Atheists Are Smart

Author: FLRW

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#1
FLRW
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Here is a list of Atheist Nobel Prize Winners:

Chemistry

Harry Kroto, joint recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Svante Arrhenius
Paul D. Boyer
John Cornforth
Frédéric Joliot-Curie
Irène Joliot-Curie
Richard R. Ernst
Herbert A. Hauptman
Roald Hoffmann
Harold W. Kroto
Jean-Marie Lehn
Peter D. Mitchell
George Andrew Olah
Wilhelm Ostwald
Linus Pauling
Max Perutz
Frederick Sanger
Michael Smith
Harold Urey

Economics

Milton Friedman
John Harsanyi
Friedrich Hayek
John Forbes Nash, Jr.
Amartya Sen

Literature

Jean-Paul Sartre, recipient of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Samuel Beckett
Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
Pearl S. Buck (1938)
Albert Camus
Anatole France
John Galsworthy (1932)
Dario Fo
Nadine Gordimer
Gao Xingjian
Pablo Neruda
Eugene O'Neill
Bertrand Russell
George Bernard Shaw
Jean-Paul Sartre
Wole Soyinka.
John Steinbeck
José Saramago

Peace

Norman Angell (1933)
Klas Pontus Arnoldson (1908)
Mikhail Gorbachev
Linus Pauling
Andrei Sakharov
Elie Wiesel

Physics

Pierre and Marie Curie.
Peter Higgs
Zhores Alferov
Hannes Alfvén
Philip Warren Anderson
John Bardeen
Patrick Blackett
Nicolaas Bloembergen
Niels Bohr
Percy Williams Bridgman
Louis de Broglie
James Chadwick
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Marie Curie
Pierre Curie
Paul Dirac
Albert Einstein
{Einstein used many labels to describe his religious views, including "agnostic", "religious nonbeliever", and a believer in "Spinoza's God." However, he rejected other labels like "atheist" and "pantheist"}
Enrico Fermi
Richard Feynman
Val Logsdon Fitch
James Franc
Dennis Gabor
Murray Gell-Mann
Vitaly Ginzburg
Roy J. Glauber
Peter Higgs
Gerard 't Hooft
Herbert Kroemer
Lev Landau
Leon M. Lederman
Albert A. Michelson
Konstantin Novoselov
Jean Baptiste Perrin
Isidor Isaac Rabi
C. V. Raman
William Shockley
Erwin Schrödinger
George Smoot
Jack Steinberger
Igor Tamm
Johannes Diderik van der Waals
Eugene Wigner

Physiology or Medicine

Francis Crick.
Rita Levi-Montalcini
Julius Axelrod
Robert Bárány (1914)
George Beadle
J. Michael Bishop
Sydney Brenner
Francis Crick, DNA codiscoverer
Max Delbrück
Christian de Duve
Howard Florey
Camillo Golgi
Andrew Huxley
François Jacob
Paul Lauterbur
Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran
Sir Peter Medawar
Jacques Monod
Thomas Hunt Morgan
Herbert J. Muller
Élie Metchnikoff
Rita Levi-Montalcini
Hermann Joseph Muller
Paul Nurse
Ivan Pavlov
Richard J. Roberts
John Sulston
Albert Szent-Györgyi
Nikolaas Tinbergen
James Watson, DNA codiscoverer
#2
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@FLRW
I’m not even sure what this thread is even meant to accomplish or argue for. Seems like a mindless pissing competition of “my figure heads are smarter than yours”.
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@Mharman

What did you think of the Atheists are cowards. in the Religion forum?
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FLRW
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@Mharman

Don't you think that in general, Atheists are smarter than Theists?   I know that there are a few exceptions.
#5
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What did you think of the Atheists are cowards. in the Religion forum?
It’s a dumb thread that does nothing helpful.
#6
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Don't you think that in general, Atheists are smarter than Theists?   I know that there are a few exceptions.
No, not really. I don’t think one is smarter than the other.
#7
Athias
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@Mharman
I’m not even sure what this thread is even meant to accomplish or argue for. Seems like a mindless pissing competition of “my figure heads are smarter than yours”.

It’s a dumb thread that does nothing helpful.

No, not really. I don’t think one is smarter than the other.
Well stated.

#8
n8nrgim
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i think atheists can be smart, but so can theists. with that said, i think most atheists that i see on the internet lack critical thinking. they are presented with objective evidence for God, and insist there's no evidence for God. with that said, most theists suck at arguing the points. atheists are probably slightly smarter on average, but not by a lot, but the main reason most remain atheists, is because they're ignorant. 
#9
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This is why a lot of people become atheists. They see a bunch of people with good reasoning ability not believe in a God, and since they are stupid, but want to appear smart, they just copy their beliefs without giving it serious thought.

I have to tell you though. I recognized at least 5 names on that list, that were not atheist
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FLRW
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@n8nrgim
For more than a millennium, scholars have noticed a curious correlation: Atheists tend to be more intelligent than religious people.


It's unclear why this trend persists, but researchers of a new study have an idea: Religion is an instinct, they say, and people who can rise above instincts are more intelligent than those who rely on them.


"Intelligence — in rationally solving problems — can be understood as involving overcoming instinct and being intellectually curious and thus open to non-instinctive possibilities," study lead author Edward Dutton, a research fellow at the Ulster Institute for Social Research in the United Kingdom, said in a research paper.

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FLRW
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@PREZ-HILTON

So you are saying Allahu Akbar?

People saying that are some of the smartest people around, right?
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FLRW
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This topic came about due to a post I made to Tradesecret

Tradesecret may be on to something. The words 'Allahu Akbar' translate to mean “God is the greatest”.
You have to be brave to fly a plane into the World Trade Center.
So maybe it's religious people are stupid and brave and atheists are smart and cowards?

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FLRW
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@PREZ-HILTON
Tell the 5 names you think weren't atheists. Was one Eugene O'Neill?

On a late summer Sunday morning in New London, Connecticut, in 1903, the 14-year-old Eugene O’Neill informed his father James that he would no longer accompany his family to Mass. Eugene had been struggling for some time with his Catholic faith. Two years earlier, while home on vacation from boarding school, he had stumbled on his mother giving herself an injection. Confused by what he had seen, he began praying for her recovery from whatever mysterious ailment afflicted her.
By the fateful summer of 1903, Eugene had come to understand that his mother was severely addicted to morphine. Overcome with anguish about his mother’s condition, furious at his father for allowing her addiction to take root in the first place, despairing at the impotence of his unanswered prayers for divine intervention on his mother’s behalf, Eugene rejected God and remained estranged from the church for the rest of his life.

In his plays, O’Neill developed a distinctive style of atheism, though it can be a challenge for us to recognize it today. Our bestselling atheists insist almost without exception that godlessness is unambiguously good news — a liberation from ignorance and fear, and a gateway to intellectual fulfillment. O’Neill’s reflections on humanity’s struggle for spiritual meaning were, by contrast, haunted by the palpable absence of God and shot through with tragedy, peopled by characters marooned in a twilit world longing for a redemption and forgiveness that never comes. Those eager for an alternative to the superficial, insouciant godlessness so prevalent in our time will find one in the deeper, darker atheism explored in O’Neill’s greatest plays.


#14
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@FLRW
I agree that atheists r slightly smarter but u r jumping to too many conclusions based on that idea. The IQ difference is prob too small to draw many conclusions.  With that said a baby should be neutral on god and then as they get older should become atheists if they remain ignorant, the default. It takes knowledge and critical thinking to rise above the atheist default. It's understandable that there's so many atheists since knowledge and critical thinking r in short supplyl
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@FLRW
Tell the 5 names you think weren't atheists. Was one Eugene O'Neill?
Jean Paul Sartre 

Richard Feynman

Etc
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@PREZ-HILTON
Richard Feynman (1918-88)– Atheist 
Richard Feynman was an American theoretical physicist and Nobel Prize winner known for his work in quantum mechanics. 
Feynman was an atheist, and said that the Abrahamic anthropomorphic Gods were something he could not believe.  He thought Abrahamic scriptures were interesting historically, but nothing more.

Jean Paul Sartre was an existentialist, and not a Christian existentialist in the sense that Kierkegaard was. Personally I don’t think the author of La Nausée can be realistically regarded as a theist in any important way. Sartre was also, of course, a Marxist. Below are two relevant quotations from Sartre, in defense of existentialism. Make of these quotations what you will.
Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. That being is man or, as Heidegger has it, the human reality.

So, first of all, Sartre defines himself as a representative of atheistic existentialism. Then he finishes by clarifying that statement.
“Existentialism is not atheist in the sense that it would exhaust itself in demonstrations of the non-existence of God. It declares, rather, that even if God existed that would make no difference from its point of view. Not that we believe God does exist, but we think that the real problem is not that of His existence; what man needs is to find himself again and to understand that nothing can save him from himself, not even a valid proof of the existence of God.

So to Sartre, the existence of God, even if it were shown to be true, would be irrelevant.
Whatever this is it is not a statement of theism. It’s a statement of indifference to God and an assertion that what matters more than God are the problems of man.

#17
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@FLRW
True.

Anyone that lets their judgements be clouded by unnecessarily foggy data, will inevitably be distracted.
#18
RationalMadman
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@FLRW
Einstein was not an atheist, he was deistic.

You named plenty of people who did not explicitly state they were atheist ever.
#19
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@FLRW
I 'could give a list of Nobel Prize Winners who were religious or had religious background,
But it wouldn't prove atheists or theists being more intelligent,
Though maybe you're just trying to say atheists are capable of intelligence, rather than saying atheists are 'more intelligent,
Anyway,

Should my takeaway be that Americans are more intelligent than other country?
No, no it should not.

Should my takeaway be that men are more intelligent than other women?
No, no it should not.

Statistics 'can be telling,
But they can also be assumption,
They're more often to my mind, just information, more often 'part of enough information to reach a conclusion.
So often there's always context, other statistics, variables that 'cause ends.
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FLRW
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@RationalMadman

In 1954 one year before he died, Einstein says: “The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.”
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@FLRW
I'm aware, a deistic thinker would say that about the Judeo-Christian god.
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FLRW
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Elon Musk is often described as an atheist or agnostic. Asked if he prays, Musk once replied: “I didn’t even pray when I almost died of malaria.”
#23
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@FLRW
Musk believes we are in a simulation, he literally has to believe in powerful entities outside the simulation even if he says otherwise.
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FLRW
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Mark Zuckerberg was raised Jewish. Afterward, he became an atheist.
Steve Wozniak is also Atheist. He himself said a quote "I am also atheist or agnostic (I don't even know the difference). I've never been to church and prefer to think for myself".
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FLRW
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@RationalMadman

A simulation would make sense for such a poorly designed world. Humans only evolved so Artificial Intelligence could be created. That is the goal of the Simulation.
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@FLRW
In your opinion which is a non-atheistic outlook first of all and ignores that conflation you made between not being a devout Abrahamic theist and being an atheist.
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FLRW
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Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye were not Atheists.
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@RationalMadman

I pray (to the simulation Creators) that you find Humanism.
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@FLRW
That is not an atheistic thing to say or do.
#30
Polytheist-Witch
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Musk and Zuckerberg are smart but if you watch them in interviews they're also pieces of human garbage, perfect examples. Greedy, thieves, arrogant and immoral.