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MOST of the "Jesus=Easter Bunny" cynics have never even read the entire Bible (and therfeore have no business pretending to have an educated opinion on it) and just say the myth/Easter Bunny comments because its the "hip thing to do".
In 2008, intelligence researcher Helmuth Nyborg examined whether IQ relates to denomination and income, using representative data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, which includes intelligence tests on a representative selection of white American youth, where they have also replied to questions about religious belief. His results, published in the scientific journal Intelligence, demonstrated that Atheists scored an average of 1.95 IQ points higher than Agnostics, 3.82 points higher than Liberal persuasions, and 5.89 IQ points higher than Dogmatic persuasions. [4]
The relationship between countries' belief in a god and average Intelligence Quotient, measured by Lynn, Harvey & Nyborg.[5]
Nyborg also co-authored a study with Richard Lynn, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Ulster, which compared religious belief and average national IQs in 137 countries. [5] The study analysed the issue from several viewpoints. Firstly, using data from a U.S. study of 6,825 adolescents, the authors found that atheists scored 6 IQ points higher than those adhering to a religion.
Secondly, the authors investigated the link between religiosity and intelligence on a country level. Among the sample of 137 countries, only 23 (17%) had more than 20% of atheists, which cons uted “virtually all... higher IQ countries.” The authors reported a correlation of 0.60 between atheism rates and level of intelligence, which was determined to be “highly statistically significant”"
"Taking the U.S. population as an example: Most polls show that about 90% of the general public believes in a personal God; yet 93% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences do not. This suggests that there are few modes of thinking less congenial to religious faith than science is."
this
MOST of the "Jesus=Easter Bunny" cynics have never even read the entire Bible (and therfeore have no business pretending to have an educated opinion on it) and just say the myth/Easter Bunny comments because its the "hip thing to do".
Physics and the Immortality of the Soul
The topic of "life after death" raises disreputable connotations of past-life regression and haunted houses, but there are a large number of people in the world who believe in some form of persistence of the individual soul after life ends. Clearly this is an important question, one of the most important ones we can possibly think of in terms of relevance to human life. If science has something to say about, we should all be interested in hearing.
Adam Frank thinks that science has nothing to say about it. He advocates being "firmly agnostic" on the question. (His coblogger Alva Noë resolutely disagrees.) I have an enormous respect for Adam; he’s a smart guy and a careful thinker. When we disagree it’s with the kind of respectful dialogue that should be a model for disagreeing with non-crazy people. But here he couldn’t be more wrong.
Adam claims that there "simply is no controlled, experimental[ly] verifiable information" regarding life after death. By these standards, there is no controlled, experimentally verifiable information regarding whether the Moon is made of green cheese. Sure, we can take spectra of light reflecting from the Moon, and even send astronauts up there and bring samples back for analysis. But that’s only scratching the surface, as it were. What if the Moon is almost all green cheese, but is covered with a layer of dust a few meters thick? Can you really say that you know this isn’t true? Until you have actually examined every single cubic centimeter of the Moon’s interior, you don’t really have experimentally verifiable information, do you? So maybe agnosticism on the green-cheese issue is warranted. (Come up with all the information we actually do have about the Moon; I promise you I can fit it into the green-cheese hypothesis.)
Obviously this is completely crazy. Our conviction that green cheese makes up a negligible fraction of the Moon’s interior comes not from direct observation, but from the gross incompatibility of that idea with other things we think we know. Given what we do understand about rocks and planets and dairy products and the Solar System, it’s absurd to imagine that the Moon is made of green cheese. We know better.
We also know better for life after death, although people are much more reluctant to admit it. Admittedly, "direct" evidence one way or the other is hard to come by — all we have are a few legends and sketchy claims from unreliable witnesses with near-death experiences, plus a bucketload of wishful thinking. But surely it’s okay to take account of indirect evidence — namely, compatibility of the idea that some form of our individual soul survives death with other things we know about how the world works.
Claims that some form of consciousness persists after our bodies die and decay into their cons uent atoms face one huge, insuperable obstacle: the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood, and there’s no way within those laws to allow for the information stored in our brains to persist after we die. If you claim that some form of soul persists beyond death, what particles is that soul made of? What forces are holding it together? How does it interact with ordinary matter?
Everything we know about quantum field theory (QFT) says that there aren’t any sensible answers to these questions. Of course, everything we know about quantum field theory could be wrong. Also, the Moon could be made of green cheese.
Among advocates for life after death, nobody even tries to sit down and do the hard work of explaining how the basic physics of atoms and electrons would have to be altered in order for this to be true. If we tried, the fundamental absurdity of the task would quickly become evident.
Even if you don’t believe that human beings are "simply" collections of atoms evolving and interacting according to rules laid down in the Standard Model of particle physics, most people would grudgingly admit that atoms are part of who we are. If it’s really nothing but atoms and the known forces, there is clearly no way for the soul to survive death. Believing in life after death, to put it mildly, requires physics beyond the Standard Model. Most importantly, we need some way for that "new physics" to interact with the atoms that we do have.
Very roughly speaking, when most people think about an immaterial soul that persists after death, they have in mind some sort of blob of spirit energy that takes up residence near our brain, and drives around our body like a soccer mom driving an SUV. The questions are these: what form does that spirit energy take, and how does it interact with our ordinary atoms? Not only is new physics required, but dramatically new physics. Within QFT, there can’t be a new collection of "spirit particles" and "spirit forces" that interact with our regular atoms, because we would have detected them in existing experiments. Ockham’s razor is not on your side here, since you have to posit a completely new realm of reality obeying very different rules than the ones we know.
But let’s say you do that. How is the spirit energy supposed to interact with us? Here is the equation that tells us how electrons behave in the everyday world:
Don’t worry about the details; it’s the fact that the equation exists that matters, not its particular form. It’s the Dirac equation — the two terms on the left are roughly the velocity of the electron and its inertia — coupled to electromagnetism and gravity, the two terms on the right.
As far as every experiment ever done is concerned, this equation is the correct description of how electrons behave at everyday energies. It’s not a complete description; we haven’t included the weak nuclear force, or couplings to hypothetical particles like the Higgs boson. But that’s okay, since those are only important at high energies and/or short distances, very far from the regime of relevance to the human brain.
If you believe in an immaterial soul that interacts with our bodies, you need to believe that this equation is not right, even at everyday energies. There needs to be a new term (at minimum) on the right, representing how the soul interacts with electrons. (If that term doesn’t exist, electrons will just go on their way as if there weren’t any soul at all, and then what’s the point?) So any respectable scientist who took this idea seriously would be asking — what form does that interaction take? Is it local in spacetime? Does the soul respect gauge invariance and Lorentz invariance? Does the soul have a Hamiltonian? Do the interactions preserve unitarity and conservation of information?
Nobody ever asks these questions out loud, possibly because of how silly they sound. Once you start asking them, the choice you are faced with becomes clear: either overthrow everything we think we have learned about modern physics, or distrust the stew of religious accounts/unreliable testimony/wishful thinking that makes people believe in the possibility of life after death. It’s not a difficult decision, as scientific theory-choice goes.
We don’t choose theories in a vacuum. We are allowed — indeed, required — to ask how claims about how the world works fit in with other things we know about how the world works. I’ve been talking here like a particle physicist, but there’s an analogous line of reasoning that would come from evolutionary biology. Presumably amino acids and proteins don’t have souls that persist after death. What about viruses or bacteria? Where upon the chain of evolution from our monocellular ancestors to today did organisms stop being described purely as atoms interacting through gravity and electromagnetism, and develop an immaterial immortal soul?
There’s no reason to be agnostic about ideas that are dramatically incompatible with everything we know about modern science. Once we get over any reluctance to face reality on this issue, we can get down to the much more interesting questions of how human beings and consciousness really work.
Sean Carroll is a physicist and author. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1993, and is now on the faculty at the California Ins ute of Technology, where his research focuses on fundamental physics and cosmology. Carroll is the author of From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, and Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity. He has written for Discover, Scientific American, New Scientist, and other publications. His blog Cosmic Variance is hosted by Discover magazine, and he has been featured on television shows such as The Colbert Report, National Geographic’s Known Universe, and Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman. His Twitter handle is @seanmcarroll
you're no atheist if you put that much FAITH into statistics spewed out from a biased source. You realize that Nyborg also says women and black people are dumber than white men too, right? Or maybe you missed the part where Nyborg is a known supporter of Neo-Nazi parties?In 2008, intelligence researcher Helmuth Nyborg examined whether IQ relates to denomination and income, using representative data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, which includes intelligence tests on a representative selection of white American youth, where they have also replied to questions about religious belief. His results, published in the scientific journal Intelligence, demonstrated that Atheists scored an average of 1.95 IQ points higher than Agnostics, 3.82 points higher than Liberal persuasions, and 5.89 IQ points higher than Dogmatic persuasions. [4]
The relationship between countries' belief in a god and average Intelligence Quotient, measured by Lynn, Harvey & Nyborg.[5]
Nyborg also co-authored a study with Richard Lynn, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Ulster, which compared religious belief and average national IQs in 137 countries. [5] The study analysed the issue from several viewpoints. Firstly, using data from a U.S. study of 6,825 adolescents, the authors found that atheists scored 6 IQ points higher than those adhering to a religion.
Secondly, the authors investigated the link between religiosity and intelligence on a country level. Among the sample of 137 countries, only 23 (17%) had more than 20% of atheists, which cons uted “virtually all... higher IQ countries.” The authors reported a correlation of 0.60 between atheism rates and level of intelligence, which was determined to be “highly statistically significant”"
"Taking the U.S. population as an example: Most polls show that about 90% of the general public believes in a personal God; yet 93% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences do not. This suggests that there are few modes of thinking less congenial to religious faith than science is."
Why are atheists always trying so hard to PROVE how much smarter they are than everyone? Insecurity issues perhaps?
First understand that theists came up with the term intelligent design. ID is a joke in the science world.
Second, there's no such thing as a soul. A soul is a hybrid of man's insecurities in admitting his mortality with the functions of the human brain.
So with these two things being said, I've already burned your post to the ground.
Now... the capacity to understand? Understand what? I can read a book... Bible, Quran, Lord of the Rings, and Winnie the Pooh, and I can see the moral implications embedded.
Look in a mirror, dude. Understand what evolution is, and wrap your mind around it. It should amaze you that everything on this planet that lives came from a common ancestor. Do you understand how big the Universe is? I don't, because it's infinite... but if you could understand how insignificant we are to what we know of, then you could get an idea.
Believing... I believe in fact. There are plenty of amazing things that happen around the world and in your regular day that you don't appreciate. Every breath of life you take is something I believe to be incredible.
You're reading the wrong books.
I can use google to try to look smart too...
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/...14&version=NIV
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallaciesyou're no atheist if you put that much FAITH into statistics spewed out from a biased source. You realize that Nyborg also says women and black people are dumber than white men too, right? Or maybe you missed the part where Nyborg is a known supporter of Neo-Nazi parties?
Why are atheists always trying so hard to PROVE how much smarter they are than everyone? Insecurity issues perhaps?
How about you try and disprove anything I or jARS mEsH sEt has said...
loool.this is so funny.you have an equation for soul now?stupid honestly.neurons and nerves can't explain soul and this article still didn't answer my question.why do people die yet their entire body could still be functioning?Read this carefully, the day you die is the day you know the truth.you will live your life in denial but once you die and you are buried, an angel will come to you and ask you, did you believe in god, you will say no and i dont need to talk about the rest.you could look it up.but since you were informed by a lot of people that you were wrong u will have no excuse and only then will u regret it but it'll be too late.we could argue back and forth but the evidence that god is there is overwhelming and i will leave you with this link to see for yourself.
http://scienceislam.com/
did you know that the quran that came out 1500 years ago talks about how an embryo is formed?science stems from the quran.did you kmow the quran exaplins the big bang theory?please educate yourself and since you're into science see how the quran introduced these ideas before man knew what science was.
please read this link
I will become an atheist if you can prove to me that god doesn't exist. i gave u evidence u give me yours
Physics and the Immortality of the Soul
The topic of "life after death" raises disreputable connotations of past-life regression and haunted houses, but there are a large number of people in the world who believe in some form of persistence of the individual soul after life ends. Clearly this is an important question, one of the most important ones we can possibly think of in terms of relevance to human life. If science has something to say about, we should all be interested in hearing.
Adam Frank thinks that science has nothing to say about it. He advocates being "firmly agnostic" on the question. (His coblogger Alva Noë resolutely disagrees.) I have an enormous respect for Adam; he’s a smart guy and a careful thinker. When we disagree it’s with the kind of respectful dialogue that should be a model for disagreeing with non-crazy people. But here he couldn’t be more wrong.
Adam claims that there "simply is no controlled, experimental[ly] verifiable information" regarding life after death. By these standards, there is no controlled, experimentally verifiable information regarding whether the Moon is made of green cheese. Sure, we can take spectra of light reflecting from the Moon, and even send astronauts up there and bring samples back for analysis. But that’s only scratching the surface, as it were. What if the Moon is almost all green cheese, but is covered with a layer of dust a few meters thick? Can you really say that you know this isn’t true? Until you have actually examined every single cubic centimeter of the Moon’s interior, you don’t really have experimentally verifiable information, do you? So maybe agnosticism on the green-cheese issue is warranted. (Come up with all the information we actually do have about the Moon; I promise you I can fit it into the green-cheese hypothesis.)
Obviously this is completely crazy. Our conviction that green cheese makes up a negligible fraction of the Moon’s interior comes not from direct observation, but from the gross incompatibility of that idea with other things we think we know. Given what we do understand about rocks and planets and dairy products and the Solar System, it’s absurd to imagine that the Moon is made of green cheese. We know better.
We also know better for life after death, although people are much more reluctant to admit it. Admittedly, "direct" evidence one way or the other is hard to come by — all we have are a few legends and sketchy claims from unreliable witnesses with near-death experiences, plus a bucketload of wishful thinking. But surely it’s okay to take account of indirect evidence — namely, compatibility of the idea that some form of our individual soul survives death with other things we know about how the world works.
Claims that some form of consciousness persists after our bodies die and decay into their cons uent atoms face one huge, insuperable obstacle: the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood, and there’s no way within those laws to allow for the information stored in our brains to persist after we die. If you claim that some form of soul persists beyond death, what particles is that soul made of? What forces are holding it together? How does it interact with ordinary matter?
Everything we know about quantum field theory (QFT) says that there aren’t any sensible answers to these questions. Of course, everything we know about quantum field theory could be wrong. Also, the Moon could be made of green cheese.
Among advocates for life after death, nobody even tries to sit down and do the hard work of explaining how the basic physics of atoms and electrons would have to be altered in order for this to be true. If we tried, the fundamental absurdity of the task would quickly become evident.
Even if you don’t believe that human beings are "simply" collections of atoms evolving and interacting according to rules laid down in the Standard Model of particle physics, most people would grudgingly admit that atoms are part of who we are. If it’s really nothing but atoms and the known forces, there is clearly no way for the soul to survive death. Believing in life after death, to put it mildly, requires physics beyond the Standard Model. Most importantly, we need some way for that "new physics" to interact with the atoms that we do have.
Very roughly speaking, when most people think about an immaterial soul that persists after death, they have in mind some sort of blob of spirit energy that takes up residence near our brain, and drives around our body like a soccer mom driving an SUV. The questions are these: what form does that spirit energy take, and how does it interact with our ordinary atoms? Not only is new physics required, but dramatically new physics. Within QFT, there can’t be a new collection of "spirit particles" and "spirit forces" that interact with our regular atoms, because we would have detected them in existing experiments. Ockham’s razor is not on your side here, since you have to posit a completely new realm of reality obeying very different rules than the ones we know.
But let’s say you do that. How is the spirit energy supposed to interact with us? Here is the equation that tells us how electrons behave in the everyday world:
Don’t worry about the details; it’s the fact that the equation exists that matters, not its particular form. It’s the Dirac equation — the two terms on the left are roughly the velocity of the electron and its inertia — coupled to electromagnetism and gravity, the two terms on the right.
As far as every experiment ever done is concerned, this equation is the correct description of how electrons behave at everyday energies. It’s not a complete description; we haven’t included the weak nuclear force, or couplings to hypothetical particles like the Higgs boson. But that’s okay, since those are only important at high energies and/or short distances, very far from the regime of relevance to the human brain.
If you believe in an immaterial soul that interacts with our bodies, you need to believe that this equation is not right, even at everyday energies. There needs to be a new term (at minimum) on the right, representing how the soul interacts with electrons. (If that term doesn’t exist, electrons will just go on their way as if there weren’t any soul at all, and then what’s the point?) So any respectable scientist who took this idea seriously would be asking — what form does that interaction take? Is it local in spacetime? Does the soul respect gauge invariance and Lorentz invariance? Does the soul have a Hamiltonian? Do the interactions preserve unitarity and conservation of information?
Nobody ever asks these questions out loud, possibly because of how silly they sound. Once you start asking them, the choice you are faced with becomes clear: either overthrow everything we think we have learned about modern physics, or distrust the stew of religious accounts/unreliable testimony/wishful thinking that makes people believe in the possibility of life after death. It’s not a difficult decision, as scientific theory-choice goes.
We don’t choose theories in a vacuum. We are allowed — indeed, required — to ask how claims about how the world works fit in with other things we know about how the world works. I’ve been talking here like a particle physicist, but there’s an analogous line of reasoning that would come from evolutionary biology. Presumably amino acids and proteins don’t have souls that persist after death. What about viruses or bacteria? Where upon the chain of evolution from our monocellular ancestors to today did organisms stop being described purely as atoms interacting through gravity and electromagnetism, and develop an immaterial immortal soul?
There’s no reason to be agnostic about ideas that are dramatically incompatible with everything we know about modern science. Once we get over any reluctance to face reality on this issue, we can get down to the much more interesting questions of how human beings and consciousness really work.
Sean Carroll is a physicist and author. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1993, and is now on the faculty at the California Ins ute of Technology, where his research focuses on fundamental physics and cosmology. Carroll is the author of From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, and Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity. He has written for Discover, Scientific American, New Scientist, and other publications. His blog Cosmic Variance is hosted by Discover magazine, and he has been featured on television shows such as The Colbert Report, National Geographic’s Known Universe, and Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman. His Twitter handle is @seanmcarroll
http://miraclesofthequran.com/scientific_index.html
Explain to me how the quran 1500 years ago had referenced your science that man just discovered. i dont have any more time to waste on losers.you will die and you will know.i dont care if u believe or not and neither does god.ur only harming urself brotha
with that being said i dont like getting into these discussions because most atheists are blind and dont wanna listen.i said i will become an atheist if u can prove to me that god doesnt exist but u cant.
im here to discuss basketball and not religion because i'm happy with my faith.i have more imp things to do then respond to ignorant people.
Like I said, there's no such thing as a soul. There's a brain. Your body can function with minimal brain function. Read up on the brain stem.
I think you need to take an educational course on the word 'evidence' and what it means. You keep using it incorrectly.
edit: Also stop using a 1500 year old book written by men of the old ages as a backdrop. what is 1500 years compared to the timeline of the universe? Look it up.
Jars hasn't SAID anything... He just keeps googling and posting links in a futile effort to try to prove that atheists are so much more intelligent than everyone else.
As for you, it's pointless to engage in your circular arguments. Nothing I say will change your mind, nor you change my mind. We'll just have to agree to disagree, because I don't have time for your "loaded questions." I graduated college 10+ years ago, I don't do POP QUIZZES anymore... find another "unintelligent believer" to take the bait...
Last point is that Atheists are that way because they haven't been introduced to islam.say what you want about islam but islam is the only unchanged religion. The bible unfortunately has been changed too much and was written long after jesus so it has many flaws and things that don't make sense which drove people away. Islam answers those concerns just ask yussif estes former priest who converted.
What we have here is the ultimate cop-out.
Let's try and make this into a deductive argument.
P1) Your beliefs differ from mine.
C1) You are unable to believe anything.
C2) You do not understand my beliefs.
C3) You are unable to accept my beliefs.
This argument consists of one premise and three conclusions (each of which is a non sequitur fallacy).
It's also a rhetorically ineffective argument to the extent that it victimizes and condescends to the opposition.
Easy now, I never said Intellectuals lacked the capacity to believe. I consider myself educated and I'm a believer.
What's laughable to me is that there are people who feel they are smart enough to explain away God's existence through science, history and philosophy. These are the folks who are too smart for their own good.
Christopher Hitchens was one of the most notorious. He was a gifted writer and certainly stuck to his guns as far as his non-belief but he was a lightweight in the field of theology and science.
He tried his hand at debating the existence of God with a real expert and got abused. It's not so fun when you aren't the smartest guy in the room.
You actually follow a religion that's heavily based on the same backdrop as Judaism and Christianity. All your statements are heavily biased and I'm starting to think you're just trolling me.
You failed to appreciate the content of the link that he provided and responded with one that begs the question of your beliefs and is irrelevant to anyone outside of your belief system.
If you read the link that jARS mEsH sEt provided, you might find it very informative about the topic at hand.
I'm more of a Sagan fan. Science only disproves of a deity.
i dont troll.its true they are the same religion but judaism was modified by man so god sent christianity which again was modified so he sent islam which remains the same to this day.if you look at my link u'll see how the quran talks about science.if the quran was written by man how did man know about embryos, sperms, atmosphere, light 1500 years ago?look an i am very educated, i have a phd in microbiology.i'm not some idiot off the street.i do science everyday in the lab.the more science i do, the more i believe.science supports religion
I think Duncan believes in something. I've seen him point up before. Maybe it had nothing to do with it. I've heard him say that he's been "blessed" in a couple times interviews.
So the Quran tells of these scientific findings... where does the logic lie in crediting that to an invisible deity instead of man?
If you really have a phd in anything biology related, you should understand the Theory of Evolution.... do you?
i dont think you're getting the point.
the Quran 1500 years ago talked about scientific findings that have just been discovered within the past 100 years.If it was written by man how did that man know of all this science 1500 years ago?its clearly from god.
Theory of evolution is very controversial. thats why they dont teach it in graduate school. I support natural selection, i support evolution in the sense that a cell can evolve due to mutations overtime.nothing wrong with that but there is no way that we come from bacteria and primates.plus evolution says there were elements on the earth and with the help of lightening they formed a cell, where did lightening come from?where did these elements come from?evolution can never explain the origin of everything.
QUOTE=Proxy;5650508]So the Quran tells of these scientific findings... where does the logic lie in crediting that to an invisible deity instead of man?
If you really have a phd in anything biology related, you should understand the Theory of Evolution.... do you?[/QUOTE]
Lol @ this thread. My god.
My take is, you cannot prove with any facts or evidence anything the bible says to be true.
However....
There are no facts or evidence that it is not true, either.
Which is why I ultimately careless about anything to do with religion.
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