Why intellectuals dont believe in god

Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about? He can be reached at garethideas AT gmail. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Discover World-Changing Science.

Get smart. Sign up for our email newsletter. Sign Up. Support science journalism. Knowledge awaits. See Subscription Options Already a subscriber? Create Account See Subscription Options. Continue reading with a Scientific American subscription. Subscribe Now You may cancel at any time. Does that mean that most believers are unreasoning? Well, some surely are. But I'm not prepared to say that most or all are.

What then is the basis of belief in rational, intelligent, reflective, scientifically literate thinking people in the modern age?

Direct experience of god's presence in the world, perhaps? A good friend of mine sometimes talks that way about god. He -- my friend -- is a very good person. He recently went to Guatamala, I think it was, to help his church build some houses for the desparately poor people who live in a rural village there.

I recall hearing him say something to the effect that he had never felt the presence of god so clearly as on that trip. I think many believers have thoughts like this.

They think they experience the concrete effects of god's presence in their own lives or operating through others. When I came closest to sincere belief in my own life, it was because my very devout then girlfriend was a luminously good person. Her religious conviction seemed to me to light up her soul. Certainly her belief was partly responsible for leading her to do many, many good and caring things.

I had never met a person quite like her and I really wanted and tried to believe as she believed. In the end, though, I found that although I admired her goodness and wanted to emulate it to the small extent that I could, I could not bring myself to believe as she believed -- no argument and no experience was sufficient to bring me to belief.

Though she perhaps felt god's presence in the world and took herself to be responding to it with her goodness and caring, somehow she was unable to bring me to feel god's presence. Perhaps that's just the way it is. Some people feel it and others don't. And there's not much one can do to get another across the divide. The problem with the direct perception of god's presence is that even those who profess to directly perceive or feel god's presence in the world, have to confess that god makes his presence felt pretty sporadically and selectively.

If I had been a jew in Hitler's concentration camp, or an innocent, peaceful and devout Shia Muslim in Saddam's Iraq or any sort of peace loving believer in the current chaotic and deadly Iraq, I would long for greater signs of god's presence and for greater signs of his love and wisdom. I know that some religious traditions condemn such longings as prideful and arrogant. But even believers must admit that so often, in the darkest hour, in the hour of most need, the voice of god goes silent, his hand is stilled and his face disappears as if behind a dark veil.

Now some believers will admit that arguments run out, that experience is insufficient to dispel doubt. And yet, still they believer. But on what basis? Some turn to pure faith, grounded in neither reason nor direct experience. But making a leap of ungrounded faith seems tantamount to jumping off a cliff, intending to reach a supposed other side that you have no grounds whatsoever for believing even exists. That, I think, is an act of pure desparation.

Is religious belief really such? At this point, some believers might choose to turn quasi-fictionalist. This seemed to be something like what Howie Wettstein in our show about the meaning of life was getting at. Wettstein posits god as a kind of "cosmic partner. Doing so enables one to see one's own life as part of a great cosmic drama.

Wettstein would prefer to live under the guise of living out a cosmic drama than to live under the guise of living an utterly meaningless life in a universe utterly devoid of meaning.

The problem with this approach, as I see it, is that if you take yourself to be positing god merely in order to endow one's life with meaning and you do so with no rational basis for really and truly believing that god exists, then you seem to be engaging in a kind of pretense.

But I wonder whether mere pretense is really enough to endow our lives with meanings that they don't already have. If mere pretense is enough, why can't we just decide to see our lives as meaningful in the first place, and skip the positing of god in whom we don't really believe. I don't pretend to have answers to all these questions. Plus it's about and I have to be in the studio in an hour and half. So I better stop now. I think we'll have lots to talk about.

Phil is a lively and thoughtful guy. So it should be fun. William James is a great figure, historically important as a philosopher pragmatism and radical empiricism , a student of religion au Worship May 10, Worship is the feeling or expression of reverence and adoration for something. The attitude of worship towards God or gods or ancestors is a universal of human culture.

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Kierkegaard Is Nothing Sacred Anymore? The Extended Mind What is an adult? Too Much Information? Corporations as Persons Psychological vs. March Fear! Live Blogging! April Journalistic Ethics? Beyond the Cartesian Moment? To blog is to forgive? Pretending that there is a god on the Christian model, e. This kind of pretense seems at least natural to me; I can relate to a fictional story like that. Whereas pretending there is godless meaning of life without actually giving content to what that meaning is supposed to be is so narratively unnatural as to be meaningless.

Fiction is supposed to have a point, and if the universe is by narrative stipulation pointless, I can't imagine what it would mean to pretend that the universe as described has a point, or a meaning. For one, if you could give a narratively compelling account of its putatively fictional meaning, then by my way of thinking you would have described the actual meaning!

Sunday, October 29, -- PM. Perhaps, finally, the only place where god need exist is within the person, as phenomenology. If one believes, life long, subsequent to a history of rearing, education and religious practices, the experience and presence of god may be well established within the person, if only as canalized brain processes.

Then as life ends one may be truely with god For example, it is reasonable to speculate that Pope John Paul was with god as consciousness faded into death. I'm reminded of this passage from Wittgenstein's Tractatus: "6. Death is not lived through.

If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present. Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit.

Thursday, November 2, -- PM. They have the ability to exploit each other, consume the ecosystem and even melt the polar ice cap. But let's see them try to move the planet's rotation off it's rotational axis! At least the rest of the universe is still safe. Friday, November 3, -- PM. Hey Ken, Here are a few comments from a believer? Reformed Epistemology? It certainly seems correct to say that most believers do not believe in the existence of God based on reasoned arguments or evidence.

They may have a? You say;? As a philosopher, I tend to want my beliefs to be based on either direct experience or reasoned arguments? It seems to me one could and should have much the same attitude toward religious belief.?

The general principle then is one ought not to believe in things that are not based on arguments or direct experience. As for the former it seems that this has been shown to be an overly stringent view of rationality. If we have learned anything in our introductory epistemology courses it is that arguments for other minds, induction, the external world, that the world wasn? Still this seems to most to be a problem for those arguments and our need for them not for belief in other minds, etc.

If our belief in other minds, etc. The latter then is most likely where I would place belief rational belief since it seems rationality has extended beyond? Your objection here seems to be that the experience is not great enough. That experience is not enough to? This seems arbitrary at best. How much experience is enough to continue on in belief? If there is something else that we have learned in our intro courses its when you find that most of the arguments run out pretty much everything is in the realm of doubt.

It seems pretty stringent Descartes stringent! As for pure faith, the? I believe because its ridiculous? I think Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Turtullian would have liked Plantinga and his cohorts.

One last point. This seems unlikely, if this standard is held I would love to hear your arguments for belief in other minds, induction, the external world, that the world wasn?

Assuming you? Most likely your belief in other minds is based on experience and perception. What if, like your account of the experience of God, that experience just isn? Who gets to say that? Especially when all of the evidence or arguments for other minds, etc. Again this doesn?

OK, we can look at how a person conceives of, say, an airplane, then proceeds to design, build, and, finally, fly it. From this we deduce that, at least on some level, existence depends on having a maker, which presupposes a designer, which presupposes a conceiver. Upon this premise, we deduce from observing the material universe that it must have been conceived, designed, and created by someone or something. Question: by what or by whom? Faced with this First Cause question in a philosophy class decades ago, I was unable come up with an answer suitable to support a belief in God.

Later, following experiences that I could not explain rationally, or consistently from a materialistic point of view, I re-examined various beliefs couched in the idea of a creator, and eventually came upon the Tao te Ching, and the concept of "The Eternal Tao.

For me, contemplating the Tao does not answer the question, "Is there a god. Rather, it keeps me questioning and questing, which enriches my life immeasurably by expanding my experience of life and all it offers. Thanks for your program. I look forward to it every week. Monday, November 6, -- PM.

I enjoyed the show and found enough of interest in what Phil Clayton said to ask him some questions, but I am not expecting that he will overcome my impression shared by caller Paul that there is no meaningful content to the question of existence or non-existence of the god that Phil appears to be talking about.

In the end, talk of such a god seems to amount to no more than the naming of an apparently unanswerable question and no matter whether we call it 'God' or 'Tao' or something else, it has no moral or other implications. This is not to imply that thinking about it in an "appropriate" way might not have some kind of beneficial calming effect on the human mind - but then so might thinking about any other abstract problem in mathematics or philosophy.

Another concept of god, which arose in Ken and John's response to Rob's conundrum about the comfort of acting as a believer despite not believing , was as a "flag" or symbol for the body of shared human values. To me the confounding of these two concepts reason and "purpose" for the existence of the universe, and "purpose" or values of human species and individuals seems highly presumptuous, but Phil appeared to be claiming some linkages so I have asked him about that in response to his follow-up posting.

Perhaps it is true that finding some consoling sense of substantiation re both is a common human need, but that doesn't imply that they both require the same "god" and perhaps some religions - eg Hinduism - are closer to recognizing this distinction than others.

In fact, the "source of values" concept is what strikes me as being closer to what most people seek from religion, so I want to follow up with you, Ken, about some aspects of that. First, in response to part of what you say in the blog posting, I think it exemplifies a kind of faith that is not in conflict with reason.

One way to achieve this is by having the beliefs devoid of empirical content as I have suggested that belief in Phil's god may be. But this does not preclude meaningful content. For example many beliefs are exhortatory in nature. Commandments have impact but are not empirically falsifiable.

Whether encouraging such beliefs is a good thing is something I would question in fact I would strongly deny it, but that's not the topic here so I must hold back , but I don't believe that they can be successfully challenged on purely rational grounds. Second, and this may be a simple question for you to answer, but I was unable to see a clear distinction between what is represented by the "fictionalist" label you used for Howie Wettstein's "positing", and the "semantic agnostic" applied to Rob's finding comfort in faithless participation and in fact, if I was going to make a distinction, I'd be inclined to reverse the labels.

Either way, I was disappointed by the comfort you gave to Rob. He should, I believe, have been supported instead in his apparent willingness to acknowledge and deal with the fundamental dishonesty of his position. To adjust the semantics so that a statement of faith is not a lie to oneself does not avoid the misleading effect that making that statement might have on others. In the case of religion, those who find comfort by making a statement that means something different to others than it means to themselves do harm in various ways.

One is by undermining and discouraging the truth-seeking of others who may be in a similar doubting position; and another is by lending credibility to the words themselves rather than the concept you mean by them, which empowers those who would turn the same words to a vastly different and often quite evil meaning.

This happens all too often with scriptural religion, so I think we need to do all we can to encourage the overt rather than covert denial of literalism. Tuesday, November 7, -- PM. I haven't had time to read all of the other posts on this topic, but I will go ahead and state my humble opinion. There is a God. I believe that if you ask people what God is then you will receive many different answers. Thus, God is what believe it is. People have believed in God in some form or fashion since the birth of civilization.

I believe that several things can be learned from holding a belief in God. And, depending on your beliefs, a belief in God can foster advances in all realms of human activity. Looking to the past, our ancient ancestors perceived God in many different forms, and each form deserved respect. However, in the scientfic age of today 'things' have been reduced to numbers and all sorts of complex calculations that I won't pretend to understand.

But, what do those numbers and calculations represent? I believe that God exists in everything. Should we not pay respect to world we live in and the universe that created it? What would happen if we no longer believed in a God different from the abolishment of religion? In conclusion, God seems to be just a word that people use to describe the concert of magnificent forces that surround them.

However, whether these forces act in We don't have to give it to him, but bad things tend to happen when there is a lack of respect for anything.

Thursday, November 16, -- PM. I think that if you want a good definition of God, you need go no further than St. Augustine's Confessions.

Sure, it's a "starter level" book, but St. Augustine's idea of God, Good, Truth, and so forth, is mirrored throughout time by a multitude of thinkers. Saturday, November 25, -- PM. The original question being, "How can smart people still believe in God? Society promulgates the god myth so incessantly that very few people can think beyond the thought that god must exist. In the way of analogy, if there are intelligent people that do believe that humans exist as separate races, and not one human race due to very effective societal brainwashing , then why should we not see that brainwashing by societal beliefs is behind other incongruencies?

Sunday, November 26, -- PM. Even ultra-rational folk can share beliefs that are not based on solid evidence or rational argument. For instance, NASA has spent many millions searching for extra-terrestial life, despite no evidence that such life exists, nor the slightest idea how probable or improbable the spontaneous origin of life may be.

Given the lack of evidence, it seems just as reasonable to assume that ours is the first and only planet in the universe yet pregnant with life, as to assume that life is so ubiquitous that it is lurking under the martian ice caps, sloshing within the frozen void of Europa, or stirring in the methane lakes of Titan.

Though I share the fervent hope that life is present throughout the universe, I don't fool myself that this belief is based on anything but wishful thinking. Ken implies that the believer in God resorts primarily to faith, while the un-believer relies mostly on reason. As one caller remarked, atheists have faith equal to believers that God doesn't exist. Given that neither atheists nor theists have sufficient evidence nor a bulletproof argument to prove or disprove the existence of God, it's reasonable to assume that at bottom, both sides of the argument rely equally on faith.

I suspect that if you scratch any argument hard enough, probing mercilessly with why questions, you will eventually scrape down to a bedrock of irrational and unsubstantiated belief.

For even the most rational thinkers, reason and evidence alone are not enough to stir the passion of true conviction. Superficial beliefs are easy to flip with argument and evidence.

Deeper beliefs have a protective coil of emotion encircling them like a devouring serpent. Our core convictions will not go down easily, simply because the light of reason is shone upon them. Wednesday, November 29, -- PM. The question should be "How can smart people believe in a single religion? Belief in a religion requires suspension of all doubts and questions that challange a religion's writings and belief systems. Saturday, December 2, -- PM.

This is in response to David Chilstrom's comment above. While it is true that absolute belief in the non-existence of all gods appears to lack convincing rational support, this does not contradict Ken's point that the unbeliever relies mostly on reason. In fact the typical unbeliever may simply not believe in either the existence or the non-existence of a god.

Having been unconvinced by any argument pro or con myself, I have a lot of sympathy with that position. The question at hand at the start of this discussion was "How can smart people still believe in god? I don't think Philip Clayton answered that question for me because I did not find his argument compelling, but I do think that if the god concept is sufficiently abstract then it can be believed in without too much offense to reason.

Perhaps the more challenging question is that raised by Jody - "How can smart people believe in a single religion? Saturday, December 30, -- PM. If God is just a product of human imagination because of hope for life after death, every belief could be easily be dismissed.

I'm no keen for the evolution of the human brain to become such as emotional as it is right now but yet it is clear that as the human body learns to adapt itself in every climate the brain does too. I am not a scientist to elaborate a very complicated point of view, nor did I studied theology but there is one clear fact for me. Ninety five percent of the human populace are not smart enough. He called himself the most "reluctant believer in England, dragged kicking and screaming into the Kingdom of Heaven.

The movie "Shadowlands," was about him and, of course, "The Chronicles of Narnia," are nothing more than Christian allegory. Lewis's contention was that the Jews, our No. God, the Jews said, interjected himself into their lives and insisted on being listened to, like a jilted lover. God came looking for man, not the other way around. In the same way Christianity's uniqueness is not taken from great philosophical debate and argument.

Christians simply said that God, who created the whole darn shabang we see at night in the sky, chose to enter our history through the birth canal, the only way in, and exit through the grave, the only way out. While here he showed us what God is really like. The Creator took the form of a lowly Jew in Roman times. As Lewis pointed out, he was who he said he was or he was a raving maniac. There is no middle ground. You must decide. You must believe or not believe.

It is an act of the will, not based on reason. Reason will carry you so far, but we all must stop at the cliff, and yes, leap into Jesus Christ's arms, for safety. Is it a leap of faith out into darkness with no supporting evidence. That is exactly what it is and why God has made it so, no one will ever know until they go to him and he tells them after they have exited through the grave. The debate will never be solved to anyone's satisfaction. To the true believer, God, or Jesus Christ, as the Christians would say, is reality.

The physical universe is only a stage of arranged and ordered particals or building blocks that makes the stage on which human history is acted out. That is why drama grips us so deep down in our minds, because we see something on the silver screen that we have oursleves experienced. Reality is not out there or in here, it is us, we; we ourselves are true reality and the world was made for us to inhabit, to grow and to mature in, until the time for our processing into the next universe comes.

And Christ, our only reality and anchor, showed us how it is done. When the Jews and Romans attacked his positions and statements, he did not answer them. I wonder why? Friday, January 5, -- PM. Tuesday, January 23, -- PM.

Tuesday, March 20, -- PM. In the absence of a scientific explanation for the beginning of the universe, whether by 'Big Bang' or not, there is no other option but to believe in a Creator who is outside of the need to have been created Himself - i. God - an eternal being without beginning or end - is the only reasonable conclusion, however difficult it might be for some people to accept, for whatever personal reason they might have for not wanting to accept it.

But even Stephen Hawking an atheist admits that science cannot explain the beginning of the universe and he himself says: "for that, you would have to appeal to God. I believe that this is one of the reasons why God says in the Bible: "Only the fool has said in his heart, there is no God. Which God is the true God is another matter, which I don't have the space to go into here.

Wednesday, May 9, -- PM. I am amazingly smart. Just ask me. I have wrestled with this question for over a decade, and have often remarked, "I would be an atheist if it weren't for this whole belief in a god thing I can't shake.

I would non-believe if I could non-believe. There is no earthly way to controvert this and so submission to the 'belief' assures your continued acceptance in society and eternity. The fact is, all religions, monotheistic or not ask you to do one thing: accept the overtly unprovable. The only variable is the degree to which you are required to 'act like you accept' it. It is impossible to gauge what one believes save for watching their actions, and religion has built in 'actions' that 'prove' you believe, but not that 'prove' your belief is justified.

And so it goes. I think this is the main hesitation smart people have with religion: the way in which you are required to subjugate your rationalizations about the world in order to accept the religion. Some people are able to strike an internal balance between the un-explained good and the unbelievable bad. It seems to me that BOTH ways of doing it are acts of Thursday, May 17, -- PM.

For it is written: "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate. Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age?

Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe.

Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength. Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth.

But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things? Sunday, May 27, -- PM. I am 12 years old and I don't belive in god. Now I know I am only a child and I have no word but I am very smart for my age.

The subject of god has been brought up my man for thousands of years. No one can give the right answer. This is why I think why believing in god is good, bad and why people belive in god.

Beliving in god is good because it gives a good balance in your life. Imagine if no one belived in god. People would be killing, slaughtering and. Im Gian, im 16 years old and i do believe in God. No true believer should see science as something tha limits faith, knowing the meaning of faith i know that Science and God are the same.

Science is just the study of God's creation ,ne? Tuesday, June 19, -- PM. I suppose that there is nothing new to talk about, these days. Just how much sense does it make to attempt to apprehend the infinite? It is, by definition, a futile exercise. The current argument against "God" seems to be, "since I'm not smart enough to comprehend the Divine, or you're not smart enough to explain it to me, then it must not exist" How reflective of our time, when everything is seen through the lens of the "self".

That Dawkins, et al use only the common Judeo-Christian concept of God as the basis of their argument, simply shows their limited knowledge or ability to conceive the Divine. I recognize the Divine in all things, and just because humans aren't happy with events, simply means that that humans are not the center of creation. Maybe this energy would be better spent educating people that they are not the focus of creation. Once this is achieved if it can be, then maybe we can move forward.

Emerging research is demonstrating that atheist parents and others pass on their beliefs to their children in a similar way to religious parents — through sharing their culture as much as their arguments. Some parents take the view that their children should choose their beliefs for themselves , but what they then do is pass on certain ways of thinking about religion, like the idea that religion is a matter of choice rather than divine truth.

But are atheists more likely to embrace science than religious people? Many belief systems can be more or less closely integrated with scientific knowledge. Some belief systems are openly critical of science, and think it has far too much sway over our lives, while other belief systems are hugely concerned to learn about and respond to scientific knowledge.

Some Protestant traditions , for example, see rationality or scientific thinking as central to their religious lives. Meanwhile, a new generation of postmodern atheists highlight the limits of human knowledge, and see scientific knowledge as hugely limited, problematic even, especially when it comes to existential and ethical questions.

These atheists might, for example, follow thinkers like Charles Baudelaire in the view that true knowledge is only found in artistic expression.

And while many atheists do like to think of themselves as pro science, science and technology itself can sometimes be the basis of religious thinking or beliefs, or something very much like it. For example, the rise of the transhumanist movement , which centres on the belief that humans can and should transcend their current natural state and limitations through the use of technology, is an example of how technological innovation is driving the emergence of new movements that have much in common with religiosity.

The science of the biological world, for example, is much more than a topic of intellectual curiosity — for some atheists, it provides meaning and comfort in much the same way that belief in God can for theists. Psychologists show that belief in science increases in the face of stress and existential anxiety , just as religious beliefs intensify for theists in these situations.