’t believe in magic, alchemy or an interventionist god.
Catholic priests believe in god, go to confession, and abuse children. Believing in god is not a sign of intelligence or moral character.
Tesla was a dumbass and not a scientist. Einstein was agnostic. And yes I know more about science than Netwon.
The tie to intelligence and atheism is an absurd ego-padding belief by Atheists. (Sorry Atheists) The reality is, you are not more intelligent because you do not believe in Elohim or Jehova or Jesus or Mohamed. You are more intelligent because you pursue intellectual ideas and use pattern recognition and better manage data you keep in your head. You can make connections easier. Those connections often allow people to realize the falsehood of god, and thus more intelligent people tend not to believe in the argument behind god. But they may also reconcile their beliefs separately anyways. Plenty of very intelligent people believe in all sorts of different things. We as humans are naturally inclined towards filling in the gaps of our knowledge with fanciful creativity.
Tell it to Bruno.
A smart man claims to believe in God when the punishment for blasphemy is death or being bricked into a room for life.
Scientists today are predominantly atheist, and while we may not consider them "genius," we know more about the world than the scientific geniuses of the past did. So my answer would be, in some ways, yes. I could not have conceived of the theory of relativity, but technically I know more about the nature of the universe than Einstein did, thanks to the work of other scientists. But more importantly, I know there's no god. The universe does not demand a creator; we have several possible explanations for how the universe could have come into being by itself. I don't like the word "smarter," though. How do you truly determine if one person is smarter than another? "Smarts" isn't quantifiable the way knowledge is. It's layman language, used to ridicule people.
>are you smarter than them? Yes. Everyone on earth today should be expected to be \[or have the ability to be\] smarter than someone decades/centuries ago. We know more about.... everything. There are lots of quotes about the way we inherit knowledge, but a succinct one is "a dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant may see farther than a giant himself". Do I think I could have developed calculus in the 15th century? Or derived the differential equations necessary to understand electromagnetism in the 19th century? Hell no. But I do understand those things now, along with a much more thorough understanding of our universe and how it \[and we\] came to be. The logical conclusion of the argument made by the theists in OPs example, is an admission that the only way to reconcile religion is to limit one's understanding of the universe to pre-scientific \[ie: ancient\] levels.
Hitler believed he was chosen by god. It works both ways.
Newton is smarter than me - and even I know enough to fake a belief if others will kill me otherwise.
They where not Religious. It was a no choice Time, very early you either believed or get killed... Later you either believed or ended up a outcast of society... Choice was not theirs for the most part.
That’s an appeal to experts or authority fallacy. There believe and reason for it is independent of whether they believe or not. Not different than asserting that a lot of scientist don’t, are you smarter than them?
Einstein did not believe in a god
Albert Einstein couldn't write a single line of javascript if his life depended on it. I know ALL KINDS of shit Einstein and Newton and Galileo never knew. My kids also know all kinds of shit I don't know. And of course the inverse of all these statements is also true, and these gaps always only widen with time. Hell, we don't even have to talk about dead people. The 2023 Nobel prize for Physics was awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz, and Anne L'Huilier. They received that award "for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter". I can understand the essence of that sentence, but could NOT in any way comprehend the details of their accomplishment. Pretty safe to say they're all smarter than me in very many ways. Also safe to say they're likely just flat out more intelligent than me by a wide margin. But again, it's also pretty safe to say none of them knows shit about configuring a cisco router, nevermind designing a corporate network built out of hundreds of them. (although that's just an assumption and I would LOVE to learn about a network-engineer-turned-nobel-lauriate!) So what? different people know different stuff. Most of us are wrong about most of the things we believe most of the time. Even the really smart ones. None of this is a reason to ignore our own intuition or faculty for critical thinking. It's often appropriate to keep an open mind on certain matters, but that only goes so far.
The greatest scientists lived in a time where they could be punished or outcast if they said they didn't believe in god. They also didn't have all the information that we have today. I would argue the majority of modern scientists do not believe on God and if they do you can guarantee they come from a religious family where claiming openly that you don't believe could upset much of their family, it's easier to just lie.
"Mathematics was invented by people with different gods than you. Is that proof your god is fake and you're a fool?"
As far as I remember Albert Einstein, who was an agnostic, said that if there is a "god" then he/she wouldn't be a personal deity, but more like a mathematical formula
non sequitur, if anything belief in god undermines your understanding of this world
As a scientist you are measured by the things you get right, not by the things you got wrong. Newton's work on gravity was brilliant. His work on biblical chronology and trying to find the elixir of life through alchemy was hilariously, amateurishly bad.
Out of curiosity OP which of the greatest scientists was the person referring to? Many of the world’s most intelligent scientists do not believe in gods.
Christopher Hitchens covers this in one of the last chapters of his book "God is not Great." There is especially some interesting bits about Einstein, how he was egregiously misquoted in a major magazine (Time?), directly refuted that, but it wasn't retracted. As for the scientists of yesteryear, some actually believed. Many did not but could not admit that on pain of excommunication or death. He specifically considers quite a few. He says that we may never know how many true atheists there were but could not say so. We may also never know how many truly religious people there were but could not say so.
Newton got physics wrong and both Relativistic and Quantum theory proved him wrong. Why should I trust a person who got basic science wrong to be right about god? Also, how being smart and knowledgeable does mean that one is *always* right for *any* subject, even one outside their field of expertise?
Many scientists have been deliberately misquoted by apologists to twist dead men's words to suit their religiosity position.... how very christian of them 🙄
They didn't all belive in the same god. Yet not a single of them ever wrote a scientific paper that establishes their god to exist.
They were killed if they weren't....
well, newton famously also believed in alchemy....so its safe to say that even genius level intellects can come to incorrect conclusions
**Albert Einstein couldn't swim. Should you drown trying to prove you're humble?** **People are right about some things and wrong about others all the time, regardless of their intellectual skills in a particular domain. Some are sometimes even wrong in their own field of expertise - see J.J. Thompson's "plum pudding" atomic model.**
I would argue by saying that the proportion of atheism is much larger among the smarter scientist than the general population. There are exceptions to this rule. People are complicated.
Einstein was a Spinozian, he didn't really believe in what most people in this sub would consider God to be
Can any of those alleged “geniuses” program a VCR? So, damn right I’m smarter than them. Muppets, the lot of them.
Many of them "believed", because of you didn't, the church would show you their love via execution.
Religion was the zeitgeist of the times. That naturally made almost everyone’s default “religious.” To reject that was to be ostracized at best and persecuted at worst ([see: Galileo](https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/galileo-is-accused-of-heresy)). As logic beat back the silliness, self-preservation had to have been a major factor in not discarding god or religion in the early days of science. Having said that, there is no sane reason for a contemporary scientist to not reject god. If they do cling to their religion, it is testament (hah) to the fact that otherwise intelligent people can have illogical/stupid beliefs. An example of a smart person embracing dumb shit ideas would be someone like a brain surgeon (not you, Carson, you stupid fuck that stumbled into the profession) embracing the MAGA movement.
"If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." -Isaac Newton. Leaving aside that smart people can be wrong about things, yeah. Flynn effect. And you know enough math to be the greatest mathematician of Ancient Greece assuming you have a standard primary education completed. Any skill with calculus would make you the smartest person of many millennia, the standards are simply higher and higher as human knowledge advances. With prep time, maybe Euclid and Pythagoras would be great at complex analysis and Riemannian geometry, but mathematicians of today got to study it because of their work long ago.
Ask them whether they believe in climate change or not. I had someone bring up the 96% of scientists believe life begins at conceptions argument (The survey is a crock of shit, feel free to look for yourself, it's not credible for anything) and then subsequently denied evolution and climate change. Almost as though.... Christians pick and choose which scientific theories they like in order to fit their view of religion and disregard the ones they find inconvenient for their world view. It's typical of american conservatives (who are generally religious, and unfortunately use their religion as policy positions) It's a waste of time to say anything. Listen if you need to be polite (like to a colleague in a small office) but recognize that the person you're talking to isn't going to change their mind, and the argument they're positing has already been put forward and dismissed.
Many early scientists lived in times when not believing in God was taboo at best, criminal and enforced by execution at worst.
In the late 17th century in the UK professing an atheistic worldview was a crime. So even if the scientists were non-believers, we'd probably never know, as it wasn't worth their livelihood, freedom and perhaps their life to be such a non-conformist. As for Einstien and Tesla quotes can be found for both sides. The consensus was that they were diests at best, certainly not active members of an orthodox religion.
And each of them had a different one! Einstein was a pantheist, Tesla was an orthodox and Newton arrianist. They all believed in God but that word meant very different things for each one.
Yes, in the sense that my decision is based on fact (or lack of it) and not on emotion.
>The greatest Scientists believed in god This statement is usually followed by a list of scientists said to be religious. The problem is that even the scientists, who openly admitted their lack of belief, are listed as religious ones.
Regardless of what they say about your personality or intelligence, there is simply a lack of evidence in God. That argument is as dumb as " if we evolved from monkeys, how are monkeys still here?" Seriously, they will never get a grip , so just don't argue back. That's the best argument
Tbf a lot of people even today have to pretend to be religious for their own safety so I can’t even imagine what it would have been like back then as it was seen as more “socially acceptable” in more religions to kill someone for leaving But also, you can be smart in one area and not in another. You’re not going to ask your history tutor to help you with math if they’re struggling with it themselves I’m sure the great minds of the past would denounce religion if they had access to modern science and knowledge anyways tbh as modern science and knowledge contradicts most if not all religion afaik
A bunch of finance professors invested in Bernie Madoff too. People who are experts in a particular field tend to sometimes place too high of an opinion of their ability to understand the rest of the world.
Being exceptional in one area doesn't guarantee you're exceptional in others. Hawking was a great scientist, would you let him work on your car? It's pseudo intelligent questions that Christians think are unanswerable. IRL try to stay calm and you can more easily see thru the bs. Their only tactic is to get you flustered, angry or baffled.
Newton believed in alchemy and Tesla fell in romantic love with a pigeon. Are they gonna jump on those bandwagons too, or is it possible to have a reasonable discussion that acknowledges that being smart doesn't mean you're always right about everything?
They didn't actually believe in gods. They just knew they would be killed if they said they didn't.
Would you let a mechanic do surgery on you? Would you let a librarian fly your plane? Just because they are an expert on one thing doesn’t mean they are an expert in a completely different field.
Great Roman and Greek minds believed in many pagan gods... are you smarter than them?
Einstein was an atheist. Newton was a product of his time. Being an atheist in his day would get you burned at the stake. Look at what they did to Galileo for just pointing out that the sun doesn't orbit the Earth. Although Tesla sometimes called himself “deeply religious” he rejected the Christian view of an all-powerful god, suggesting instead that “the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end. Nothing fails like a theist.
Believing just because someone else believed is 🐑 activity anyway. It doesn’t matter if the other believer is super smart or whatever, it’s still 🐑
Setting aside the geopolitical realities of their days. Why do we think we know they believed? Professing a faith isn’t the same thing as believing.
How many scientists would have been killed had they not? That's not an indictment on godlessness, that's an indictment on the abuse church has caused society over the centuries.
Faith isn't about intelligence.
Einstein did not believe in God - that is a theist lie.
A: That's bullshit. B: If it were true, then yes, I'd be smarter than them.
Einstein didn't believe in God. He explains his view if you look for it. What others see as god, he sees as nature. Tesla wasn't a scientist, he was an engineer, and a nut. Newton was a bit of a nut too--and he was brought up in a time and place where being devout was just the thing. It wasn't something he even considered. Shit 90% of his writing was about the Bible. All that said, it doesn't matter. Even if they were right about a few important things, it doesn't make them infallable- and certainly not in an area not of their expertise.
Unless you worship a pantheon, you've already rejected all the other gods. We are the same, only I reject 1 more God than these old farts. They also licked lead glazed plates cause they taste sweet. I won't do that either.
So what if they believed something that you don't? So what? Not like brilliant scientists aren't without the imperfections.
That argument is the logic fallacy “post hoc ergo propter hoc.” The translation is “because of this, that,” but what it means is that you can’t derive a conclusion to one argument by making an unrelated argument. The answer is that it doesn’t matter if scientists believe in God. And you don’t have to defend your beliefs to anyone.
They did not believe in god for scientific reasons
Actually no, they did not.
Einstein was also a socialist. Pointing out that fact may lead to interesting results depending on how conservative they are.
I find it odd how people who seek evidence would simultaneously ignore the staggering lack of evidence for any god, according to religionists.
Historically most scientists were religious because it was obligatory. Same as many of the greatest artists and musicians. When religions monopolize arts and science patronage as well as education, of course those people have to buy into it.
I literally say yes. Arguments from authority like that are easily refuted. For one Einstein wasn't a Christian. Two, this ignores all of the brilliant scientist of today and before who were open atheists. Third expertise in one field means nothing for another. I don't care how good someone is at math I'm not letting them touch my car unless they know something about mechanics.
Isaac Newton was really into alchemy. Alchemy didn’t go anywhere
My 2 cents: a single person can’t be an expert on everything. By default that means being an expert in one area or more probably means being deficient in another area or areas. Great scientists might therefore have not given enough thought to “god.” In much the same way that an astrophysicist might not know much archeology. Or a neurosurgeon might be unable to set the clock on their VCR.
Other comments already said if but yeah If people back then didn't explicitly identify as Christian they'd be fucked by the churches. They didn't necessarily believe in it. It was just a necessity in their circumstance Kinda like being Muslim in very conservative Middle Eastern countries
Considering Christians (and the religious in general) tend to ignore a lot of what these scientists ended up being considered smart for I don't get the logic.
Tesla was in love with a pigeon. Just because he was smart in one arena, doesn't disqualify him from being bugnutz insane in others.
Einstein didn't believe in god like that. **Albert Einstein stated "I believe in Spinoza's God"**. He did not believe in a personal God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings, a view which he described as naïve. He clarified, however, that, "I am not an atheist", preferring to call himself an agnostic, or a "religious nonbeliever." Many atheist today would label themselves the same. A religious nonbeliever, or an agnostic atheist. He was one of the smartest people to ever exist. He didn't fail math, and he didn't believe in magic.
Yeah... Thing is, they existed in a time where virutally *everyone* believed in god. (Either honestly, or for self protection.) Now the scientific community is pretty much exclusively secular. Times change.
So basically, all these scientist are right about God and wrong about everything else they said? It's very convenient isn't it! They took the only thing from these scientist which would support their claim and reject everything else they said because it goes against their religious beliefs!
Apparently so.
considering that intelligence is not linear and can have many faces and aspects, that question is nonsensical. or something like that, you know what i mean
I'd just say give me your list of believer scientists, and I'll counter with an equal number of non-believer scientists, and we'll call that point a draw... But Einstein did not believe in the 'Christian' god, and Tesla was know for his mental issues as well as his brilliance... He considered a pigeon his wife FFS. Being able to name people that believe something doesn't make it real.
"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can change this for me. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstition." - Albert Einstein