Things
appear to have
come to a
head as far as this whole
“smart” thing is concerned. Apparently,
many readers have been under the impression that, when I praised
smartness, I
was defining smart
solely in terms
of I.Q. This was
never actually the
case, and I have recently clarified my position on this matter in a Reader
Mail response
to a dedicated reader, for whose e-mail The 1585 is
eternally
grateful.
Pursuant
both to this response
and to the recent “We’ve
Got
Magic to Do” essay, I was asked the other day in
a MySpace
blog discussion
whether I regard atheism itself as better proof of intelligence than
I.Q., as
there are, to be fair, many people with high I.Q.s who believe in God,
but whom I appear to be calling stupid.It
is a
good question, and one which I have decided to address in its own
essay,
rather than waiting to insert some thoughts on it into a longer piece
as an
aside.
The
answer, stated up front so
as to quash accusations of
suspense-building, is no:
I do not
regard atheism as proof of intelligence, nor do I regard belief
in God, period,
as proof of
stupidity.It seems
a valid general prescription that no
one position on any one issue can accurately be taken as proof of
intelligence,
and atheism is no exception.
No
further proof is necessary
than to examine both positions
cast into extreme circumstances:if
there were some isolated society to which religion was unknown, all
members of
said society would naturally be atheists, and it would be absurd to
conclude
that they were all therefore exceptionally intelligent, as the
population
doubtless would contain the same natural spectrum of intellectual
ability to be
found anywhere else; likewise, if there were some society to which even
the possibility
of atheism were
unknown, and
in which faith-based precepts of one stripe or another were sworn to by
even
the most respected authorities, and the means of scientifically
overturning
them absent or untaught (as was indeed the case in many civilizations
in the past),
an individual would have to be possessed of near-unimaginable genius to
come to
atheism on his own, but could certainly be incredibly intelligent while
still
falling short of that mark.
Our
own society’s
present situation, of course, comes
nowhere close to either of these extremes, but the maxim that atheism
itself
does not altogether prove intelligence still holds: a modern
individual
raised
in non-religious circumstances needs only to avoid
falling into the trap of religion when some powerful misfortune
or philosophical quandary arises, whereas an individual reared in
oppressive
religious circumstances must struggle to free
himself from them; we must necessarily admit that the second individual
has
before him the harder task, and that it is logically possible for him
to be
“smarter” in some performance-based I.Q.
sense than the first.Leaving
open this window is, perhaps,
inconvenient to our position, but I will remind you that what
separates
us from our opponents is the fact that, when facts arise that are
inconvenient
to our positions, we do not
therefore
omit or ignore them, however inconvenient they may be.
Wow,
so far this essay is not
funny at all.But
it does sound like it was written in the
late 17th Century, which is pretty
cool.And it turns
you on a little bit,
doesn’t it?Come
on, admit it.
I’ll
talk normal
now, but only because I want you to pay
attention to the essay instead of masturbating.
Anyway,
what serves nearly to
close the loophole that seems
to have just been opened is the fact that, clearly, religious
indoctrination
does not just ramble around in the human brain independently of all the
other
functions, but rather affects them.If
someone’s brain has the ability to comprehend advanced
science, but out of
deference to some unscientific religious ideal he refrains from
studying it; or
if someone has the ability to craft great literature, but due to a
pious
rigidity he shies away from complex themes; or if someone has the raw
materials
of the skill to compose great music, but out of a religion-imposed
sexual
retardation he wishes to avoid exciting the passions, then of course
his
accomplishments will end up falling far short of his ability.And,
as explained in
the Reader Mail
response concerning I.Q., the problem with I.Q. tests is that they
measure ability
in the
abstract — they (allegedly)
indicate what someone is capable
of
doing, but not whether there is present in his life some other factor
that will
prevent him from doing it.
And
someone who is capable
of becoming smart, but does not
become smart, is not smart, any more than someone who is physically
capable of
shooting a gun but never kills anybody is a murderer.
At
this point, after
having prepped the reader
regarding the necessity of the admission, I can reveal the true
purpose at the
heart of this essay — the admission of the fact that, as loath
as are many who
consider themselves intellectuals to admit it, emotion
matters, even in regard to
issues of a high intellectual
premium.
When
I say emotion,
of course, I don’t mean making decisions based on wishes in
place of evidence
(as religious types do) or prioritizing the ability to interact with
others
emotionally above the ability to debate intellectually (as P.C. types
do).All I'm
doing is acknowledging the fact
that a certain degree of emotional
maturity is necessary in order
for an individual’s
intellectual abilities
even to enter into the picture.Unless
someone is forced to learn something by rote (in which case they would
anyway
really only be getting forced to recite
it, and not necessarily to believe
it), the ability
to learn something
must naturally be preceded by the decision
to learn it — and the decision
to learn
is motivated by emotion.We
are smart
because we have put a lot of effort into becoming smart,
yes — but we would not
have done so if we did not enjoy
the
idea
of being smart.
If
any readers bristled at the
phrase emotional
maturity in that
last paragraph, don’t worry.Hell,
I bristled at having to type
it.This, of
course, is because the
expression has been negatively affected by its association
with…well,
prissy girls.The
kind who pronounce mature
with a
hard “t,” and are always calling people immature
for
totally innocuous shit like the fact that they find attractive people
attractive or laugh at jokes even when the jokes are clearly hilarious,
and who
for some reason are instantaneously moved to paroxysms of white-hot
rage
whenever they see someone over the age of fourteen watching a cartoon,
even if
that cartoon is The
Simpsons.
Seriously,
what is wrong with
those girls?You’re
in the lounge peacefully watching The Simpsons,
and all of a sudden all
these girls are screaming at you, and you’re like Fine put on
whatever you
want, and then they put on some shit that is like a million
times more immature than The
Simpsons,
and you’re like Oh right like this is so mature, and
they’re like Whatever you just don’t understand it,
and you’re like The fuck I
don’t this show is retarded, and then they call you a rapist
or something and
you’re like How the fuck does the fact that I like The
Simpsons
make me a rapist, but then
they just don’t answer you
and then suddenly the next day there’s a rumor all over
campus that you were
stalking some girl you have never even heard of in your life and WHAT
IS SO
MATURE ABOUT THIS?
So,
anyway, that’s
not what emotional maturity means.What
it does
mean, at least as it relates to our purposes here, is the ability to
bring the
intelligence to bear in situations where this is
advisable — most especially dire
or traumatizing ones wherein the individual does not wish for what the
intellect might tell him to be true.
Consider
the example of a man
at whose door the cops have
arrived to tell him his son is dead.The
man may, in this most horrifying of moments, still be able to realize
that the
cops are only doing their job and that it’s not their fault,
or he may lose his
shit and say that the cop is lying and take a swing at him.If
he does the latter,
unwise though this may
have been, we can certainly understand and forgive his instantaneous
reaction
to this awful news.He
only lost it for
a second, and it was in the most traumatic circumstances imaginable.
This,
by the way, is what the
commonly misused expression
“there are no atheists in a foxhole” actually means.Religious
types sometimes
use it to mean that
atheists are all bullshitting and know deep down that there is a God,
but what
it actually means is that it takes a near-superhuman level of
philosophical
fortitude to stand by an unwelcome truth in a traumatic situation.The
example of a soldier
who has been a
lifelong atheist but who suddenly freaks out and starts praying when he
thinks
he’s about to die doesn’t
“prove” that there is a God any more than the
father
losing it and punching the cop “proves” that his
son isn’t actually dead.People
lose their minds in traumatic
situations — supposedly, the most common last word spoken by
dying soldiers is
“mommy.”Does
this “prove” that their
moms are omnipotent beings with supernatural powers?No.These
outbursts are equivalent to confessions
extracted under
torture — i.e., argumentatively worthless.
But
now let us look beyond the instantaneous
reaction, of which nearly
all types may be excused,
and examine possible long-term ones.Probably,
the father who freaks out and punches the
cop would come to
his senses after a little while and be sorry.But
suppose he didn’t?Suppose
he
spends the subsequent week, or year, or the rest of his life, hunting
down the
cop who told him that his son was dead?At
this point, we would say that the guy is
stone-cold nuts, right?
The
reason we would be able to
say this is that there would
necessarily be a mountain of evidence that the man’s son is
dead aside from
the cop’s
word: the man is
brought to the morgue, for example, where he sees the dead body of his
son with
his own eyes.Or if
no corpse is
available to be seen, the man cannot deny the fact that days and weeks
pass
without his son ever coming home.In
short, there was, when the son was alive, a mountain of evidence, in
the form
of continuous firsthand contact, to support the position that he was
alive — and
when he is dead, all the evidence that he was alive suddenly goes away,
and is
replaced with evidence to one degree or another that he is dead.
But
suppose this were not the
case.Suppose that,
instead of leaving behind
corpses, human beings vanished at the moment of death, like Yoda.Suppose
that, even when
his son was alive,
the man did not see him regularly because he lived far
away — or that, for some
reason, he had never even met his son, but had only ever been told
that he had a son, and believed it
based solely on the word of the people who told him so, and that these
same
people, even after the incident with the cop, continue to swear to the
man that
his son is alive.It
would be their word
against the cop’s, and the cop would be in the difficult
position of having to prove
that
the son is dead to a man who
does not wish
to believe so, and
who has
no particular reason
to believe so,
unless he is instilled with a desire to know the truth for its own
sake, which
he may or may not be.(Consider
also the
case of those black “POW/MIA” flags you see
everyplace, even though there’s
almost certainly nobody still over there.In
a few years, we will be at the point where even
if there were
guys still over
there, they would
be dead of old age — do you think the flags will come down then?I
bet not. In fact, I bet this will make the people who fly
those flags feel even
more determined to keep flying them.)
The
cop drafts the best and
most convincing argument
possible that the man’s son is dead, types it out on a single
sheet of paper,
and presents it to the man (this would indeed be going beyond the call
of duty
to rather a ridiculous degree, since his duty was only to inform
the man of his son’s
death, and not to make sure he believes
so, but still the analogy
serves).The
man’s desire to persist in
the belief that his son is alive, then, can now wholly be satisfied by
the
simple act of ignoring
the words on
this piece of paper, which is of course easily done.The
man is obviously smart
enough to understand
the concept of his son’s being dead and the argument to that
effect — since
neither is all that complicated — but if he lacks the emotional
maturity
necessary to choose to
engage them, then his capacity
to understand is a non-issue.
Upon
ending the analogy and
returning to the matter of
atheism, there is of course one major amendment to be made.Atheists
do not argue that
God once
existed but has since
passed away,
but rather that there was never
any
God (or, for the polytheistic religions, were
never any Gods)
to begin with.When
Nietzsche declared
that God was dead,
the sticking point was not that he was unable to produce a body,
because the
phrase was a metaphor.It
was phrased as
“God is dead” rather than as “God never
existed” to emphasize the idea that
humanity had advanced to the point where belief in God was no longer
necessary — i.e., we were ready
finally
to accept the fact that there never was any God to begin with.(Whether
it is in fact the
case that a phase
of human progress in which religion existed was either necessary
or inevitable
is an interesting question, but an irrelevant one — religion did
exist, but must now cease
to, regardless of whether it did or did not have
to.Most atheists
fully admit
that many ultimately
beneficial philosophies arose out of the existence of religion, but
this does
not constitute an argument that it should continue, any more than the
fact that
many legitimate scientific discoveries were made accidentally by
alchemists and
astrologers constitutes an argument for the continuance of belief in
alchemy or
astrology.)
I
realize that it is not
exactly news to the
philosophically trained readers of this site that it is logically
impossible to
prove an absence.Someone
who believes,
say, that Bigfoot exists can venture into the Great North Woods and,
with a
little luck, capture Bigfoot, and subsequently convince those who
doubted his
existence, as they would be bound to the evidence of their senses,
whereas
someone who wishes to convince believers that Bigfoot does not exist
can only
point over and over to the fact that no-one has yet done this, or even
anything
close.But there
are important
differences between Bigfoot and God, even aside from the fact that God
has
never had a monster truck named after him.
For
starters, one can take the
compromise position that
Bigfoot once
existed — i.e., that there
was once some species of large and advanced ape in North
America,
accounting for the many similar and independently collected Native
American
legends, but that the poor beasts have since gone extinct.Furthermore,
there is the
fact that, even
among those who lend credence to his biography, there are more-or-less
established boundaries respecting what Bigfoot may or may not
do: believers
would be unlikely, say, to argue that he remains undetected because he
can turn
himself invisible, or shrink to microscopic size, or hibernate beneath
the
ground for a thousand years when he feels threatened.Finally,
there is the fact that, even if one
day Bigfoot (or rather, a
Bigfoot,
since if it did exist it would needs be a species rather than an
individual)
were to waltz out of the forest and introduce himself (after his
fashion,
whatever it may be), this would amount only to the discovery of a
theretofore
unknown species of ape, and not to anything supernatural.The
glamour of his mystery
has caused Bigfoot
casually to be classified with the paranormal,
but since there is nothing fundamentally extrascientific about a
species of ape
that is really, really hard to find, it would be quite exactly in error
to
claim his eventual discovery as evidence of the supernatural,
and no new credibility whatsoever would properly then
be gained by tales of ghosts, vampires, etc.
The
problem with the God legend
(argumentatively speaking,
and so ignoring the obvious fact that many more people desire much more
strongly to believe in God than in Bigfoot) is that it transcends all
three of
these precepts:One
cannot argue that
God once existed but no longer does, since God is by definition
immortal; one
cannot chip away at the legend based on accepted boundaries concerning
what God
may or may not do, since God can by definition do anything; and one
cannot
erode God’s cachet down to a sensible form of belief among
believers, since God
is by definition supernatural.
Technically,
in fact, God is
the only
thing that is by
definition supernatural.People
do not realize this about other
“supernatural” legends partly because skeptics are
prone to using the phrase “a
scientific explanation” when positing alternate
scenarios — but the problem with
that phrase is that it is redundant.All science
means is sound explanations of things, and so if a valid explanation of
something exists
at all, then it is inherently
a scientific
explanation.What
would be the alternative — an unscientific
explanation?That
would only mean that
the explanation is not really an explanation.
This
applies even to the most
far-fetched of “supernatural”
legends.If it were
to turn out that vampires
actually
exist, there would
necessarily be a reason
why they
do,
and that reason would necessarily be capable of
explanation — it might be hard to
figure out for a while, but that
wouldn’t mean an explanation didn’t exist.And
that explanation would
necessarily be a
“scientific” one — unless
it involved God.It
has been posited by some that if God
existed, his existence would necessarily be
“scientific,” since the existence
of anything
would necessarily
become
a part of the sum total of knowledge.And
this is true.But
it is also
true that the existence of God as
the major monotheistic religions use the term would necessarily
annihilate the
usefulness of the term science
itself.If
everything was created by a
being who exists for an inherently
unexplainable reason (as
opposed to the Universe, which
exists for a reason that is just really
hard to explain), then
ultimately nothing
exists for
an explainable reason.If
a being exists
who can do anything,
then this
necessarily imbues all other beings with the possibility of having anything
done to
or through
them at any
time.It would, for
example, no longer
be true
in an absolute sense to say
that
“penguins can’t fly,” since God would be
able suddenly to make a penguin fly
whenever he felt like it — the phrase would needs be amended to
“So far, God has
not made any penguins fly when someone was
watching.” And what would be the
point of even bothering
to say
that?
Theism
has not been taken to
this extreme by most believers,
thanks to the Enlightenment meme of the “watchmaker
deity” who does not
interfere with the universe he has set in motion.This
was, of course, a convenient backslide
on their parts, designed as a response to the looming threat of
science’s being
able to explain everything without making use of God.But
this meme has largely been abandoned in
our society at present.In
response to
what they perceive as the ultimate insult constituted by the fact of
human
evolution from a common ancestor with the Great Apes (well,
technically, from a common ancestor with everything, if you go back far
enough), theists have taken up once more the banner of a
God-legend
that necessitates disbelief in empirical scientific evidence.As
they are currently
outraged by statements
concerning the age of the planet, why may they not suddenly decide to
be
outraged by the statement “penguins can’t
fly?”There
is no reason why not.
This
is not a slippery-slope
argument predicting that penguin-outrage will come to pass in
the near
future,
but only a proof of the fact that it is all too logically possible for
theists
to use belief in God as an excuse to become outraged by any
fact whatsoever, as soon as they trump up some reason why the
fact in question is worthy of outrage. Some
schools are already bowing to pressure to
accept “6,000 years” as a correct answer to a test
question about the age of
the planet — and all that’s stopping the same thing
from happening to any
question on any
test is the matter of how
many religious people decide to
start bitching about it. The
extent to which they
will decide to do
this is limited only by their desire to piss off smart people — which
is, in
many of them, apparently limitless.
People
who run around looking
for Bigfoot may be nerds, but
they do not pull this kind of shit.
This
brings us all the way back
to the question of whether I think that everyone who believes in God is stupid, and the fact that my
answer was — and still is — no.One
reason for this is the
undeniable fact
that I have met many smart people who believe in God, some of whom I am
proud to count among my very dearest friends.Another
reason is that, although it is logically possible
to use belief in God as an
excuse to discount any and all
scientific facts, not everyone who believes in God does so.Many
of them are simply
people who answer
“yes” to the question “Do you believe in
God?”, and appear to have no further
disagreements with us beyond that.Admittedly,
it is a mystery to me why
they feel
the need to answer that question in the affirmative if they have no other
beliefs that necessitate this
response for support, but the fact remains.And
this is why I specified “belief
in God, period”
way back in the
third paragraph.
Religious
beliefs that compete
directly with empirical
evidence, however, are another matter.Yes,
all creationists are stupid.Yes,
everyone who
believes that Noah’s Ark
really happened is stupid.Yes,
everyone
who believes that the planet is 6,000 years old is stupid.
Here’s
a visual aid:
And
this is why atheism in and of itself is, as I stated in the blog
discussion, not the be-all
and end-all of
1585.The 1585 is
opposed to all forms of
bullshit and prioritizes the ones I feel to be the most dangerous.Religious
tenets that
necessitate disbelief
in science are incredibly dangerous, and belief
in God, period — though
it is in factual
error — is far less so.It
seems for some merely to be code for optimism: they
have the same moral
beliefs and definition of good as we do, and use belief in God as an
indicator
of faith that this good will one day be achieved.Is
this pointless?Certainly.But
as I have limited time and energy, I prefer to
invest it primarily
in making fun of the people who think dinosaur bones were created by
the Devil
and who want to teach teenagers that you can get AIDS from holding
hands.
Why
does one person who
believes in God argue crazy shit
like this and another come nowhere close to doing so?Partly
due to a difference in intelligence,
and partly due to a difference in emotional maturity. As I've shown, the primary function of the
God-legend is that it provides a means to assert that whatever you feel
like believing is true.And someone
who is
emotionally retarded will feel
like believing different
things from someone who is not
emotionally retarded.The
desire to put empirical reality to fire and
sword solely for the
sake of spiting people who are better than you at something, whether in
religious types or P.C. types, is more a matter of emotional
retardation than
of intellectual failing — the capacity to really
believe the retarded stuff that
some people claim
to believe may be a matter of stupidity, but the question of
how many of them really
believe
what
they say
they do is very much an
open
one (indeed, someone who has worked themselves into a permanent
rage about these matters may
very well have lost the
capacity to tell the difference — and when someone is crazy,
it is no longer a matter of smart
and stupid, but only a
matter of crazy).
Of
course, the fact that
religion inherently
allows this is
why this behavior is more of a problem
with religious types than with others, and provides the answer to the
question
oft-posed to atheists, “What if there were a religion that
exactly asserted all
of your own personal moral precepts — would you still be
against it?”The
answer is yes,
for much the same
reason that the answer to the question
“Wouldn’t a benevolent dictatorship be better than
a democracy?” is no:the
fact that, even if it starts
off good, the very fact of its being
a religion or a dictatorship will cause
it to become bad.Positions
in
dictatorships attract people whom you do not want to be in charge
(because they
love absolute power for its own sake), and religion attracts people who
cannot
assert whatever they wish to believe through any other form (because it
is
false).If it is
cold outside, and to
keep warm you start a fire in the middle of your kitchen, it will keep
you warm
for about 30 seconds and then just burn your house down.
This
is why all religions seem
eventually to degenerate into
telling people they’re not supposed to have sex.Religion
attracts the
emotionally retarded,
and Rule #1 of being emotionally retarded is that you are scared of sex.You
could start a religion
tomorrow that has nothing
whatsoever to do with bitching
about sex, and I guarantee
you
that
in a century or two it will be concerned with doing very little aside
from bitching about sex.
And
there are lots
of people with high I.Q.s who are terrified of sex.They’re
called nerds.This
is why 1585 is
always careful regularly
to specify that the fact of praising intelligence does not
mean 1585 is one of those
retarded “nerds are superheroes” sites,
and is very
careful constantly
to specify that 1585ers are hawt and like teh sex, and think
that others should also be hawt and like teh sex.
If
any of you thought it was
just to get more traffic,
well…Let’s
just say I’ll be careful
never to let you catch me watching The
Simpsons.