Posted on 04/26/2012 7:47:20 PM PDT by lbryce
Scientists have revealed one of the reasons why some folks are less religious than others: They think more analytically, rather than going with their gut. And thinking analytically can cause religious belief to wane — for skeptics and true believers alike.
The study, published in Friday's edition of the journal Science, indicates that belief may be a more malleable feature of the human psyche than those of strong faith may think.
The cognitive origins of belief — and disbelief — traditionally haven't been explored with academic rigor, said lead author Will Gervais, a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
But with time, asking questions, probing deeper into the inner workings of the world that surrounded him, Man began to learn, understand that the world around him was not rooted in supernatural power but that of principles of natural phenomena unraveled, as such the power, the belief in a supernatural deity, a God,diminished over time and continues to do so, by those who ask questions, seek out the truth, answer questions that religion, the belief in a God simply finds itself much too inadequate to resolve.
Dunno about that. I wandered through agnosticism and atheism and it was thinking that finally led me to God. Science offered no answers that weren’t based on a high degree of faith, along with contradictory and constantly changing theories.
I’m sure Isaac Newton and Johannes Kepler would disagree.
And thusly the advocates of scientism have gone on to this day.
However they have only managed to shrivel and depersonalize the world with their presuppositions.
Rigorous, logical thinking does not play favorites when given the premises of theism. It works equally well with them as it does with the premises of atheism. Logic can’t furnish any premises any more than science can prove there isn’t a God. All the pretense of science to where theology had once been has done, is to cheapen the realm of knowledge, and reduce the view of man to that of some kind of automaton.
St. Thomas Aquinas would be so pleased.
If this is true, then how come pretty much every atheist I’ve ever met was atheist of the “my kitty died when I was 5 years old, therefore God doesn’t exist” mold?
My husband accuses me of being over analytical. Now I can tell him that just can't be true because I'm Catholic!
Here’s one to think about: they killed Christ and he came back. Now, how much thinking can overcome fact?
Good. Would someone please tell the Eastern orthodox Church this. I’m in the process of joining and most days the studying has my brain on life support.
Looks like another phishing "study"
100% emotional reaction of a child under horrible circumstances, and nothing rational or thoughtful about it.
It's common. I pray for them.
/johnny
Ridiculous!
As a Marine (which requires thinking), and a member of MENSA (which means I think quite a bit), I have never wavered in my Faith in God.
If, as they think they have answered, which came first, The Chicken or the Egg, the Chicken didn’t just crawl out of the protoplasm...it was, as I was, created.
It's just that religious people do in fact discourage thinking, probing too deeply for fear of seeming intellectually inadequate. To scoff at questions of where the Universe came from, how does something emerge out of nothing, is easily applied to God. Where did God come from? How did God emerge out of nothingness?? Would love to hear some answers that don't border on the inane.
Perhaps because he was alive at the end of the Nazi occupation was because God does exist and was protecting him, giving him the will to survive, inspiring others to help him survive. Do you know if he has ever considered that?
And then there is the excellent book “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl
God’s invisible nature is made plain through what has been made, so “unbelievers” are without excuse. The fact is, for all their hauteur, they suppress the truth. The entire universe was made through Jesus, so every “discovery” points to Him. It is a refusal to honor Him, not an innocent mistake.
So violent gang members, drunk frat boys, and drug addicted prostitutes are examples of the enlighten state of having no religion?
G_d loves you, otherwise he wouldn't have created you.
Only if you don't know what you believe and why you believe it.
My husband, my kids, and I are VERY analytical thinking people and we ALL have strong faith.
Believing in God does not equate to kissing your brains goodbye.
Hootowl, you're right. Science depends way more on faith than most scientific types care to admit. The reason they don't acknowledge it is that for the most part, science is being used as an alternative to God for those who have issues over God that are NOT related to science or intellect. People turn to science for justification to reject Him.
First, students were randomly assigned to look at images of Auguste Rodin's sculpture "The Thinker," or of the ancient Greek statue of a discus thrower, "Discobolus." Those who viewed "The Thinker" were prompted to think more analytically and expressed less belief in God — they scored an average of 41.42 on a 100-point scale, compared with an average of 61.55 for the group that viewed the discus thrower, according to the study.
Clearly sports make you religious. Or something. Anyone who takes this sort of thing seriously instead of giving it the belly-laugh it deserves is only hurting himself.
I believe this is just rationalization.
There are plenty of great scientific, musical and historical minds and they all had no trouble in believing in God. In fact if anything what the created/discovered in their respective fields just strengthened their belief in a rational, orderly Creator God.
People today rationalize everything in order to do whatever they want. Rationalization is the 2nd greatest human drive.
I'll take the mystery of an uncreated God over the absurdity of an uncreated universe any day of the week.
Hmmm, yes of course you are correct. Matter and energy began from nothing...not to mention life. Wonder why evolution, or is it “mother nature” who is your god...made two sexes, pretty inefficient isn’t it?
Not only does man figure out that there is a higher power in every civilization, but God actually makes himself known to us very clearly, but we do have to open our eyes and contemplate (that is think...for you atheists) about things a bit. Did you know that the concept of fairness is inside all of us? Where does that come from? Hmmm, where does thought itself originate that gives us the ability to put a string of letters together to create words and then a string of those words together to create a coherent sentence???
Oh well, I am tired of “thinking” time to go pray for the lost souls whom do not believe in God...they truly are sad and pitiful folks.
actually the reverse is true. a more ridiculous assertion, completely ignorant of the history of science, could hardly be imagined.
the greatest scientists and thinkers ever born, people like boyle, faraday, newton, einstein, and i could go on and on described their work as attempts to discover the mind of God.
Because if you are destined to be an atheist God kills your kitty when you are about five and then you simply don't want to face the truth of who killed your kitty.
Or maybe not...
How did time, space, and matter emerge out of nothingness? Riddle me that mr science guy. Once you have an answer, so will I.
Well, that’s the thing about people. Two people can go through the same traumatic event, and one person winds up saying “there is no God” and the other winds up finding God.
There are people who did find God going through the holocaust. There are soldiers who liberated those camps who found God through those experiences. Same with 9-11.
The sense I get from this piece is reminiscent of the way they wanted to use Einstein’s theory of relativity for undermining moral absolutes.
I had to work through my questions myself. I believe that God guided me.
I don't have all the answers. I do know what I believe. And I do know what I've experienced in a near-death event.
Humans want answers to specific questions. I understand that. And some questions, humans just can't answer.
/johnny
What a bunch of horse hockey. Scientists are pretending to have all the answers provided by science, all the time.
To scoff at questions of where the Universe came from, how does something emerge out of nothing, is easily applied to God. Where did God come from? How did God emerge out of nothingness??
And if you get those answered, then what?
What would change in your life if you had answers to those questions?
Nobody is scoffing at the questions. What is being scoffed at though, is the hypocrisy of demanding answers for those posed about God and being willing to give science a pass for not being able to answer them when it comes to the universe and singularity.
Double standards generally tend to be scoffed at.
Science scoffs at angels and demons and replaces it with ET's.
Science scoffs at heaven and hell and offers up in their place, multiple dimensions and alternate universes.
All scientists do is remove God and believe the same thing they condemn when God is part of the equation.
To find out, his research team had college students perform three thinking tasks, each with an intuitive (incorrect) answer and an analytic (correct) answer.
For example, students were asked this question: "A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?" The intuitive answer — 10 cents — would be wrong. A little math on the fly reveals that the correct answer would be 5 cents.
Things of the spirit can not be understood in the flesh. The deeper my observations of the complexities of what we can see and measure become, the clearer the logic of God becomes to me.
“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding.” Proverbs 9:10
Sometimes a deity is the derivative of intellegence or imagination. Christianity OTH is an unsought for encounter with a a someone who is more and other than his own intellect.
I disagree. Science does not scoff at god. SOME scientists do, but science does not.
Polytheism does not in fact give us the idea of a Creator, but only of a myriad of contending forces, pushing mankind from pillar to post. The God of Abraham enters history as a compelling voice that guides a single man and his family for many years and leads them to Egypt and then out of it, revealing himself more powerful than all the gods of the great civilization of Egypt, including with the god-king of Egypt. Israel, the first born of the Lord is freed through the destruction of the First-born of Pharoah. Then he makes covenant with Israel as he has made covenant with Abraham. Like Plato, but by a very different process, Israel comes to believe, through a process of rejection of the many gods, to believe in one. Josephus was convinced that Plato was familiar with Moses.
Modernists like Jews and Christians, note how Judaism and Platonism came together, Jerusalem and Athens, faith and reason, came together in Judaism and Christianity. But while Christianity saw Platonism, or neo-Platonism as kindred in Spirit, yet the Christians were careful to avoid the Platonists tight embrace. For Christianity is rooted in concrete experience not the abstract. What it did provide was the kind of certainly that the world really means something, that it was an intelligent and knowable things, however confusing and unintlelligibe it might seem at times. It was on this foundation that modern science was built, avoiding the skepticism that kept the Greeks from pulling it altogether, even though they had all the elements of physics sand math they needed.
Ridiculous. One would think that JP II and Benedict XVI were/are stupid men who could not read or write. Or how about Thomas Aquinas or St. Augustine? Were they not thinkers either?
Do you guide them with your experience, or do you drive them off with scoffing?
/johnny
God does not exist within the parameters of time and space. We do, however. We cannot begin to understand the true nature of god no matter how hard we try.
And that, is really all there is. It is not possible to know. This is why the question is stupid.
Ridiculous, I am a thinker and GOD has saved me through Jesus Christ-even using logic at times, and extra Biblical Historical evidence to strengthen my faith in Him!~
-J.S.
I already preempted question like yours in post #14. So where did God come from? He’s existed for all eternity, no beginning, no end? Unlikely. God emerging from nothingness? God emerging from nothingness says a lot less about God, the Supreme Being (emerging from nothingness) than it does about the Universe, empty space(coming from nothingness).
Yep. Hebrews 1, Colossians 1, John 3:17-18.
I should have said scientists. They are the ones demanding the godless base of science these days.
Science cannot scoff at anything.
It’s merely a tool. A nice, efficient, data gathering tool at that, but still just a tool.
The analysis of the data falls squarely into the realm of philosophy, something most scientists are in deep denial about judging by the responses of many on these threads.
Yeah, I loved that one. Apparently you’re more likely to believe in God if you can’t count correct change. Who knew?
Most often it's intellectual suicide to say I don't know--nobody wants that for an answer and it can be a very dull and short discussion. In any case, if you're really interested, the most intellectually rigorous form of I-don't-know that I've come across is in Hans Urs von Balthasar. Try his Presence and Thought: An Essay on the Religious Philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa if you are intellectually fit.
Don’t forget Romans 1.
Because God cannot bring His full presence into this dimension without destroying it, and in place of His presence there are cosmic forces and immutable laws that point subtly to His existence. There is One beyond our existence, that willed this existence to be. That will is present in this plane, and here takes the appearance of these forces and laws. IMO.
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