In my opinion Professor Richard Lynn, for someone who evidently has a high IQ himself, has taken a rather shallow view of things, or if not at least the articles or his explanation does not go into much detail to explain why he believes what he does beyond that of just IQ level.
For one having a high IQ and being well educated do not always go hand in hand. I have known many people in my life who have had a high IQ but were drawn at some early or fairly early age to some line of employment that did not require higher education and because of it when compared to others with lower IQ’s who did go to college and possibly graduate school who received much more education the ones with the higher IQ’s do not seem to be as intelligent as those with the lower IQ’s and more education. Many of those with the lower IQ’s become part of the intellectual elite and the academia. Now when I say lower IQ’s I mean that in a comparative way and not as in lower meaning way lower and not at all gifted. They still have very respectable IQ’s but they are not as high as those I am referring to.
Well those that go on to higher education often times enter fields of studies that basically become their religion though they seldom see it that way. It replaces or overpowers what they may have been taught when they were young.
Something I found to be interesting was a TV show I saw some years back on if I remember right the Discovery channel was about NASA and one of the things mentioned was how after the Hubble telescope began getting the most amazing pictures of space ever seen that a number of NSAS scientists that had been atheists started to rethink things and a good number of them decided that there had to be a God or at least some form of intelligent design. What they were seeing for the first time in their lives was so amazing that they could no longer believe things just happened in a Big Bang random trial and error fashion.
I may be wrong but if you look at number of people with higher IQ’s who are professors or part of the intellectual elite in general and the number of scientists working for NASA that most likely you will not find a higher average IQ level among professors and the intellectual elite as you will find among those working for NASA.
Something else to be factored in is that in the past religion was not only taught to people when they were children but it was reinforced throughout their lives even in very small subtle ways that no longer happens and more people who start out as believers drift away from believing.
It may seem minor to some but when I think back to my younger years every store that you went into during the Christmas Season played Christmas music but it was things like Hark the Herald Angel Sings and not Santa Claus is Coming to Town. Store windows and signs said Merry Christmas and not Merry Xmas or Happy Holidays. Everywhere you looked there were religious reminders like Nativity Scenes in front of not only churches but also governmental buildings. Even other holidays had stronger religious overtones to them than they do now. Thanksgiving was not just a day to give thanks for all we have but to give thanks to God for all we have. I can remember even 4th of July speeches where it was said that with the help of God the colonists and Revolutionary Army were able to beat the British and shed the yoke of oppression of the old ways and give us religious freedom. When was the last time any of you heard a 4th of July speech like that? Memorial Day and Veterans Day speeches said with the help of God or the grace of God we, meaning the U.S., prevailed. You do not hear that said these days. TV shows showed families in church on Sundays or at least just coming home from/getting back from church on Sundays and talking about what the preacher said. You don’t see that on TV today.
There used to be a constant reinforcement of religion throughout people’s lives that no longer exists so more people are apt to drift from their religious beginnings just because of that alone. Maybe it is not a massive percentage but it is some percentage of people.
According to the Bible Adam and Eve were forbidden to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge. They did because they were allegedly duped by the Devil by being told it would give them God’s wisdom, they would become God-like in many ways that that was a temptation that was more than could be ignored. Today science has become the fruit of the tree of knowledge and many have taken bites from it and now believe themselves to be so wise that they believe they have the knowledge to say God does not and or never did exist and that man created God instead of discovered God through His Son’s teachings or previous to that by alleged infrequent interactions between God and certain humans like for example Job and Noah and Abraham and others.
Some of the stories of the Bible are extremely difficult to believe. The story of Noah’s Ark for one. To begin with if you research it the Ark was supposedly far larger than anything people ever saw in drawings in children’s religious books. The best estimates are that is was at least 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high and possibly larger because it was built to cubits and cubits was not a standardized measurement and some of what people called cubits were larger so the Ark could have been larger.
Well that tells people who pictured the Ark as some fairly tiny ship that could never have contained the animals it was claimed to have contained that there was far more space available and it would have held far more animals. But the question still is how did Noah travel so much of the world to find two of every species and then return then to the Ark? How did Noah have enough knowledge about animals to be able to look at every type of animal, many of which would not have been native to his region, and know one was a male and another a female? Was there some Angel on his shoulders pointing them out? What about the highly dangerous species of animals that would have killed and eaten Noah? Did some Angel on Noah’s shoulder tell the dangerous animals to chill and tell them that this guy was going to save their species from extinction so they should just come along for the ride and not kill Noah or any of his family or any of the other animals on the Ark? Now I have no idea if Black Mamabas existed in that time but they are a rather petulant snake so if they did how did Noah know which were males and which were females and how did he gather them up by tows without getting killed. Asps and Cobras date back to that era and neither of them are very person-friendly so how could Noah look at them and know a male from a female and then be able to say follow me or just walk over and pick them up and say you’re coming with me? How did he supply food and water for all the various species of animals? How did he and his family keep up with the tremendous amount of waste the animals would deposit in the areas of the Ark they inhabited? They would have been shoveling and scraping dung 24 hours a day trying to keep up on it. How did Noah know enough about ships to load the Ark in a way that would make it balanced and stable and not end up with all the elephants and rhinoceroses and water buffalos all on one side and things like snakes and ferrets and mice etc. all on the other side making it so unbalanced that the first big wave would have turned it into the Poseiden?
The sheer and total inability to believe those things could happen and that someone like Jonah could have survived in the belly of a whale makes educated people say it is all bunk, it is impossible. If the stories are all taken literally most if not all would have been virtual impossibilities unless the Hand of God intervened and some miracle was performed to make them possible and educated people do not believe in miracles these days. But some or many stories were meant to be metaphors or a combination of a metaphor and an analogy. They were turtle and the hare or ant and the grasshopper stories where the only truth was the meaning behind them but not the actual stories themselves. Some were like the three little pigs in a way saying you had to have a firm foundation and strongly constructed belief and that sticks and hay beliefs will not be strong enough to get you through hard times.
Now myself I ain’t no rocket scientist. I am smarter than the average bear, I have a 147 IQ and I did attend college but I did not go into the various sciences any more than I absolutely had to. The same goes with things like philosophy because I did nothing but butt heads with my philosophy professor all year and make him red faced and raise his blood pressure by arguing against what he was teaching and to pat myself on my back a little raising questions that he could not answer which very much upset him and a few times made the class laugh and he did not appreciate it, which was reflected in my grade, but to me what he was teaching was not philosophy in general but instead his personal philosophy and I was not about to blindly accept what he said when there were so many questions to be asked about how and why what he said was allegedly true.
But in my case I find both the Bible and evolution to be lacking in many ways when it comes to explaining things and I also find them very similar in one way. Both have gaps and holes and in religions case the answer to the gaps and holes is faith, you have to believe. Religion is based on faith so that means there always has to be questions, they will always have to remain because if there were answers there would be no need for faith. Well evolution has many major gaps in it and the answer to them is faith, to believe. We are told that the answers are out there and all we have to do is believe and one day the answers will be found. Maybe they will and maybe they will not and at least until they are evolution is much more like religion than people who believe in evolution want to believe because it relies on faith and belief for many of its key elements just like religion does.
People can point to certain portions of the theory of evolution and say, look there is proof. Well many portions of the Bible can be pointed to and cities and people and other things are known to have existed and again people can point at them and say, look there is proof.
Both can show a degree of proof and both have major gaps that require faith and belief to cover the gaps.
I was once talking with a very intelligent far more educated man than myself and he went on and on about how God cannot exist and how the Bible is proof of that and how carbon dating and other forms of dating things are proof because the timeframe for life on and of the planet earth are so different between what the Bible teaches and carbon dating and other forms of dating things. After his long ‘sermon’ I asked him a couple questions. I said if for a moment you could assume that God as described/defined in/by the Bible exists then you would have to accept that being omnipotent he would have known everything man would ever learn in the total amount of time that man exists and since religion is based on faith could it be possible that God created certain things in ways that he knew man could never and would never be able to figure out. I said is at all possible that God created things so as they aged they would at some point begin to age at an exponential rate but do so in a way that man’s technology could never discover and by doing so assure that man could never accurately date things from the past after a certain age. I said that would be one way to assure that for the length of human existence a need for faith and belief would be required to maintain true faith. He thought about it for a moment and with an odd look on his face he just said he had never thought about anything like that and that yes it could be possible. He then went on to think up various other ways that things could have been done that would keep man from ever being able to figure out certain things so the need for faith would remain vital for any true religious belief. He said that if God did exist as described/defined in the Bible he would have infinite wisdom far beyond that man could ever acquire and he would most definitely protect certain things from ever being able to be discovered to assure that faith and belief always remained the vital core to religion. He of course was not an instant convert to religion but he said no one had every asked him anything like that before and he had never thought of anything like that before because he just accepted that what man has discovered, that the technology that man has developed was accurate and reliable. I jokingly said that was just his faith in what is basically his religion and if that can rightly be questioned all the beliefs fall to pieces much like questioning the Great Flood and Jonah in the whales belly etc. tend to cause the more intelligent to lose their beliefs in God because they can no longer believe in what they have been told. Because some doubt may arise people have to question things and because we now live in an era where we expect and require proof to believe in something if proof is not able to be found or produced we find it very difficult to believe in something and we can no longer rely on faith but still it takes faith in the theory of evolution to fully believe it because of the number of gaps in it but because it is scientific people in this era are more likely to have faith in and belief in something scientific with gaps than they are to believe there is an invisible man in the sky with powers beyond our comprehension.
In any era since scientific investigation has existed those involved knew there is much yet to be discovered but still they believed they knew enough to make certain claims and say they were certainties even though many were absurd. When trains were first invented it was believed that if they traveled at over 12mph the people riding on the trains would suffocate because at the time train cars were open and they would be unable to breath. Well an average horse of decent genetics and health can run at 30mph or faster and thoroughbred horses can top 40mph and quarter horses in short distance runs can to 50mph and horses had been ridden for ages and ages and no one riding one ever suffocated due to not being able to breath because of the speed at which they traveled but scientists for some inexplicable reason at one time did believe that if riding on/in an open car of a train if it went more than 12mph people would suffocate. Is that a wonderful example of the genius of scientists or what?
Isaac Newton first figured out the fundamental nature of gravity in the late 1600’s. It wasn’t until fairly recently that a theory to actually explain why gravity exists was discovered and while it is accepted it is still a theory. The proof that gravity existed has always been there, it just took someone to notice it but the reason behind it took an extremely long period of time to find some rational scientific explanation to say why it exists. There have been many beliefs as to why gravity existed throughout the years but none held up to close scientific scrutiny over the ages so how many things that are accepted as being factual today might in fact be like gravity and in 10 or 50 or 1000 or more years turn out to be wrong and some totally different explanation for them come into existence? It is sort of like the 12mph train thing in that people tend to believe or need to believe that whatever era they live in that science has advanced so far that what is believed to be known has to be factual when it is not at all uncommon that as time passes new things are discovered that make scientific fact of yesterday to be incorrect. How many times has the smallest particle in existence been found and then later someone else has found something even smaller but for a while the old smallest particle found was believed to be scientific fact and was taught as being such instead of it just being taught as the smallest particle yet to be found but that others smaller might in fact exist?
People, more so the higher educated, like to or need to believe that we presently know so much that we can rule out many things and that others are pure indisputable facts and that we are capable saying so factually, just like the 12mph train thing.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
.......UMmmm...You're right, it's not an arguement........
, so all of that what you said about Einstein, Founding Fathers, Holy Bible (n ur case of speaking), and all it seems possible you can go on about.......
......and Albert wuuzzzz an....Satire attempt, sorry I missed........
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