Why don’t the most intelligent minds believe in God?

[marvin (Christian Sceptic)]

I would not be so sure. Most of us start to understand life when we experience death. I pity those who only start to understand it at their own death as they never learnt to enjoy life before death.

Happy Easter

[CSTR (Caleb Strom)]

I think it is just a reflection of this historical moment where philosophical materialism is popular among the most educated. Five hundred years ago the most intelligent minds probably mostly believed in God. Being exceptionally intelligent doesn’t stop you from being a product of your time. It just makes it easier for you to rationalize it.

[bluebird1 (Robin)]

Buffalo…you never justify your faith in light of someone else’s negativism. You justify it based on the facts that you know. I worked with someone years back who claimed to have an IQ of 170 and noted that “intelligent people are never sure that God exists.” Well….that eliminates Newton, Collins, and a few other people. What intelligent people think is never the measure of all things….A few of the Nazi leadership during WW2 had above average intelligence levels and you do not want them to be your source of right and wrong just because they are brilliant – or do you?

[Christy (Christy Hemphill)]

@santini

If no evidence of the non-physical has been found, how can it be reasonable to believe that the non-physical exists?

There are different ways of knowing. Observation, empirical analysis, and logical deduction are wonderful epistemological tools of science.

But we can certainly gain knowledge using other capacities. We know things about non-physical things all the time, like love and beauty and morality. It’s just that knowledge of non-physical things is acquired or discerned through different ways of knowing than science. Experience, intuition, imagination, even love itself can be epistemological tools.

[MarkD (A Whateverist, not a Christian)]

Exactly. We can’t and wouldn’t want to go through life with our lab coats on testing and measuring everything we encounter or hear about. Beauty, goodness and truth exist but not as objects independent of an experiencer. Science is just a discipline for settling empirical claim as Terry has been very convincingly arguing.