It's a legitimate question: Why do PhDs continue to believe in God? They are supposed to be scientists - driven by empirical evidence and logic. But still, religious beliefs are inherently the opposite. That's exactly you have to "believe" in them... because there is no evidence and are illogical. So why, why, why, why do PhDs continue to believe in God?
Why PhDs continue to believe in God?
(74 posts) (1 voice)-
Posted 11 months ago #
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The question of warranted belief is much more complex than you make it out to be.
Posted 11 months ago # -
Why do you believe there is no God? There is no evidence to suggest this.
Posted 11 months ago # -
All those interesting readings when you enter grad school, OP.
Posted 11 months ago # -
Well, OP, you're clearly not getting a Phd with the brand of logic on display here. All Phd's scientific? Bollocks!
Posted 11 months ago # -
Frankly, perhaps the most honest position is that of an agnostic, at least when it comes to the existence of God. It's a matter of unproven belief either way. But when it comes to organized religion, things change. That's why I'm an atheist.
Posted 11 months ago # -
And of course the premise of the topic is misleading: academics are much less religious than the public at large
Posted 11 months ago # -
"It's a matter of unproven belief either way." Yeah, I feel the same way about the omniscient omnipresent tea pot floating at the edge of the universe (just outside Hawkings imaginary boundary) riding a little green pony with the head of a cloud and two pine trees for legs. You can't prove it or disprove it so it must be an open question as to its existence. Being agnostic about such questions has to be considered the only really honest position.
Posted 11 months ago # -
It is perhaps slightly less likely that a man-made object riding a creature imagined by man is omniscient and omnipresent. Ridiculing a statement is not the best way to deal with an argument. But yeah, it is "possible" that this is what floats at the edge of the universe, although I would consider it a very long shot... just like any other version of God.
Posted 11 months ago # -
"The question of warranted belief is much more complex than you make it out to be."
Not that much more complex.
Smart people who believe that the universe is stranger than we think, and probably a lot stranger than we can think? Debatable, but entirely reasonable.
Smart people who hold an unabashedly and self-consciously speculative hope that some of that strangeness in the universe(s) might involve intelligence, rational ordering, benevolence? Again, debatable (much more so), but still reasonable.
But the god(s) of any particular organized religion? That makes no sense at all, and if someone claimed to understand the rudiments of science and philosophy, yet still affirmed that crazy sh*t? I'd assume they really didn't understand science and philosophy. Or that they were tenured faculty in a "studies" or worse, "social studies of science" program.
It's a reasonable question, then, why apparently smart people hold on to those kinds of ridiculous beliefs, especially after studying politics ("hmmm, I study hierarchical systems of privilege-preserving coercion all the time, and without fail they all try to make their claims of authority seem as if they're utterly natural and reasonable, when in fact they're usually nothing of the sort. But this hierarchical system of authority. the one that I inherited from Sunday School as a kid? That one must be legit!").
Posted 11 months ago # -
^ True. But does OP say that s/he is talking about a Christian God?
Posted 11 months ago # -
^ fair enough, although they do simply refer to "God" - capital G - and "religious beliefs" (not spiritual or metaphysical judgements or something like that), so my guess is their beef is with organized religion (Christian or otherwise), not the kind of wacky but internally coherent philosophical excesses of smart people freed from pesky things like evidence and rigor (ex: Spinoza, Einstein).
Posted 11 months ago # -
^^^^^ What is always interesting to me is that lots of folks brush off claims about unproven belief either way by making up fairly crazy examples of things that aern't proved wrong and allowing the craziness of their example to do all their work for them. An alternative, and I think more intellectually honest position, would be to acknowledge problems like this as fundamental limitations on our ability to make inferences about what is true in our world.
Posted 11 months ago # -
I feel genuinely sorry for those who take what we do as modern scholars so seriously that they are unable to humble themselves before the possibility of anyone or anything greater.
Posted 11 months ago # -
If a god of some sort does exist, then would it not follow that he/she/it would make himself known to mankind in some way? One way would be through organized religion and/or some book. Not saying any one religion is correct, but a belief in an overarching deity almost implies organized religion.
Posted 11 months ago # -
Why are people Cubs fans?
It's basically the same question, with basically the same answer.
Posted 11 months ago # -
^^ You obviously do not understand the simple tenet of just about any religion. God is fundamentally unknowable (i.e. mysterious). In other words, logic is simply inapplicable. That's where faith comes in, and that's why you either believe or you don't.
Having said that, why would a deity make itself known? And if it did, why would it choose to do so through books/religion as opposed to simple manifestation or, even better, by just implanting an unshakeable knowledge of its existence in every last human being? I would have to say that relying on the multiple editions/translations/changes of a "book" strikes me as a very inefficient (and silly) way of doing this. But then again, I am not a deity so perhaps it is using different criteria?
Posted 11 months ago # -
"They are supposed to be scientists..."
But they're not. lol
Posted 11 months ago # -
I do believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but I've come to realize that there are other faith traditions that I have to respect. After all, whose to say that if I hadn't been born into an F.S.M. household I wouldn't believe differently today?
Posted 11 months ago # -
I believe in God because the God variable always comes up statistically significant in every regression I run.
Posted 11 months ago # -
^^^^ I actually agree with the proposition that should a God exist, it would be unbound by the upper limits of human knowledge and thus, for all intents and purposes, "unknowable." But it's certainly not true that this is "the simple tenet of just about any religion." Catholic theologians/philosophers have spent centuries saying otherwise. It's only in the post-Kierkegaard era that you see a proliferation of your conceptualization of faith, at least in Christian thought.
Posted 11 months ago # -
"... it would be unbound by the upper limits of human knowledge and thus, for all intents and purposes, "unknowable."
I have no idea what this means (and neither do you), or what the "thus" is doing there.
Posted 11 months ago # -
I believe that somewhere, some time, there are a finite set of equations which can accurately guide individuals and societies in how they live their lives. Although the exact nature of these equations can be difficult to divine due to noise and insufficient data, I have faith that we will eventually get there and faith that what I think mankind has discovered about human behavior is not just about to be thrown out the window by a new method or idea. Each day, I sit before a box, and ask it questions about how man can deal with weighty issues. Although the answers are sometimes strange, I have a knack for twisting them to fit what I already believe to be true.
Posted 11 months ago # -
"... there are a finite set of equations which can accurately guide ..."
That's just silly. You should be a metaphysical graphical structuralist, a much more sensible position.
Posted 11 months ago # -
Most atheists I know "decided", rationally, not to believe in a God. All believers I know did not "decide", rationally, to believe in a God. Atheists justify their believes through rational elaborations; believers elaborate, rationally, on justifications about their irrational involvement with a God. The OP question is legit because PhDs are not a selective sample from the population at large-- they are much less religious than those who did not have the skills, resources, and the like to get a PhD. If PhDs have a closer involvement with what is "rationally available" in the world, it would be interesting to see even a single PhD who believes in God-- should the educational system do what it is expected to do. So, my answer to the OP question, is that this situation brings evidence that there is a failure in the educational system.
Posted 11 months ago # -
Using the words of a wise man: The impossibility of proving the non-existence of a God makes God unfalsifiable... and any person who knows just a tiny bit of science should therefore not believe in a God.
Posted 11 months ago # -
LOL so if i understand the arguments correctly, anybody who believes in God is either unscientific, dumb, or uneducated. The hubris of people on this board is incredible. I'm so glad that most of you are loser grad students who won't ever amount to much.
Posted 11 months ago # -
^ "believers elaborate, rationally, on justifications about their irrational involvement with a God" applies to you perfectly.
Posted 11 months ago # -
For a gang of folks that prides itself on an assumed intellect based on having a PhD (which most here will probably never get), there is a baffling ignorance of basic human psychology.
You folks should be similarly critical of voters...
Posted 11 months ago # -
I'm an atheist but I see no reason why people should not believe in god--at least in so far as they are willing to affirm any beliefs based on undetermined evidence.
The recent Kalam argument is by far the most potent version of the cosmological argument for the existence of God, for example. Obviously it does not prove God's existence, but it I can see why one might be rationally swayed to become a believer.
I am coming out of a philosophy department, so this may play a significant role in it, but every philosopher I know who believes in God has spent a great deal of time considering it and will know much more about the arguments for and against God's existence than anyone on this thread. Furthermore, they are all very intelligent, well educated, and scientifically minded.
Hans Halvorson is a good example(http://www.princeton.edu/~hhalvors/). He's a young guy and considered one of the best living philosophers of physics. (I don't know much about his work in math, but I hear good things.)
Posted 11 months ago #