Skip to main content

Fabulous

Lovely commentary here from Keith Burgess-Jackson, also known as The Anal Philosopher:
Is there any evidence that religious people are less intelligent than nonreligious people? I’ve never seen any. Some of the greatest thinkers in the history of humankind have been devout theists. Thomas Aquinas was a theist. Isaac Newton was a theist. René Descartes was a theist. Immanuel Kant was a theist. William James was a theist. Ludwig Wittgenstein was a theist. What are we to say of these people: that they’re stupid? But we know on independent grounds that they were the opposite of stupid. They were fabulously intelligent. They were brilliant. I’ve been teaching philosophy of religion for more than twenty years. I can assure you that theists hold their own in intellectual contests with atheists. If they didn'’t, or couldn’'t, there would be nothing for me to teach. Read some Aquinas if you don’t believe me. He'’ll run intellectual circles around you. In my discipline, philosophy, there are as many theists as there are atheists. The ratio of atheists to theists may be higher among philosophers than among people generally, but if the hypothesis of stupidity is correct, shouldn'’t the ratio be extraordinarily high in a field such as philosophy, which attracts people of such impressive intelligence? Shouldn'’t it be extremely unusual to find a theist in a philosophy department? I can assure you that it’'s not. Many of the best philosophers in the world today are theists: William P. Alston, Peter van Inwagen, Marilyn McCord Adams, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Philip L. Quinn, Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne. See here. They work not just in philosophy of religion but in epistemology and metaphysics. They are as hard-headed, rigorous, and intellectually demanding as anyone, anywhere, in any field.
I've said it here before, but I'll say it again. Political divisions are not about smarts. It's about where you locate transcendent authority. You can only have two choices: a transcendent God or yourself. But there is a problem with the second choice. If it's true, then there is no such thing as choice. Nevertheless, there are many smart and decent people who take the second choice and then erect very elaborate theories on it. Because they are smart, and because this second choice *appears* to place few if any obligations on its adherents, others find those theories attractive.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Wordpress

My move to Mac has been very happy except for two issues - gaming and blogging. For websurfing and multimedia, a Mac is of course a terrific machine. Games on the Mac platform are often ports of games made for the larger PC market and that means a Mac gamer will have to wait for the port. I'm not a heavy gamer by any means but I am very happy that the Mac port of Civilization 4 is finally here. Well, my copy isn't here quite yet - but it has been ordered and ought to be here soon. The blogging issue is more complicated. I'm not fond of writing my posts in a browser window. This goes back to when I was first blogging and I lost one or two large posts into the ether. After that I moved to w.bloggar - a great little app that let me compose on my desktop and then click send when all was said and done. I have not been able to recreate that experience on my Mac, and not for a lack of trying! I looked at Marsedit , but that forces you to compse while staring at a bunch of HMT...
Post a Comment
Read more

Da Vinci: It bleats, it leads

The trouble with The DaVinci code is certainly this : the fundamentals of the Christian creed can be summarized in a few sentences easily learned by schoolchildren and recited aloud from memory by the whole congregation on Sunday. They are great mysteries to be sure - Trinity, incarnation, redemption, salvation, crucifixion, resurrection - but they are simple enough to explain. Contrast that with the account Mr. Brown offers of a centuries-long fraud, sustained by shadowy groups, imperial politics, ruthless brutality and latterly revealed by a secret code "hidden" in one of the world's most famous paintings. The Christian Gospel offers a coherent, comprehensible account of reality that invites the assent of faith. It requires a choice with consequences. Mr. Brown's dissent from Christianity offers a bewildering and incredible amalgam of falsehoods and implausibilities, painting a picture of a world in which the unenlightened are subject to the manipulations of the fe...
Post a Comment
Read more