Belief in God Boils Down to a Gut Feeling

[Thomas Doubting]

I never said that all religious people are this and that.. i said they seem to be more likely.. as diverse examples showed.
Well i think we were riding this topic for long enough.. just one more thing, Einstein was terrible at math

Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.

and he admitted that openly just like his own stupidity.

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

like i said before.. some are hiding it better than others most of the time, but thinking out of your butt (or gut) is not a good way to hide it.

 

[Laurens]

like i said before.. some are hiding it better than others most of the time, but thinking out of your butt (or gut) is not a good way to hide it.

I don't think people are thinking intuitively through choice to hide their ignorance. The article suggest that people who naturally think intuitively are more likely to be religious - i.e: that people predisposed to thinking in a certain way are more likely to become religious.

It's not like they make a conscious choice to think intuitively in order to hide anything...

EDIT:

I never said that all religious people are this and that.. i said they seem to be more likely.. as diverse examples showed.

And I'm saying you have no basis to claim what is or isn't more likely about these people based upon the results in the article. They do not indicate anything to do with stupidity or intelligence level so how can you claim what is or isn't likely about these things, from these results?

 

[Thomas Doubting]

:cry: you got me wrong again.. i am not saying that somebody is trying to hide their stupidity/ignorance by thinking or acting intuitively, i am saying that we are all stupid, like it or not. It shows now and then, sooner or later, so "hiding it" is actually my way of saying that we try to not act in a stupid manner.
By acting intuitively/by gut feeling our stupidity is very likely to show.. like Mr. Bush demonstrated. My point is that it is more likely to happen for religious people because they supress their logical/critical thinking and resort to intuition/wishful thinking more often, like this study showed for a part. Of course there are many other examples, few of them i named in earlier posts. People can train their brains to be more thorough in thinking processes and involve logic more often where it is needed, religious doctrine plays a part there, it keeps the thinking process in the creative realm more often and it shows in many parts of the daily life.. even in very important parts like.. politics, raising kids, education etc. But really, enough said about that (on my part)
But to make one thing clear, i do not say that ALL religious people ALWAYS act stupidly, merely that they are more likely to do so, as i (think i) explained.

 

[Laurens]

:cry: you got me wrong again.. i am not saying that somebody is trying to hide their stupidity/ignorance by thinking or acting intuitively, i am saying that we are all stupid, like it or not. It shows now and then, sooner or later, so "hiding it" is actually my way of saying that we try to not act in a stupid manner.
By acting intuitively/by gut feeling our stupidity is very likely to show.. like Mr. Bush demonstrated. My point is that it is more likely to happen for religious people because they supress their logical/critical thinking and resort to intuition/wishful thinking more often, like this study showed for a part. Of course there are many other examples, few of them i named in earlier posts. People can train their brains to be more thorough in thinking processes and involve logic more often where it is needed, religious doctrine plays a part there, it keeps the thinking process in the creative realm more often and it shows in many parts of the daily life.. even in very important parts like.. politics, raising kids, education etc. But really, enough said about that (on my part)
But to make one thing clear, i do not say that ALL religious people ALWAYS act stupidly, merely that they are more likely to do so, as i (think i) explained.

I didn't say you were claiming that all religious people always act stupidly, I just don't understand how you make the leap from more likely to think intuitively to more likely to think stupidly.

I agree with you that we are all liable to be stupid at times, I just don't see how, from these results you can conclude that religion increases that propensity. It might well be true, but this study does not show that, it shows that a predisposition to thinking intuitively may increase the likelihood of being religious (or the other way around perhaps?). Not that religion increases the likelihood of stupidity.

 

[Thomas Doubting]

I do think it is the other way around.. that religion encourages them to /makes them think or act more intuitively, as the study made by Yale psychologists explains (link called "this little article" somewhere up there) ,among others, like neurotheological and neuropsychological studies showing that neural connections are built in the brain which tend to make some people skip reality checks aka critical thinking and use wishful thinking or their "gut feeling" more often, especially "victims" of early religious indoctrination.
Making a wrong decision because one didn't apply logic and reasoning can bring many problems, i would call that a stupid decision, and like my friend Forrest Gump said, stupid is who stupid does. (like one might say that i am stupid for quoting Forrest gump but.. oh well.. i am well aware of my stupidity)
Why I wanted to make clear that i didn't make claims about all religious people or that it is always the case, is because you seemed to read between the lines and think that i said something like that, that is not true, though i wish to point out that i will always stand behind my statement that religion does stupify humanity, just one part of the negative influences.

 

[Laurens]

I do think it is the other way around.. that religion encourages them to /makes them think or act more intuitively, as the study made by Yale psychologists explains (link called "this little article" somewhere up there) ,among others, like neurotheological and neuropsychological studies showing that neural connections are built in the brain which tend to make some people skip reality checks aka critical thinking and use wishful thinking or their "gut feeling" more often, especially "victims" of early religious indoctrination.

I can see how this would be the case. But I could also see how someone with a predisposition to thinking intuitively might become religious without any indoctrination at all.

Making a wrong decision because one didn't apply logic and reasoning can bring many problems, i would call that a stupid decision, and like my friend Forrest Gump said, stupid is who stupid does. (like one might say that i am stupid for quoting Forrest gump but.. oh well.. i am well aware of my stupidity)

I disagree, I don't think you could call someone a stupid person for making a few mistakes or bad decisions. If that were the case then we'd all be stupid. We all do stupid things, yes, but to call all people who've made a bad decision or two stupid is like calling someone a thief because they stole a chocolate bar once when they were 10. To qualify as being a stupid person I'd say you'd have to continually make mistakes and bad decisions with an apparent inability to learn from them.

Why I wanted to make clear that i didn't make claims about all religious people or that it is always the case, is because you seemed to read between the lines and think that i said something like that, that is not true, though i wish to point out that i will always stand behind my statement that religion does stupify humanity, just one part of the negative influences.

I never said you made claims about all the religious people, you are interpreting my objections that way, but I never claimed that is what you think.

 

[Thomas Doubting]

That is how you define being stupid.. I like to say we are all stupid merely because we are humans.. Einstein even said infinitely stupid. But we do fight our stupidity and i wish we could "hide" it as often and as much as possible.. We all make mistakes and if we're given enough time and opportunities, some of them are very likely to be very stupid. My position is that intuitive and wishful thinking results in more stupid mistakes, maybe even spoils our intellectual development.
I believe that if we don't train our logic side of the brain as much as possible, our intelligence suffers and our ability to make a good decision if it highly depends on logical/reasonable scrutiny of the given situation/data.
Religion definitely seems to play a part there, just like with the IQ.
This graph shows the correlation between the IQ and one's "importance of religion", pew survey from 2003 in many countries, just one of many studies. (usa is marked with a red circle)

sauce(summary of one of many studies made.)

Here something that supports your theory that intuitive thinking "calls" for belief in God.

I'm convinced by the work of cognitive scientists of religion (see "Religion Explained" and "In Gods We Trust") that belief in gods and spirits is intuitively plausible to most people.
...
The point is that religious beliefs and systems use these intuitions and impulses as atoms with which they can build up more complex cultural ideas.

Very interesting, (maybe even a bit disturbing) the article says that atheists might have something in common with autists :shock:
also stating that pre-modern societies had belief in God as the null position, "if not necessarily universal".


The guy who did the IQ vs Religion study in 2008 also thinks that higher IQ rather more likely results in rejecting belief in God(s) and not that belief in God makes people more stupid.. although he didn't seem too sure about that.

"I'm not saying that believing in God makes you dumber. My hypothesis is that people with a low intelligence are more easily drawn toward religions, which give answers that are certain, while people with a high intelligence are more skeptical,..."

source
Over time I checked several studies on that topic, it often shows the same result, people who don't believe in God seem to have a higher IQ in average, even agnostics score higher than beople who do believe in god firmly.. i can't really find out for sure if one's belief can affect their intelligence negatively or one's intelligence is the reason for their belief.. might be both ways.
I however am quite sure that religion does and always did stupify humanity, heck they even wanted people to stay uneducated and illiterate for a long time.. and burned thinkers and early scientists/medicians :roll:
still fighting parts of education, medicine and other fields of science.. not too long ago i read about some extremists bombing scientists who work on nanotechnology.. :facepalm:
But that doesn't really have anything to do with this topic.