The 50 Smartest “People of faith”?

August 17, 2014 • 7:44 am

The Best Schools website, which I think is fairly well known for telling people where to study in a given area, has produced a list and description of “The 50 smartest people of faith.” And it’s dire. I’m not sure whether they simply haven’t looked hard enough to find smart religious people (they choose folks who have gone public with their beliefs), or whether those people are simply rare.  We do know that the degree of unbelief rises with education, but education isn’t completely correlated with “intelligence” (which the writers don’t define), and, in the main, most people—even at the upper end of the IQ scale—are probably religious.

The article was written as an explicit refutation of atheism, as we heathens supposedly claim that we’re the only smart ones. The rational for the piece and criteria for selection are these:

A few years back, “New Atheist” authors Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett helped to publicize a movement to rechristen atheists as “Brights” (see our feature article on influential atheists here).

This was no doubt mainly because the word “atheist” still has a harsh and aggressive ring in the ears of most ordinary people.

But the corollary—that people of faith are “Dims”—was surely an added benefit, in the minds of the New Atheist publicity men.

Is it really true that most intelligent and well-informed people are atheists, while people of faith tend to be unschooled and credulous?

Far from it.

Unfortunately, in the rancorous debates in this country over the role of religion in our public life, all too often it is simply assumed—by both sides—that religious faith is in conflict with reason (and intelligence). The unspoken assumption is that religion relies exclusively on faith, while science alone is supported by reason.

This idea is utterly mistaken, but because it mostly goes unchallenged, it reinforces the stereotype that atheists are somehow smarter than believers.

One way to combat the erroneous assumption that faith conflicts with reason is by giving greater visibility to living, breathing believers who are also highly intelligent. That is what we are endeavoring to do with this list of “The 50 Smartest People of Faith.”

The qualifications for inclusion on our list are twofold:

(1) Intellectual brilliance, evidenced by a very high level of achievement, whether in the natural sciences, the social sciences, the humanities, literature, the fine arts, or public service; and

(2) Religious faith, evidenced either through explicit personal witness or through publicly professed respect for religion.

By “religious faith,” we mean religion in the monotheistic, or Abrahamic, tradition—which we happen to know best. We do not doubt that a similar list of brilliant and devout Hindus, Buddhists, Daoists, Confucianists, Shintoists, and others could easily be drawn up, and we hope it will be, by those qualified to do so.

Most of the individuals on our list have given explicit public witness to their religious faith. However, in a few cases we infer a faith that appears to be implicit in a person’s writings. Needless to say, we do not pretend to see into people’s hearts. Unbeknownst to us, some individuals may have private reservations. But all have declared their deeply held respect for religious faith through their works and/or their public pronouncements.

This list, then, includes living men and women who are both people of faith and people of exceptional intellectual brilliance and professional accomplishment. It is presented in alphabetical order.

You can look for yourself, but I want to say a few words before I highlight some of the choices. First of all, give me a few hours and I’d produce a list of the “50 smartest nonbelievers” that is far, far more impressive than this. After all, many of the people in the site’s list are theologians, for crying out loud! Among scientists alone I could beat their own list hands down.

Second, is someone who is religious really “smart”? My answer is “yes, of course: they can be intelligent and do really good things, but they do have a flaw in their intelligence: a tendency to believe in superstition and religion nonsense.” But many of us, even smart heathens, have some flaw, mental or otherwise. So most of the scientists, writers, and others in their list do strike me as smart. Nevertheless, I could produce a much more impressive list of smart atheists, and people would have recognized the names as opposed to the many obscure on on the Best Schools list.  Who, for example recognizes Ben Carson (more about him later), as opposed to atheists Stephen Hawking or J. D. Watson?

Moreover, their list of “smart” people includes quite a few theologians—at least ten of the fifty names, not to mention Pope Benedict! Given my biases, I have trouble seeing someone as “smart” who makes their living parsing and explaining the nonexistent.  Yes, these theologians would do well on IQ tests, and would strike you as intelligent if you talked to them without knowing that they did theology, but, really—Alvin Plantinga? Perhaps for such people “savvy” is a better word than “smart”.

At any rate, I’ve singled out a few of these smart believers, and give comments on them below. I’ve divided them into three classes: theologians, scientists and doctors, and “others” (lawyers, writers, etc.). I’ve only mentioned people I’ve heard of.

Scientists and doctors

1. Ben Carson.  A retired neurosurgeon known for pioneering forms of neurosurgery in children, Carson is controversial because he’s a creationist—and a diehard one.  I wouldn’t call him super intelligent in the conventional sense, but rather super competent as a doctor. I simply can’t laud the intelligence of someone who purports to be a scientist but is a vocal creationist.  By the way, the website gets one thing wrong: although the faculty of Emory protested Carson’s invitation as a speaker because of his creationism, they neither urged disinviting him, nor was he disinvited. (The site says he was uninvited and then reinvited. That’s not true.)

2. Simon Conway Morris. A paleontologist at Cambridge, Conway Morris is a smart guy who’s done pioneering work on the Burgess Shale fauna. An Anglican, Conway Morris science has, I think, been compromised by his repeated insistence (and several publications) that the evolution of humanlike beings was inevitable. As far as I can see, that view comes solely from his faith, for if God made humans in the image of Himself, the evolution of creatures capable of apprehending and worshipping God must have been inevitable. Conway Morris’s argument is based on evolutionary convergence (different lineages evolve similar features, meaning that evolution is sometimes constrained in particular directions), but humanlike intelligence is an evolutionary one-off (no other creatures have it, or religion), so his argument simply doesn’t work.

3. David Gelerntner, a computer scientist who is Jewish. I don’t know much about him but he’s respected and, sadly, was injured by one of the Unibomber’s explosives.

4. Martin Nowak, at Harvard, is a Catholic evolutionary biologist who pulled in a huge ($10 million) Templeton grant. He’s undoubtedly done good work in theoretical evolutionary biology, although I must say that I can’t pinpoint a solid contribution he’s made to understanding nature (and, asking several of my friends who are evolutionists, I find that they can’t, either). Nowak was largely responsible for the current and misguided criticisms of kin selection that have so muddled our field; I’ve posted about this many times.

That’s pretty much it for the scientists. Now I could produce a list of much more impressive living scientists who are atheists. Some I can’t name here since they wouldn’t want their unbelief publicized, but among those I could put on MY list of smart atheist scientists are Dick Lewontin (my advisor at Harvard), J. D. Watson (and Francis Crick when he was alive), E. O. Wilson, Steven Weinberg (and just about any physicist), Lisa Randall, Stephen Hawking, Sean Carroll (the physicist), Richard Dawkins, Harry Kroto (Nobel Laureate), Peter Atkins, Patrick Bateson, Jared Diamond, Lee Smolin, Martin Rees (a nonbeliever but friendly to faith), Paul Nurse (Nobel Laureate), David Deutsch, Steve Pinker, and Steve Jones.  Give me a few days and I could produce a longer list, but the one I just gave is about five times as long as the list given above.

Theologians

I wonder why they even put theologians on this list! Sure, they can be smart, but certainly there are equally smart people who actually accomplish something. Theologians spend their lives refining their understanding of a nonexistent being and explicating the work of other theologians who do the same thing. As Dan Barker told me, “Theology is a subject without an object.” If smart people don’t expand our understanding of the universe, or create something that moves us, as a great artist would, or help relieve human suffering, do they belong on this list?

The list does not, as far as I see, include religious scholars, who have much more claim to the potential title of being smart, for many of them don’t believe in the tenets of the religions that they study.

1. William Lane Craig. We all know Craig, who is a Baptist and a skillful debater.  Yes, he’s savvy, but can someone who accepts the Divine Command Theory of Morality, so that God’s Old-Testament genocides are perfectly okay, really be smart? Does someone who spends years explicating the cosmological argument—an argument that most philosophers and all physicists find uncompelling—really belong on this list?

2. David Bentley Hart.  An Orthodox Christian, Hart is a quintessential Sophisticated Theologian™, one who makes the argument that God is a Ground of Being, not an anthropomorphic spirit. He uses a lot of words to say things that, to me, are meaningless, but that give succor to perplexed smart believers. There is no substance to what he says, for there’s no way of checking its veracity. He sees that as an advantage.

3. Alistair McGrath. Educated in molecular biology at Oxford, McGrath now holds a professorship of theology and education at King’s College, London, and engages in apologetics, historical studies of Christianity, and criticism of New Atheism.

4. R. Albert Mohler. President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in the U.S., and a creationist, Mohler isn’t even as intellectually sophisticated as William Lane Craig, and I don’t know why he’s on this list. They must have been desperate.

5. Alvin C. Plantinga. Plantinga, a philosopher who is a member of the Christian Reformed Church, may have done some good work in philosophy once, but now spends his days engaged in verbose Christian apologetics. His latest hobby-horse is the claim that Christianity must be true because only the Christian God could have given is the means (a sensus divinitatis) to detect truth. Evolution, he claims, gives us no reliable way to form beliefs about what is true. He’s wrong. And he also has sympathies for intelligent design. He’s smart in the way that a good t.v. huckster is smart: he’s able to take advantage of people’s psychological weaknesses to sell his product.

6. John C. Polkinghorne. Once a physicist, now an Anglican priest and theologian, Polkinghorne works on showing that faith and science are in harmony. If you’ve read his stuff, you’ll find it unremarkable: the standard accommodationist pap.

7. Jonathan Sacks. Sacks was Chief Rabbi of the Commonwealth, and is still a rabbi as well as a visiting professor of theology in London. I don’t know much about him except, like all Sophisticated Rabbis, he’s very slippery in debate about saying what he actually believes.

8. Richard Swinburne is an emeritus professor of philosophy at Oxford, has a reputation as perhaps the greatest living philosopher of religion, and has written many works of apologetics as well as adducing philosophical evidence for God. He’s surely smart, but what can you say about a guy who misuses his gifts to prove the nonexistent?

9. Charles M. Taylor, a Catholic, is more a philosopher than a theologian, I think, though he’s spent much of his life attacking scientism and naturalism, and has nabbed the Templeton Prize (a mark of shame). I can’t speak about his other philosophical achievements, but I haven’t been impressed by his criticism of naturalism.

10. Peter van Inwagen is an Episcopalian philosopher of religion at the University of Notre Dame. Much of his work, which I’ve read (and it’s couched in tedious prose!) deals with the Problem of Evil, and how that comports with an omnipotent and loving god. I’ve discussed his theological arguments on this website (see here and here),  His arguments for why God finds it necessary to make animals feel pain, and why God is hidden, are unintentionally hilarious.  Clever, yes; intellectually sound, no.

11. Joseph A. Ratzinger. (Pope Benedict XV). WTF?

Others

1. Phillip E. Johnson, a Presbyterian, has no claim, to my mind, to being on this list. He is, as most of you know, the Father of Intelligent Design (his book Darwin on Trial was instrumental in the ID movement), and the force behind the notorious Wedge Document, a strategy for replacing naturalism as taught in science classes with Christianity and Jesus. Although he was a professor of law at Berkeley, I am aware of no contributions he’s made to jurisprudence. And really, does someone deserve kudos for spreading lies? Here’s how the website characterizes his contributions:

“A well-recognized legal scholar in the field of criminal law, Johnson is best known for his critique of Darwinian naturalism. Johnson’s book Darwin on Trial sparked what has come to be known as the Intelligent Design movement. His debates with prominent atheists who appeal to evolutionary theory to undermine religious faith (e.g., Stephen Jay Gould, Steven Weinberg, and Will Provine) are legendary. A figure of controversy, Johnson deserves much of the credit for the informed critique of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory that is rapidly growing among American intellectuals (even if many of the contemporary critics of Darwinism, such as Thomas Nagel, reject Johnson’s views on intelligent design).”

2. “Condolleezza” Rice. The site misspells her name, giving her two “l”s instead of one. An evangelical Protestant, Rice has a long record of accomplishment in government and politics, and was provost at Stanford. She’s surely smart, though I’d prefer that she’d used her intelligence in the service of enlightenment and liberalism rather than American conservatism and imperialism.

3. Marilynne Robinson, a Congregationalist, is a superb writer who has crafted at least two great novels (Housekeeping and Gilead, which won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction). I’ve read them both and enjoyed them immensely. But she went off the rails with her religiosity, going after Darwinism and “scientism.” Her book Absence of Mind, a critique of atheism and scientism, was, to my mind, simply a rant.

226 thoughts on “The 50 Smartest “People of faith”?”

  1. First person to come to my mind is Robert Aumann, who combines brilliance in formal rationality with loony religious and political views.

  2. Ratzinger’s theological accomplishments are certainly greater than Hart’s, hence the inclusion on the list.

      1. It’s more of a disciplinary accomplishment. If your only measuring stick is utility then you may be right (though even here one wonders if there hasn’t been some social impact).

      2. I think you are being far too kind to theologians.

        The pebbles are real, the gravel bed is real and at the end of the day the sum of human knowledge has increased.

        It is interesting that Darwin used a similar analogy:

        About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorise; and I well remember some one saying that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours. How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!

        — Charles Darwin

        Letter to Henry Fawcett (18 Sep 1861). In Charles Darwin, Francis Darwin, Albert Charles Seward, More Letters of Charles Darwin (1903), Vol. 1, 195.

        1. But the Bible is real, even if god is not. But if we take theology as the study of the bible than it’s a misnomer but still worthwhile.

        2. Having Nowak and Johnson on the same list is like having Galileo and Urban VIII on the same list, it makes no sense, there claims to intelligence are mutually exclusive.

          In addition Nowak’s work using evolution to understand latency in HIV infections would be interesting if someone tested it.

          3. See, that’s the thing…we’re living on a rather large pile of rocks, so there’s generally not much question about the presence of rocks….

            b&

  3. I find it fascinating that a neurosurgeon, who would have studied how the brain works, and would know that our brain gives us this “god” idea, would still hold on to his Christian faith.

    I am saddened about Condoleezza Rice as I’ve always respected her intelligence. It’s bad enough that she’s a Republican but add religion to it and Evangelical religion of all things!! Yikes!

    1. Actually, surgeons are somewhat like automobile mechanics. They really don’t have to know much about biology to perform their tasks, any more then auto mechanics have to know anything about the physics of internal combustion engines. Thus we have numbnuts like Carson and Michael Egnor who may be very competent at wielding a scalpel but who are ignorant of most of biology.

      Relative to physicist Lisa Randall, I was not aware that she was an atheist. Citation needed.

      1. Still, if I know about it, I’m sure they learned about it in more detail (how the brain works). So, clearly they blocked all that stuff out when they did so.

      2. The best surgeons combine a knowledge of physiology, an intimate knowledge of anatomy, and great understanding of the biological consequences of the procedures they perform. That some surgeons compartmentalize facets of their lives just like the rest of the population, is no surprise. It’s no different from the scientist who sees the evidence for evolution yet chooses to cling to religious belief. Few people have a totally consistent world view.

    2. Actually, Sam Harris in one of his talks noted that a fairly high percentage of medical doctors are religious, and he attributed to this to the stress created by frequent encounters with death and disease in that environment.

      1. Doctors are the group that are most afraid of death. I suspect because they see what it’s like to die over and over in many horrible ways.

        1. Doctors don’t fear death anymore than anyone else. We do have one huge advantage over most other groups – we know that death is not the worst thing that can happen to someone.

          1. I got that from survey data – though that may be old as it was back in the 90s when I learned about it.

          2. Yeah, I think doctors are far less likely than non-doctors to ask for “heroic measures” or to “do everything” when faced with a terminal illness. We know that some treatments appear to be truly a fate worse than death. In fact, I would expect doctors in general to be much less afraid of death than non-doctors after being exposed to so much of it during training.

      2. From experience, I think Harris is off the mark here. Many people enter the medical profession because of their religious belief, instead of coming to religion because of their clinical experiences.

    3. “I am saddened about Condoleezza Rice as I’ve always respected her intelligence. It’s bad enough that she’s a Republican but add religion to it and Evangelical religion of all things!! Yikes!”

      You didn’t think Dubya would have an atheist around, did you?

      1. Yeah, I guess not. But then again, if an atheist worked in a high profile federal US job, they probably wouldn’t admit to being atheist anyway. Not if they wanted to keep that job!

  5. Just to add: I wonder if the list of the “50 Smartest People of Faith” can ever match the QUALITY of the following world-prestigious American intellectuals who have admitted to be atheists or agnostics. Here are just some from the 19th and 20th centuries: Ralph Waldo Emerson (author and poet), Henry David Thoreau (philosopher), Andrew Carnegie (philanthropist), Mark Twain (author), Pearl S. Buck (author), Thomas Edison (inventor), Clarence Darrow (lawyer), Carl Van Doren (English professor and biographer of Benjamin Franklin), and Ernest Hemingway (novelist). And one does not have to dig deep to find them, their biographies just emerge in a simple search.

    2. Among 20th century American atheists there’s also Isaac Asimov, who as well as writing science fiction could well be considered a polymath.

      One of his comments: “Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived”.

      (He’s also currently a persona non grata on a certain atheist blog…)

          1. If I had to speculate — and this is pure speculation since the first and everything I’ve heard about it is on this page — he must have engaged in at least some of what in his day would have been called, “womanizing.” And that therefore means he’s an evil douchenozzle who contributed nothing worthy to society.

            …this, of course, by a crowd communicating by means of a satellite telecommunications system Asimov is rightly considered the grandfather of….

            But, again, that’s pure speculation. Not sure I care enough more about it to even bother with a Google search. They’ve really gone off the rails over there…the way they exploited Robin Williams’s death to make some incoherent point about how straight white men are rampaging in Missouri and everywhere else and why won’t the press give 99% of its airtime to that story and why are they wasting their time mourning some rich white dude who had it made and how dare people ignore them and…

            …and I’ve apparently already given the whole thing much more attention than it deserves. Now, where’d that cat go? I’m sure it must be time for a bellyrub.

            b&

          2. The point (which could easily have been expressed far, far better) was the media’s lack of time spent on the unconscionable murder of an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson by a police officer compared to its universal front-page mourning of Robin Williams, said “rich white male entertainer”.

            I think the critique of the media’s lopsidedness concerning a policeman shooting an unarmed child eight times was valid; I also think the use of RW’s suicide as a counterpoint was clumsily done and easily seen as opportunistic ranting. RW’s status as a “rich white male” was, imho, an utterly irrelevant distraction, far outsripped by the fact that he was one of the world’s most beloved comedians and occasional dramatic actors from the last 30 years, a man who struggled for decades with depression and addiction, had recently been diagnosed with Parksinon’s and took his own life in his home. Were it my blog/site I would’ve memorialised RW in one post and critiqued the media imbalance over the Ferguson killing in a second. Frankly I’m a ranting lefty social justice advocate myself but I don’t go looking for excuses to rail against white privilege and patriarchy between the lines of every front page; they’re legion and obvious.

            I would’ve said all of the above in the comments there, but frankly I know how I would’ve been received. Many regulars take any criticism of the host personally and allow no room at all for reasonable disagreement – it’s not the totalitarian hellscape many depict it to be and I’m in agreement with much that’s expressed at the blog in question and at the network, but I know when not to bother disagreeing and occasionally I’m embarrassed to even visit. “Strident” might be a hoary chestnut in our circles but there are one or two regulars over there who earn that adjective in spades.

            TL;DR: yes and no and yes.

          3. The stories that are not told enough are the ones about Israel/Gaza, eastern Ukraine, Syria/Iraq and west Africa/Ebola. Each of those stories involve thousands or hundreds of thousands of people directly and even more indirectly, not stories about one white man or one black man.

          4. Ben is correct. Asimov (who is no longer here to defend himself) was accused by the ftb crowd of being a sexual harasser. Essentially he was (allegedly)a “bottom-pincher”.

            I don’t know if that’s true, and if so then it’s certainly not something I would approve of.

            But such a revelation should not (in my opinion) suddenly make his many thoughtful essays suddenly worthless.

          5. Times have (thankfully) changed. (At least in some circles.) No one considered this sexual harassment back in the day, nor really even had a term for the concept. “Boys would be boys,” “ladies” (or “broads”)lived with it.

            Have taken after Heinlein, too? His female characters are masturbatory fantasies.

          9. Oh yes! Heinlein wrote terrible female characters. I found Larry Niven’s female characters to be the helpless scream-y types, but I didn’t read a lot of his stuff after I read those terrible female characters so maybe he redeemed himself.

          10. And don’t limit it to SF writers.

            (Consider [male] politicians, novelists, yes, scientists…but not all in each category, of course. There was also the concept of “gentlemen.” And some people have always been just human to each other, in the best sense, differences be damned.)

          11. “For that matter, are there any SF authors from before the current generation who would avoid condemnation by the A+ crowd?”

            The above responding to this reply from Ben, on course; not Ant’s.

            (Now watch there be another “above” before I post this.)

          13. Re SF–Aldrin & Barnes’ Encounter with Tiber is a refreshing contrast; one of the main characters is a smart, capable woman. Of course, it came out in the 90’s sometime, IIRC.

    3. Since you mention Edison, what about his rival (and victim), the ‘mad’, but absolutely brilliant -far more brilliant than Edison- Nikola Tesla?

  6. Christoph Schönborn is also on the list.
    I don’t think his contribution to the evolution-creation debate was particularly smart.

    Quote (New York Tiems, 2005): “Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense – an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection – is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.”

  7. Hey, let’s take them at their word and assume that these really are the 50 smartest people of faith.

    Far be for atheists to say that the religious are a few bricks shy of a load, not playing with a full deck, lights are on but no one is home and so on, now we are getting it from the horse’s mouth (or perhaps the posterior orifice).

    This is the best they have to offer and that’s great news as far as I’m concerned.

        1. I assume the other (biologist) Sean Carroll is also an atheist? Love his books and have heard him talk a couple of times. Very engaging.

          1. I’m inferring so …

            “If a designer was designing us, either they’re a terrible designer or they’ve got a great sense of humor, because we’re carrying around all sorts of genes that don’t work.”

            —Sean Carroll, Freethought Radio, May 24, 2008

            … quoted on the FFRF website.

            /@

  9. They should have added dead people that would presumably have been atheist if they lived today. The outcome of such a list is that this is how people were raised. It has nothing to do with faith. It might as well be a list of people who have boarded a plane at some point in their lives as opposed to those who have not boarded a plane.

    1. Actually, I find it quite commendable that they avoided picking deceased scientists for the task. That avoids the obvious criticism that past societies were overwhelmingly skewed towards, say, Christianity, and so brilliant scientists would be among their number through sheer numbers. Whether they intended it this way or not, the compilers of this 50-people list make a stronger claim that religion is still relevant.

      Doesn’t excuse other flaws in compiling the list, but at least they didn’t take one particularly easy and tempting way out.

    3. I don’t feel there’s any good way to judge those odds, though. I can certainly see Newton remaining religious, for example, whereas I think most of the ancient Greek philosophers would have ditched gods as soon as intellectually possible, but there’s certainly no proof, and it ignores the fact that people aren’t innately anything.

      Newton raised today might never achieve anything of note. If Genghis Khan were reborn right now in Mongolia, would he ever be able to accomplish anything 1% as memorable as he did in our history? You can say that certain personalities might have been atheist today, but they also might never have developed into the people we know and admire.

  10. How many different religions are represented by this list? If rationality ruled their field, why are so many intellectual differences still unresolved after thousands of years?

    The answer is: they don’t have a reliable method. That is why science wins.

    1. Perzackly.

      Science has a method for distinguishing between what is false and what is true—evidence. Religion does not, which accounts for its inglorious history of crusades, jihads, pogroms, authoritarianism, and enforced ignorance.

      1. I think this is why I always felt uncomfortable in Christian churches, even as a kid. I don’t do well at all with authoritarianism. I felt completely fine at Jewish Reform temples – minimal if any authoritarianism.

  11. Yes, there is a correlation between intelligence and education, on the one hand, and belief on the other. So a list like this just highlights the fact that smarts alone is not the only factor. This, to me, is puzzling. You can point to early indoctrination, poor training in critical thinking, strong group pressure, abject fear of death, belief in belief, etc. to explain religiosity. But, I just can’t help wondering about the effect of what we call personality – the almost compulsive need in some people to think rationally, as against a similar compulsion in others to go with the flow…to ignore the voice inside that calls bullshit!

    1. I would really like to know if the brains differ between the religious & non-religious brought up in similar environments and raised in similar ways. There must be something physiological that differentiates us.

      1. I don’t agree. I think atheism is just easier to support in modern society, and that most of the cultural factors against it have weakened over the last few centuries. There might be influences and personality traits that nudge one this way or that, but I think cultural experience is the bigger factor because the positions on religion change in society much faster than genetic evolution could account for, including the decrease in religious attendance across Europe and North America.

        Also, I think it’s ill-advised to join atheism too hastily to character traits. That risks taking it out of the realm of rational enquiry and into Sastra’s Diversity Smorgasbord, which is the last thing we should be doing when you consider how badly the religious apologists and accommodationists confuse that distinction.

        1. Character traits are just things that occur because of your brain. If it is “dangerous” I don’t worry because it’s true (if it is) nevertheless.

          I’m reading the book Stroke of Genius right now about a neuroscientist who has a stroke. Before she gets to the stroke part, she talks about the brain & where functions sit & what the neurons in those areas do. She talks about how the right side of the brain (if you’re left dominant) is focused on the present moment and:

          ….perceives each of us as equal members of the human family. It identifies our similarities and recognizes our relationship with this marvellous planet, which sustains our life. It perceives the big picture, how everything is related and how we all join together to make up the whole.

          So perhaps there is more activity for those who are religious there. Keep in mind, the control would have to be that people were raised in similar ways as I said before. I was raised as an atheist. I may or may not have become one if I were raised as a theist – perhaps I would become a particular sort of theist instead of an atheist. I would be interested in the brains of people who became atheist but were raised as theists as compared with family members who remain theists. Those then could be compared with the control (the atheists and theists) to see if there was anything different.

          1. I have heard of that book. Fascinating.
            I was raised as a “none”, I guess, and found my school chums highly provocative in their religiosity. In high school the dissonance became overwhelming so I began reading Bertrand Russell and other pagans. I think I’m on a lifelong mission to make the term “atheism” uninteresting by way of normality.

          2. That’s fair enough. I’m not saying personality cannot or does not shape the views one tends towards. If it turned out that atheists tended to be the sort of people who preferred brutal honesty over gentle tact, or who were less concerned about discipline, or who were less inclined to religious or worshipful expression, I would concede the data.

            I’m just not yet convinced it’s a major factor with a strong correlation, at least at the moment, when compared with cultural factors like being brought up in a society which encourages free expression, for instance.

  12. I think William Lane Craig is a very smart guy, and the reason he accepts the Divine Command Theory of Morality while so many of his fellow religionists find it abhorrent, is that like any chess Grandmaster he’s followed all the possible arguments (moves) and knows that if you don’t accept it, its inevitable that many of the arguments for God’s existence crumble.

    1. Just because WLC accepts the Divine Command Theory of Morality and unapologetically makes morally abhorent arguments doesn’t mean WLC is stupid. It just makes him a monster.

    2. Sorry, but Craig is an idiot. He still hews to Aristotelian metaphysics, fer chrissakes!

      Aristotelian metaphysics is even more thoroughly debunked than astrology and the flat Earth and alchemy. Would you consider intelligent a modern person who believed in any of those, regardless of that person’s vocabulary or puzzle-solving abilities?

      No?

      Then I stand by that first sentence: Craig is a complete and total blithering idiot.

      Cheers,

      b&

      1. I’m with Ben Goren on Craig.

        Also, every time I hear Ben Carson speak, I have to force myself to remember his academic qualifications. His logic and reasoning skills seem to me to be particularly poor. (And I hear him a lot because I make a point of watching at least two hours of Fox News most days to get to know the views of the significant portion of society that considers them The Authority.)

        Jerry: para 2 rational/rationale.

  13. I’m always left wondering if people really believe or if there’s something else. If their desire to belong or be part of a community or politics (or just money) leads them to embrace religion and just go along with it.
    If Catholic Popes genuinely believed, would Catholic history be what it is? If Benedict believed in hell, would he have acted to hide the child abuse scandal while he presided over the Cong. for the Doctrine of the Faith?
    The more I look at it, the more I have the impression many believers don’t genuinely believe.
    Take mourning. If the deal is that death is great, why all the grief? Shouldn’t they be celebrating?

      1. That misses the point. I mean religious cultures seem contradictory. Catholics and Shias have a very particular relationship with death. The ritualizations surrounding it seem to me to imply the deep acknowledgement that there’s nothing after death.

        1. “Take mourning. If the deal is that death is great, why all the grief? Shouldn’t they be celebrating?”

          No I would say I pretty much addressed this point. You asked why all the grief.. I think it’s pretty simple.

          1. Fascinating So is your theory that humans are so extraordinarily selfish/egocentric that they can believe death is a positive but just can’t get over the fact they’re being personally deprived?

          2. Not at all. I’m suggesting that maybe the reason religious people grieve is because they simply miss their loved ones, just as one might weep when a loved one goes on a long trip, or when we know we may not see them for a long time. If you think this is selfishness or egocentrism I’m sorry you’re a Philistine.

          3. So missing their loved one overrides the alleged circumstance that the best possible thing happened to them by dying and going to “paradise”?
            I put to you that if people genuinely believed heaven existed and their loved ones are headed in that direction and one day they’ll ‘meet again’, attitudes regarding death would be very different.
            Lamenting instead of celebrating is, under those terms, unquestionably selfish. Or, as I propose, subconsciously there’s the acceptance that that death is the end.

          4. Let me put it another way. Your child gets married and is about to go off and begin a new life with their beloved. You know your child is happy and excited about starting this new life, yet when you say goodbye you cry (and here it’s not necessarily even tears of joy). Why? Is it because you’re selfish or egocentric? I’ve already suggested that if this is the limit of your analysis you’re missing something human inside yourself.

          5. Still missing the point. We’re not talking about a ‘sad moment’, but what could only be described as a very deep recognition of ending. Catholics, for example, when someone dies, have 7 day mass, 30 day mass, 6 month mass and then an yearly mass on the same day of the death for the rest of time. That’s a whole lot of praying and mourning for someone who’s allegedly had the best possible thing happen to them.

          6. How ironic you think I’ve missed the point..

            I’m not sure there’s any use continuing this discussion. You’ve obviously made up your mind about this, though one would think it would be important to accurately represent your opponent’s perspective. I see it’s not a very high priority for you, or for many people here for that matter. Perhaps you’ll eventually get tired of wrestling with your own misrepresentations.. probably not.

            You obviously have no idea what you’re talking about when it comes to the Catholic mass for the dead. If you did you wouldn’t have conflated personal grieving with Church ritual.

            Someday when your “religious” zeal has cooled, perhaps we could have a reasonable discussion.. until then, so long.

          7. @pink

            “Or, as I propose, subconsciously there’s the acceptance that that death is the end.”

            I think perhaps a fear, rather than pure acceptance. As much as people want to believe in fantasies there’s got to be some still voice telling them it could all be just a crock. The reason religiobots are so defensive is because they have to keep reassuring themselves that their illogical beliefs are true. But there’s always that spark of doubt…After all–no evidence.

          8. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone, somewhere was preaching a sermon that went something like, “when you hear that voice telling you that the talking snake and heaven and angels are all a crock, that’s just your left brain trying to reason with you. You got to shut that stuff down! Hold your breath for a long time, play some death metal really loud or just pray a lot. Anything to shut up that reason. Because left brained reason and brain chatter is the devil!”

          9. Believe I read something very similar here not too long ago–about the evils of reasoning IIRC. There’s also a church sign near me saying something about God’s word trumping all personal experience–I’ll have to get a shot of it.

            Whatever you do, don’t think!

    2. The real zealots, like the 9/11 gang and the snake handlers, seem to really believe and really celebrate death.
      The Popes? I seriously have my doubts. For most of church history, they seemed to be motivated by greed, lust, and political expediency. I think the pressure of secular morality looking over their shoulder has curbed the excesses in modern times.

    3. I think the error in your analysis is the assumption that people are rational. There are quite a few Americans who make good incomes (and hence are not in dire need of every penny they make) who don’t contribute to their 401k even to the extent that they get all the potential employer contributions. As if they will never get old and want to retire – even though most of them believe they will get old.

  14. I’m surprised Hillary Clinton (or Bill C for that matter) wasn’t included. I’ve heard she’s deeply religious – pretty much a fundamentalist- although she down-plays it in public.

    1. I’m surprised Jane Goodall didn’t make the list. She is religious and I’ve heard her imply she believed in big foot.

      Also what about Madeline Albright? I think she is religious and she sure is a smart one!

        1. Is it not? Millions believe despite lack of evidence other than garbled traditions regarding dubious revelations, and it’s one of Discovery Channel’s favourite subjects. QED

          1. Well, no. You could say the same about fairies, or homeopathy, or the 911 conspiracy, none of which have any supernatural component. They are woo but they are not religions.

  15. There are a few on that list that I can admire, like Donald Knuth, but there is also dreck (yiddish, see definition) on the list like Plantinga, Craig and Pope Ratz.

    I notice that there are many on the list who have excelled in their professional field but the only mention of religion is that ‘he is a…’

      1. Knuth is a believer?? I used his wonderful textbook for CS and he was part of my ex’s PhD orals.

        1. It’s ok. You thought of Ken Ham and were forced to beat your head against the keyboard. Totally understandable.

  17. I think a person can be very intelligent and a theologian, just as one can be very intelligent and work on ‘human rights’ and other imaginary things.

    1. Do you mean “human rights” as an abstraction? You might need to expand on that one.

      1. Sorry, yes. Of course ‘human rights’ are a good thing as shorthand for ‘how we should behave so that life isn’t utterly wretched’, but some people treat them as things that objectively exist. Most moral philosophy ends up assuming a lot because it doesn’t observe that distinction.
        A bit like the way most American discussions of free speech or gun control seem to treat the Constitution as Holy Writ.

        1. I think this confuses objective grounding with fanatical devotion. It’s true that “rights” are simply constructs that would disappear if nobody believed them, so it’s wise not to take them too seriously (such as your example of treating the Constitution as infallible Holy Writ). On the other hand, the point behind having rights is that whatever system we implement in society has to answer to facts about all-too-real human welfare, whereas theology doesn’t even have a real-world referent going for it.

        2. I figured that’s what you were going for. 🙂 I wanted to make sure you weren’t left forever in google search as someone who was against human rights. 🙂

          1. That wouldn’t be so bad: if Google Search thought I was against human rights, I’d probably get a lucrative job offer from the NSA. ☺

  18. “Richard Swinburne”

    Hearing this supposedly Sophisticated Christian Philosopher of Religion defend the Holocaust as necessary in order for others to do good removed any doubt that the man is seriously deluded – an example of how religion can utterly warp the judgement of intelligent people.

    Take a listen to him on the UK’s Premier Christian Radio show Unbelievable, vs. Bart Ehrman.

    youtube.com/watch?v=hrrcb1WcfzM

    (The Unbelievable podcast is worth subscribing to for more debates and discussions between Christians and non-Christians – it heavily favors Christianity, of course, but host Justin Brierley does a reasonable job of being fair.)

  19. This list is also skewed towards people of traditional Christian faith.
    I’m a deconverted ex-Christian, but I was a very liberal Christian, and the bias of this list is obvious.

    Of Bible scholars, On the list is conservative New Testament scholar N.T. Wright (the irony of the initials!), but numerous !*excellent Jewish New Testament scholars*! are not present (Amy Jill-Levine, Paula Fredriksen, Geza Vermes). People of Jewish “faith” who study Jesus don’t count???!!! Needless to say, modernist Christian New Testament specialists like E.P. Sanders and Robert Brown are absent. (although Brown is Catholic, his analysis of the birth narratives of Jesus are pretty anathema to traditional Christians)

    There appears to be only one Darwinian evolutionist on this list (Simon Conway Morris) and at least two creationists (Phillip Johnson and Ben Carson). So they chose not to included Ken Miller, Francis Collins, or Robert Pennock!? (all theistic evolutionists).

    Conservative religious philosophers like Hart, Craig, and Plantinga are there. Modernist ones like Gary Dorrien (author of “The Word as True Myth” and one of the best historians of theology around!) and Hans Kung are absent.

    And surely American historian Garry Wills deserves to be on this list. A Roman Catholic, his “Papal Sin” appears on many humanist recommended book lists(!!), and his superb analyses of the vicissitudes of the Catholic church have been gracing the New York Review of Books for decades.

    1. Do you mean Raymond Brown? He was a great Catholic bible scholar. If I recall correctly, he laid bare the historical train wreck of the infancy narratives, but still believed the truth of the virgin birth, saying he accepted it on the basis of church tradition. Strange. Sadly, he’s no longer with us.

      1. Yes, I meant Raymond. Thanks much. I confused him with Protestant theologian Robert McCafee Brown momentarily. I didn’t realize Raymond was deceased.

        1. I took a class from Robert McAffee Brown eons ago called Belief and Unbelief. I began clearly on the side of Unbelief and my unbeliefs did not change. Very good speaker, though.

    2. I too was surprised about these omissions. Especially Francis Collins and Ken Miller.

    3. Pennock is theistic? Do you have any references? (I’m not doubting you, I’d just like to read about his beliefs.)

    1. You’re referring to the independent, covert ops organization from the show Archer. Right?

  21. Fine blog those bestschoolers have. No date, no author, no comment section. And so totally unslanted.

    I suspect though the writer is their editor in chief:
    The general editor of TheBestSchools.org is James Barham, a Texas native, who received his B.A. in Classics from the University of Texas at Austin, his M.A. in the history of science from Harvard University, and his Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Notre Dame.

    3. Surprised me to see anything from thebestschools site mentioned here. It is uncommon descent’s go to site for citation of the inane things their editors find relevant (that is, when they aren’t citing themselves).

    4. I approve of this editor in chief’s education. If he’s a theist, I am disappointed that his schooling didn’t break him of that. I’m pretty sure all my Classics professors were atheists.

      1. But what I really want to know is what your Darwin Fundie Index is. I ended with 31 points, mostly because I wasn’t allowed to skip some of the more (mis)leading questions and gave him the benefit of doubt.

        1. I got 34. Some of the questions were extreme though and I didn’t know how to answer because neither were really opposites of one another – like the Darwin award question.

          This was my favourite one vs. Judge Jones’s ruling. What’s important here, is that Lysenko was (gasp!) not only a Russian (gasp!) but a Soviet (clutch pearls!). So without being able to teach intelligent design in the classroom, we are really forcing COMMUNISM, GODLESS COMMUNISM on CHILDREN!!!!

          By suppressing dissent and creating a state-imposed ideology in America, Judge Jones’s ruling parallels Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union.

          1. 34 also!
            Many of the questions are blatantly dishonest and can’t be answered with a straight face; for just a few of them, the non-‘fundamentalist’ answer actually makes sense.

          2. The Dawkins question was one of those – either Dawkins should get a Nobel prize or he’s irrelevant or something like that. Of course they include Dawkins questions because I guess liking his work makes you a fundamentalist. Funny how they think that has to do with Darwin or evolution.

          5. It requires that you answer all “questions,” and for far too many of them both options are bizarrely absurd. As such, it’s more than clear that the “test” isn’t an exercise in classifying respondents, but rather a purely propagandistic push poll and barely even pretends otherwise. It’s a “sophisticated” version of: “Do you think John Smith is the most totally awesomest candidate for student body president, or are you one of those dumb losers who uses the same toilet paper to blow his nose and wipe his ass?” Whoever wrote it is a shameless and superstitious and very childish idiot.

            b&

          9. Your genes compelled you to do that, now, didn’t they?!

            “Genes build themselves into cells and cells into the gene hive called man in order to develop their potentialities, not man’s. The idea of man’s being able to develop was purely an anthropomorphic concept.” —”Gene-Hive”, Brian Aldiss

            /@

          11. Stop wrangling. Such levity doesn’t suit. Darwinism is the true religion, and the killer for creationism, which is just a religious nostrum. We’re giving you too much leeway as it is. Diesel be my last words on the matter.

            /@

  22. Haven’t these people ever heard of the term “garbage in, garbage out”? I don’t care how complicated these believers do their calculations of the number of angels on the head of a pin, if it is not based on testable and observable phenomena, it is bunk. As my professor Fahrang Zabeeh at Roosevelt University once stated about metaphysical philosophers, “fancy thinking, very impressive, but no basis in reality”.

  23. How many of them are under 40?

    The long slow slog up from superstition may pick up speed in a generation or two.

  24. Obviously the article is slanted; it is attempting to insinuate that those defending anti-evolutionist/creationist/Intelligent Design claims have an equal right to our attention and argument as do evolutionary biologists and others who have accepted Darwin or materialistic cosmology. Because? Well, they’re smart, right? But an article titled “50 Smartest Creationists” would not have flown, probably not even among the website editors, so the author(s) needed to pad their list with anyone they could think of that has received public attention simply as a religionist.
    The article is further slanted by insisting the public debate concerns a conflict between religion and reason. It doesn’t. No one denies that if you assert a first premise of any kind, you can construct reasonable arguments of all kinds deriving deductive conclusions from the premise. That is certainly a use of reasoning.
    “The Unicorn is the most perfect being in the universe; the Unicorn is equine; zebras are equine; humans are not equine; therefore zebras are closer to perfection than are humans.”
    The conflict is not between religion and reason, it is between theistic faith and science. Believe in a god-like Unicorn all one wants, there is no evidence it exists.
    The debate really then unravels as a matter of probability and consequences. (E.g., “Given the science, how probable is it that a Unicorn exits?” – and – “Does believing in the Unicorn gives us a standard for moral judgment?” – etc.)
    Finally, note: “By “religious faith,” we mean religion in the monotheistic, or Abrahamic, tradition—which we happen to know best. We do not doubt that a similar list of brilliant and devout Hindus, Buddhists, Daoists, Confucianists, Shintoists, and others could easily be drawn up, and we hope it will be, by those qualified to do so.” This is a wholly unjustifiable criterion; if the author(s) intended a claim concerning “50 Smartest Devout Christians (and a Couple of Jews and Muslims),” that should have been the title of the article. Also in compiling their list of the excluded they elide their responsibility to elucidate the problem of the nature of faith in the non-theistic religions of Buddhism and Daoism.
    But Their biggest blunder is inclusion of Confucianism in this list, indicating the rank ignorance on the part of the author(s). While it is true that in pre-Modern China many Confucians practiced a kind of ancestor worship, this had to do with the fact that such a practice was generic to many Chinese of many philosophies. Confucianism itself was always a social philosophy, and had no theistic or supernatural elements to be found in it whatsoever.
    Confucianism was labelled a religion in the 18th/19th centuries by Western scholars who couldn’t believe that millions of people – especially in a culture they presumed to be ‘primitive’ – could possibly not believe in god. But in fact that is the case. Confucianism, and its dominance of Chinese intellectual discussion over long periods of Chinese history, are prima facie evidence that people just don’t need a god in order to confront the world in which they live or to construct a workable ethic for a relatively harmonious life in a complex society.
    The Best Schools website has completely shamed itself by publishing this incompetent attempt to surreptitiously inject creationism into the public debate concerning education. Creationists have pulpits in churches across the country; let them bray there, they have a legal right to it. But they have no place in deciding what our children should learn in secular public schools.

  25. Big omissions include Ken Miller and Francis Collins. Some of these people are OK though irritating like Simon Conway Morris.

    If I were a religious person I’m not sure I’d want to be associated with the likes of Ben Carson, Robert George, WLC, Albert Mohler, Phillip E Johnson, or Ratzinger, (Condi Rice maybe too in a different way), thoroughly repulsive people IMO for different sets of specific reasons. Not much above Pat Roberson or Jerry Falwell. The rest are mainly irritating sophisticated theologian types.

  26. 50 smartest Christians?

    It’s like building a list of the “50 Handsomest Clowns Evar.”

    I mean, you could, but how could anyone really tell as long as they insist on wearing that clown makeup everywhere they go?

        1. Would you please give me a break? I don’t approve comments (and you are moderated) every 5 minutes, as I have to stop what I’m doing and go to the dashboard. I’m just doing that now and will approve everything that isn’t written by loons.

          2. Hey, Vier, thanks for pointing out Spong and Tutu. I think Spong is very smart and thoughtful and probably an atheist, too. Yeah, I know his day job, but I have several of his books and I think philosophically he’s crossed that line.

            I would add the Daily Lama, as I call him. Just his book, Ethics for the New Millennium was brilliant enough and right on point.

            As for being a loon, I have a Certificate of Lunacy that comes in quite handy when someone asks if I’m crazy. I just pull out my card and they’re, like, “Oh, yeah, right. Carry on!”

  28. What bothers me about this list is that it’s purpose is, when you meagrely analyse it, to answer a weak starting point with an even weaker one. What bothers me about that is that it’s all for the sake of a PR stunt (“improve faith’s image as unintelligent by showing it’s not”) implied to be a rebuttal (“people of faith are intelligent, therefore atheism is at least partly wrong”). Unless you’re cynical, it fails on all counts.

    The weak starting point is the “assumption” they draw from the “Brights” business; this is that there’s a stereotypical pairing between education and lack of religious behaviour, such that scientists are far more atheistic than the non-specialist public. Yet, this “assumption” is actually a correlation borne from study, which is a whole different kettle of fish.

    That correlation is suggestive, true, but because it’s a statistical correlation, it says nothing conclusive about the actual relationship between the two positions. Thus, it can’t be treated as a reasonable foundation from which to justify the spread of a stereotype. Stereotypes are antithetical to statistical thinking and to trends because they lump things. Stereotypes saying “atheists are smarter than religious people” are all-or-nothing and would be broken by counterexamples; trends such as “atheists tend to be more educated” are much more flexible with regards to counterexamples. It shouldn’t be surprising in the latter case, if there were 50 brilliantly educated Christians, Muslims, Jews, etc. because the trend can accommodate them.

    However much it might flatter us atheists to hear that educational attainment rises as religious involvement diminishes, none of us would or should be surprised if we find Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists among the experts in scientific fields. This is hardly a key point in the ongoing arguments between atheists and religious people, in any case. There are better arguments in our arsenal than “atheists are smarter people”. That’s just a distraction from the issue of whether atheism itself is a sound position or not.

    As a result, a specially-picked sample of intelligent believers should bring no surprises. It’s like pointing out that global-warming or GW skeptics are experts in other fields, noting that proficiency in science correlates with lack of denial, and then finding and presenting a list of experts from various disciplines who are deniers and brilliant at what they do to “refute” that trend. It’s an argument from misleading authority, or at least very much like one. Their general credentials are not why we reject their arguments against global warming.

    However, what makes this list a weaker response is not just that it’s unnecessary and could only rebut an absolutist claim of stereotypes. It’s also the fact that the list they do draw up is transparently lax in its standards, given the number of theologians on it alone. To reuse my GW-denier analogy, that’s like adding people onto the list whose only contributions are spreading “Sophisticated” anti-GW misinformation and who have a PHD in that “field”. You’re assuming what you’re setting out to prove: that believers aren’t “unintelligent” because their education involves studying their own beliefs!

    Basically, the whole thing is a PR stunt meant to be interpreted as a way to refute atheism. Given that the PR stunt is both totally unnecessary and misguided, and that the implied argument for religion is fallacious, then it doesn’t even accomplish that much.

    “Is it really true that most intelligent and well-informed people are atheists, while people of faith tend to be unschooled and credulous?” This is a wrong and malformed question. The real question is: are atheism’s arguments stronger than the opposing position’s?

    1. Also, that “Brights” movement they report seems to me to be totally misrepresented. It wasn’t intended to convey intelligence, but to copy the adoption of the word “Gay” (meaning happy) for homosexuality, thus giving atheism a positive spin which “Atheist” itself kinda lacks.

      Also, I thought Dennett clarified it later by adding “Supers” for people who believe in the supernatural, as a way of being even-handed?

      1. Regardless of the intention, a fairly obvious inference from the term is that believers are “not bright”. A lot of people in the atheist community rejected the term as soon as it was mooted, for just that reason. If it wasn’t intentionally belittling, it was at the very least tone-deaf.

        1. Ah, OK then. Fair enough. I’d cringe to call myself a “Bright”.

          In my defense, though, intention is important. This part of the article is outright accusatory:

          “But the corollary—that people of faith are “Dims”—was surely an added benefit, in the minds of the New Atheist publicity men.”

          Surely an added benefit? In the minds of “publicity men”? Who is this cynical mind-reader? That interpretation of the Brights movement business doesn’t strike me as what they were going for.

          It was stupid, what they were going for, but I doubt it was malicious.

          1. Yes, that sentence was completely gratuitous and absolutely false. While I agree with noncarborundum, the folks behind the “Brights” are some of the most polite and gracious folks you can find on the internet and they would be horrified by that accusation.

            (If the term had come from the American Atheists, I might have believed the charge…)

      2. Yeah the bright term has pretty much died out – failure, even if the intentions were fine. Secular humanist, skeptic and atheist and a few other terms cover almost everything already. Atheism Plus of course was even a bigger failure.

        1. Well, those who still support the idea are going strong. Have a look at their website someday.

  29. I do not find that atheists say that the religious are dumb to the extant that it is a generalization of atheists. This is an old trope, I think.

    And while I am at it the so-called ‘brights’ movement had never caught on for the very reasons that the article uses to criticize the movement. It did imply that non-atheists were dim, and it never took hold for that reason.

    1. I’m on a mission to normalize the word, “atheist”. I think it’s a perfectly fine word that has a bad reputation so when people as me if I’m religious or what religion I am, I say I’m atheist. I don’t say I’m “non religious” or “not spiritual” or “not into religion”. I just say I’m an atheist. I find religious people are a bit taken aback at hearing the word, but they learn to accept it if they are friends.

        1. I was somewhat astonished to find most of the old scientists at the link mentioned by
          reasonshark,
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHv__O8wvZI

          were quite tentative about the term, atheist.

          My wife’s family is Catholic. They never ask what I am. I think they suspect.
          If asked, I would not mince words…I’m an atheist.

          1. My father (though accurately described by it) doesn’t use the term because people aren’t used to understanding it and get their hackles up for no reason …

      4. I agree with you, Diana, but there is the problem that it still is a god-based term, and does define us in relation to believers. (I do support normalizing it myself, though. And some of the reactions one gets are fun.)

        Not using the term “atheist” was also one of the impetuses behind the Brights movement. They define themselves as “people who hold a naturalistic worldview.”

        I agree with Ant that “humanist” is what I think is my corollary to some of what is implied by the word “religion,” but I don’t like to use it alone to answer the “what religion are you?” question, as that seems to imply that humanism is a kind of religion as well. Which means I always have to start with, “I’m not religious” before I get to the “I’m humanist” part.

        1. « I don’t like to use it alone to answer the “what religion are you?” question, as that seems to imply that humanism is a kind of religion as well. »

          Yeah, I’m uncomfortable about that. But, for example, on a hospital admission form, there’s not much room for discussion… And I tend to think of it in terms of narrow thinking by the form designer and interpret it more broadly as (what Icelanders call) “life stance” (although I guess they’d use an Icelandic term).

          /@

          1. I agree. In fact, the quandary is completely situational. The only constant seems to be that “religious” is the norm and we’re the “other.”

            It’d be great if “humanist” caught on well enough that no one was surprised when they heard it and everyone understood what is meant by the term.

          2. In the case of “what religion are you” I usually qualify it a bit – “Oh I am not religious, I’m an atheist”. This is probably the only time I say “not religious” to clarify that I don’t belong to a group that follows a religion.

      5. I find a self-deprecating apologetic, “Oh, I’m afraid I’m one of those evil atheists,” tends to do the trick. Makes clear that you’re not just somebody who hasn’t heard the Good News and is dying to know, and also comes right out and challenges the notion that Christianity (or whichever religion) has a monopoly on morality — and all in a way that hopefully defuses the situation.

        Fortunately, though, I haven’t often had to answer such questions. People don’t seem to feel as comfortable any more asking, “So, what church do you go to?”

        b&

      6. I just say ‘atheist’ if the topic comes up. I might soften it to ‘nonbeliever’ if I want to be totally non-controversial.

        By the way, I cringe at ‘bright’, I guess I’m just too cynical and sceptical to accept it. It seems a rather boastful term. But I certainly don’t make the added jump that it implies all believers are dim.

  30. For what it’s worth, The Best Schools has a distinct bias. Its publishing arm, Erasmus Press, prides itself on “[l]aying aside Enlightenment rationalism”, and one of its current offerings is edited by Dembski. Speaking of whom, I recall reading somewhere that there was an even more direct connection between thebestschools.org and one or more of the people behind the Discovery Institute and/or Evolution News and Views, but I don’t remember the details and a quick Google doesn’t turn it up.

      1. That may explain why Ken Miller and Francis Collins aren’t on the list. It may be that the editor is unaware that Simon Conway Morris also accepts evolutionary biology, albeit with a few reservations.

  31. All lists in some way are silly. Even many hall of fame’s in sports and other cultural activities amount to silly subjective lists too. Example – The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame recently inducted the band Kiss, thus reinforcing its silliness. Of course we all enjoy and engage in the silliness, myself included, it’s all too human, but it is silly nonetheless.

  34. Joseph Ratzinger before being head of the Inquisition and eventually Pope, was a prominent theologian in Germany. He was professor at the University of Tübingen.

  35. In a 2011 study of 133 atheists, non-believers and agnostics native to 35 states in the United States and affiliated with Atheists Alliance of America, we found that 27.7% had bachelors degree, 26.2% masters, 12.8% associate or technical degree, 11.3% PhD, 9.2% doctoral or equivalent, 7.1% high school, 5.7% professional degree. Pretty impressive educational background for relatively “average” Americans. I am not sure right now (I can’t find the specific files) how Atheists contrast, in terms of overall educational attainment, to the religious population, but it has been documented that atheists and agnostics are among the most educated citizens in the United States (Pew Research Reports). They rank highest not only in knowledge about science, American history, literature, politics and the role of religion in public life, but also in awareness about world religions.

    The point I am making is that the top 50 Smartest People of Faith or top 50 Smartest Atheists represent quite different populations with diverse backgrounds, but distinctive ideologies. The article in TBS aims at equating religious “smarts” with the non-religious “smarts,” and it is a silly approach, although one to be appreciated by believers looking for modern role-models.

    And here is why is silly: you can do the same for the 50 Smartest Dentists of Faith, the 50 Smartest Meteorologists of Faith, the 50 Smartest Actors/Actresses of Faith (although this list will be hard to compile on the “smart” side), the 50 Smartest Civil Rights Activists of Faith, the 50 Smartest LGBTs of Faith (although Gallup just reported last week that most LGBTs are non-religious). And this silly proposal just opens an endless possibility of multi-variable analyses in each category, as per field of expertise, country, generation, etc.

    One of the crucial points to test if such listing has value, however, would be to establish if conservatism or progressive views (I think we already know the answer) are driving the current major discoveries in science and technology, the awareness of global phenomena, like climate change (not to mention potential meteorite collisions with Earth), or the need to understand and accept the reality of evolution, not only for scientific but for practical and long-term survival reasons. What do the 50 Smartest People of Faith have to offer, that the top 50 Smartest Atheists cannot offer, to solve the scientific and technological challenges of the 21st century, world poverty, spread of infectious diseases, like AIDS (remember that free distribution of contraceptives is not supported by influential religious people), prevention or management of the sequels of climate change (which is human induced, by the way)? If identifying the top 50 Religious Brights helps us solve world challenges that Secular Brights cannot solve, then compiling such a list would be worth.

  36. I am not understanding why it even matters. I don’t consider myself super intelligent. It seems to me that it has more to do with intellectual integrity than intelligence. I don’t even know exactly what intelligence is or how one could measure it. In the end intelligence has no bearing on whether one’s assertions, worldview, ideas etc. are correct or incorrect. It seems like a pretty straight forward fallacy to argue that intelligence or lack of it have any bearing on the correctness or incorrectness of an argument or proposition.

  37. One underlying assumption of this sort of discussion is that the human mind is unitary, by which I mean that there is a single “self” in control, or which is at least aware of all facets of the mind. I think the better view is the mind as “committee” with the single “self” as a very useful illusion, acting as moderator and “press agent” to the outside world. For the most part, the committee operates out-of-sight, below the conscious mind.

    Humans are prone to mental compartmentalization. (It may be a result of our ability to separate thought, as in planning or designing, from action.) If we weren’t, we couldn’t simultaneously hold two contradictory thoughts, feelings, worldviews, etc. Cognitive dissonance occurs when we DO maintain such contradictions AND we become aware of the contradictions, which may they become uncomfortable and we attempt to resolve the discomfort.

    But there is the prior mental state, wherein we hold the contradiction, but are not aware of it, and it doesn’t bother us.

    It’s very easy to be both intelligent and a person of faith. Very close to 50% of the religiously faithful in the world are of above average intelligence. Just ask Garrison Keillor.

  38. William Lane Craig is actually more akin to a sophisticated used car salesman than anything else. When he has nothing left to say he reverts to sarcasm, as in when he said Sean Carroll’s views amounted to the belief that bicycles can come out of nowhere. He is also essentially dishonest since he admits in Reasonable Faith, that no one can have the truth unless the holy spirit lets him or her into the secret, so reason and arguments actually have nothing to do with apologetics anyway.

    Steve Shives has a great You Tube complete takedown of all of Craig’s arguments – look up “an atheist reads Reasonable Faith” on You Tube if you are interested.

    1. I’ll concede that Marilynne Robinson, when she sticks to fiction is a pretty darn good writer even if they are tales about religious obsessed people. When she gets away from fiction, sounds like Orson Scott Card, quite reactionary.

  39. Ben Carson is not just any kind of creationist, either – he’s a full-blown young earth creationist, one of those guys who dismisses whole fields of geological science and astronomical science because of his personal belief in a false religious dogma based on a religious myth in a religious book. So he is a perfect example of how even really smart people can have their intelligence sabotaged by the irrationality of religious beliefs they cherish. Irrational emotions can, and does, trump intelligence, all the time. We know how it can and does occur sometimes in our own lives. The sheer irrationality of religious belief and how it sabotages intelligent considerations and judgments is just one stark example of this.

  40. The title, “The 50 Smartest People of Faith” implies that ALL people of faith have been evaluated in terms of their intelligence, and the top 50 have been identified, which clearly isn’t so. Not even close.

  41. For me, attributes like kindness and compassion are the most important we can have.

    The conservative religious frequently seem to me to preach ignorance and hate. Until they can let go of their prejudices and express a bit more humanity, whether or not they’re intelligent is irrelevant.

    If they used their “God-given” intelligence to make the world a better place their list might have more credibility.

    Give me an anonymous doctor from Doctors Without Borders or one using all her waking hours in a lab trying to find a cure for Ebola over Ben Carson or any theologian any day.

    It’s the fact that the world is becoming more secular that is making it a better place. The light of Reason is exposing religion and showing it to be wanting.

    1. Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, but have not charity…
      Sometimes I wonder if these people have read their own holy books.

  42. Alas, reading that list of names was like walking through a pig sty. Name after name I recognized as lying sac du merde.

    Albert Mohler? Give me a break! Anybody who is a YEC is not a smart person. Idiot savant, perhaps, but only if they can count toothpicks really, really fast and know how many minutes to Jeopardy.

    Perhaps instead of smart they meant sneaky. That would explain Craig, Johnson, Carson and a whole bunch more. Sneaky-smart would also include Charles Krauthammer.

    I would have added Dr. No to the list if only because he had a secret lair. None of those guys on the list have a secret lair – that we know of!

    1. There’s nothing sneaky-smart about Charles Krauthammer, his ‘punditry’ is overtly idiotic. He just likes to sneer in a sneaky-smart way.
      The people on this list do have lairs, but they’re not so secret – their churches. There the innocent are sorely abused.
      Dr. No was not a theist; but he did have a great lair.

  43. As Sastra would say, it isn’t that there aren’t any smart theists, it’s that they are never theists for smart reasons. Intelligent people can believe irrational things. Ideas are not automatically rational merely because some intelligent people subscribe to them.

  44. Gelernter is a nasty piece of work; he doesn’t consider Reform Jews to be “real” Jews, that title only goes to the Orthodox.
    Plantinga’s sophisticated 21st century theology is just a twist on Rene Descartes’ 17th century baloney:’God must exist because only God could have planted the Idea of God in my head’.

    1. About Plantinga: Worse – see his entry in the Philosopher’s Lexicon. That said, I think he is remarkably intelligent, just totally deluded to the point of it affecting his premisses.

  45. It’s unclear if the author of the article even understands the most basic difference between reason and faith as essentially being the difference between perception and the imagination. Since they immediately go for the most superficial explanation possible and reduce the question to an IQ battle, maybe they do in fact appreciate the imaginary nature of theism but understandably choose not to embarrass their readers with such a blatant admission.

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