Evidence is reviewed pointing to a negative relationship between intelligence and religious belief in the United States and Europe. It is shown that intelligence measured as psychometric g is negatively related to religious belief. We also examine whether this negative relationship between intelligence and religious belief is present between nations.We find that in a sample of 137 countries the correlation between national IQ and disbelief in God is 0.60.Lynn adduces four lines of evidence for this idea: 1) studies that find negative correlations between religious belief and intelligence; 2) lower level of religious beliefs among "intelligence elites" than in the general population; 3) decline of religious belief with age among children and adolescents; and 4) perhaps the most interesting, the decline of religious belief in the 20th century due to the Flynn Effect.
Lynn discusses one large anomaly in the results, namely that of the U.S., which has a much greater degree of religious belief than would be expected from this analysis. One factor is, according to Lynn, the presence of a large number of Catholics; more speculative, and therefore more interesting, is the notion that large numbers of the original immigrants to North America, i.e. those who founded the U.S., came because of religious persecution. In other words, the original inhabitants may have had far stronger religious beliefs than those who remained behind, content with the system. Since "parent-child correlations for religious belief are quite high at 0.64 [...] and 0.69", the current American population has to some extent inherited the religious beliefs of the founding population.
Well, on this subject you are on collision course with Charles Murray from Human Accomplishment. Europeans still had high IQs when we were more devout Christians. Sometimes this dedication to God actually aided science, and certainly the arts. Christianity is also growing among high-IQ northeast Asians, at least Koreans and Chinese people although not so much in Japan.
ReplyDeleteWho cares? What is on average in this matter does not interest me. This has become a confession of faith to atheist liberals. I hope it makes them less perceptive of their decline, more overconfident, more blunt, more arrogant and more clinging to their false beliefs. Average is to them a way of avoiding the details. Averages often seem to "support" hegemonic ideology.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, have you noticed that probability of God arises from atheist physics?
@Fjordman
ReplyDeleteEuropeans with high IQs were more religious on the past because of indoctrination. I bet high IQ Muslims would be less religious if there was room for dissidence in Muslim countries.
Christianity may be growing in South Korea and China but Christians are still a minority.
We can't discuss religion only taking into account intelligence(IQ) we should include culture(East Asian cultures are less individualistic). I read here(the second part of the article) that East Asians had a sharper bell curve which if it's true we should take into account or our perception of East Asian intelligence is skewed.
P.S. Why do so many terrorists have engineering degrees?
Only a few hundred years ago Europeans were massacring each other because of religion. They were very religious, yet I dont think they were less intelligent than their contemporary atheist descendants.
ReplyDeleteI'd worry that a study like this shows very little but suggests very much.
ReplyDeleteIs .60 correlation coefficient considered high? Certainly it's positive, but what is it normal in experimental science to conclude from a .60 correlation between two variables? Further studies?
Also, I'm not well versed in the field of IQ measurements, but from some minimal reading on IQ it looks like a Jewish group and East Asians have the highest IQs. Aren't these groups traditionally religious, maybe non-Christian?
Thanks for posting the study,
Daniel
A paragraph from Lynn's paper addresses the issue of why this negative correlation exists, and why, since Europeans and others were intelligent hundreds of years ago, religious belief has decreased.
ReplyDelete"Second, this conclusion raises the question of why should
there be this negative correlation between IQ and belief in God.
Many rationalists no doubt accept the argument advanced by
Frazer (1922, p.712) in The Golden Bough that as civilisations
developed “the keenerminds came to reject the religious theory
of nature as inadequate…religion, regarded as an explanation of
nature, is replaced by science” (by “keener minds” Frazer
presumably meant the more intelligent). Others have assumed
implicitly or explicitly that more intelligent people are more
prone to question irrational or unprovable religious dogmas. For
instance, some 60 years ago Kuhlen and Arnold (1944) proposed
that “greater intellectualmaturitymight be expected to increase
scepticism in matters of religion”. Inglehart and Welzel (2005,
p.27) suggest that in the pre-industrialworld, humans have little
control over nature, so “they seek to compensate their lack of
physical control by appealing to the metaphysical powers that
seemto control theworld:worship is seen as away to influence
one's fate, and it is easier to accept one's helplessness if one
knows the outcome is in the hands of an omnipotent being
whose benevolence can be won by following rigid and predictable
rules of contact…one reason for the decline in traditional
religious beliefs in industrial societies is that an
increasing sense of technological control over nature diminishes
the need for reliance on supernatural powers”."
In response to Daniel, I believe that in the social sciences a correlation of 0.6 is considered fairly strong.
Most everyone in the world was religious historically speaking, but the growth of science and technology has reduced the sphere which religion can attempt to explain; for instance, not long ago it was thought that God influenced the weather, and indeed Martin Luther's conversion experience occurred because he was caught in a thunderstorm.
Well, it sure looks like things are getting better with less Christianity. Aren't they?
ReplyDeleteSince no one is, in practice, a true atheist, this whole exercise is just an exercise in status-posturing.
ReplyDeleteDoes this study count people who profess 'no religion' as atheists? The demographics of 'No Religion' are to Atheists as snake handlers are to 'High Churchers'. In my experience, such studies tend to leave them out.
ReplyDelete"large numbers of .... those who founded the U.S., came because of religious persecution": in the sense that they left England because they failed to gain the power they sought to persecute Anglicans, yes.
ReplyDeleteI'm not surprised to see a correlation between IQ and atheism. I have a feeling that the existence of a Creator and an afterlife is not something that is deducible through science or logic as we understand them. I'm not sure it's meant to be. I know from my own experiences with out-of-body travel - something which completely floored me when I learned how to do it, and utterly changed my life - that our consciousness is separate from our bodies. We do survive our death, and there is a Creator. I have had the proof of that that satisfies me, but I can't prove it to you. I can only point you in the direction I followed to find it out for myself, and then you can go find it out for yourself.
ReplyDeleteI can see why people with high IQs, who would be more likely to be left-brain/analytical types, would be less able to let go of that left-brain way of knowing the world and be able to refocus their attention into these other aspects of reality. The left-brain high-IQ types congratulate themselves for using their analytical powers to "know" that there's no God, while people with a less analytical bent are more open to the direct religious experiences that are actually available to us but which modern scientific culture tell us are impossible.
So I read this study not as proof that atheism is true because smart people tend to be atheists, but evidence that smart people have more difficulty using the non-analytical parts of our consciousness necessary for first-hand "spiritual" experience.
And I say that as a member of the left-brain/analytical high-IQ (and former atheist) group myself.
@ MnMark: search google for "virtual out of body experience" (youtube movie)
ReplyDeleteI suspect that more and more "spiritual experience" will be located in the brain quite precisely. And that inducing such experiences more and more vividly will be easy in the future. Just science acting as a "universal acid". It may be that science and religion are providing answers to different questions, but science, in finding out how things work, will - whether it wants to or not - corrode "religion".
Karl:
ReplyDeleteYou are likely right about the brain yielding its secrets to science as it already is. Such findings will further the conversion of religionists into atheists. The masses will still have their "faith instinct" and will lack the ability to read neuroscience intelligently much as they do now.Liberalism, ultimately leading to a culture of porn and "hate speech" laws may well replace the old religion.Murder may result in a sentence of 6 years. Because of the political immaturity and basic corruptibility of man, I hope religion is retained to provide solace and a basis for morality.
[In] the pre-industrialworld, humans have little
ReplyDeletecontrol over nature, so “they seek to compensate their lack of
physical control by appealing to the metaphysical powers that
seem to control the world...an
increasing sense of technological control over nature diminishes
the need for reliance on supernatural powers”."
This is truly the equivalent in terms of intellectual honesty and analytical acuity of the following statement:
[In] the pre-democratic world, humans have little
control over politics, so ideas like limited government and private property were useful...an
increasing sense of democratic control over government diminishes
the need for reliance on negative rights, so that with the march of progress, it became clear that all conservatives were merely dupes of the ruling class or shills for the rich, unaware that they were defending an obsolete political doctrine".
If you characterize a position in accordance with the most ignorant caricatures of that position entertained by its opponents, you end up saying things like this. (And I know Mangan was quoting and I do not address this directly to him.) Scientific Naturalists often blithely and casually depict religion as an exercise in irrational fantasy even when they pretend to discuss the subject seriously. Such an approach can yield no meaningful results.
Regardless, even assuming this correlation to be accurate, it is of no consequence without revealing the absolute numbers. Suppose that 80% of people with IQs below 110 are religious and 70% of people with IQs above 110 are so, with the IQ range of 140+ weighing in at 66%. This would indicate a positive correlation between intellect and atheism, even though theists outnumber atheists among all IQ cohorts, including the very brightest.
To stress the point, I would bet $5,000 that there is also a positive correlation between IQ and the belief that race is a social construct.
ReplyDelete@MnMark: actually i think you have it backwards. the left-brained types are the most religious because left-brain is "closed minded"
ReplyDeleteyou're confusing "left-brained" with "analytical" which doesn't have a basis. right-brained people can also be analytical, and both left-brained and right-brained can also be emotional. the difference between the hemispheres is sequential vs parallel processing and whether the person experiences the environment through an internal representation (left) or experiences it directly (right). this can be explained by the parallelism. the data from the environment is massive and more or less can't be processed sequentially
because left-brained people experience the environment through a representation, it is easy for them to overtrust their perception of the world. these are the people whose minds are very hard to change. the most common religious person is probably left-brained emotional... which is the majority of people
@Karl:
ReplyDeleteI suspect that more and more "spiritual experience" will be located in the brain quite precisely.
I believe the tongue/olfactory centers and brain cooperate to sense things that taste wonderful and those that don't. Scientists in the past have located those centers.
Inducing such [spiritual] experiences more and more vividly will be easy in the future. Just science acting as a "universal acid".
Food technology gets better and better at designing and manufacturing flavoring additives and non-nutrient taste modifiers to reproduce the taste/smell/mouth-feel sensations associated with real food. There are huge labs and manufacturing plants in New Jersey dedicated to this. These enhancing ingredients are often added to foods that have no basis in the foods whose taste/smell/feel they're meant to replicate.
... science, in finding out how things work, will - whether it wants to or not - corrode "religion".
Brain science is just now doing for "spiritual experience" what it did for "taste/smell" in the past. Our taste/smell/texture senses are adapted to help us seek what we need to survive. Our "spiritual experience" senses are adapted and attuned to sensing and discriminating between non-material realities. We just need to listen to those senses and find what is true ultimate and spiritual sustenance.
As for the science of "universal acid", spiritual experimentalists/empiricists have long already been experimenting to find the best spiritual "flavor enhancers". Studies have shown that buddhists are typically the happiest and most fulfilled of all spiritual practitioners. Buddhism is a spiritual experience highly optimized for pleasing taste and is the equivalent of a spiritual pop tart ... tasty, but ultimately empty and something you can't live on.
Science can study both taste/smell and also the effects of those good (proper sustenance) and bad (obesity/bulemia/profit-from-unhealthy-food) things these senses lead us to seek. Science will be able to help us understand our "spiritual experience" faculties, but unfortunately science will ultimately have nothing to say about the substance of interactions with the non-material world as that is beyond what science can measure and evaluate.
So while we study the scientific basis for spiritual sensation with no hope of rational judgment of the outcome of spiritual experience, many will seek and/or facilitate proper spiritual food (a la balanced meals); vacuous spiritual food (a la pop tarts); harmful spiritual food (a la flavored everclear). Others will choose and advocate spiritual starvation.
Abraham of ancient Ur understood Jehovah was offering true spiritual food and in faith believed and journeyed far from home to cultivate that experience. It's up to us to recognize that same offer and avoid the empty and harmful.
Religious belief requires the suspension of rationality in favor of the irrational.
ReplyDeleteSome people reconcile the contradictions sufficiently to fully value the rationality of science while still maintaining their irrational religious faiths. I don't care what you say, this juggling requires a great deal of mental facility on the part of the individual, if it is to be done well.
Sadly, the vast majority of people can only manage to this juggling act poorly, and rely far too much on their inherited cultural myths to make decisions, over reasoned thought.
I am an atheist, and choose not juggle at all. Frees me from maintaining all that useless cognitive overhead.
Karl: I went and viewed the "virtual out of body" video and read an associated story about it. It's interesting that by using virtual reality goggles, they could trick people into feeling like they were having an OOBE.
ReplyDeleteHowever unless I am missing something it does not prove that whenever people are having an OOBE that it is a trick that has been played on the mind. At most it has shown that ONE way to have a sensation that some test subjects report in such a way that it sounds similar to reports of "real" OOBE's is to put on virtual reality goggles and have someone stroke your back with a feather. That doesn't prove that ALL OOBE's are illusions.
I'm no logic expert but it sounds like the researchers are saying "you can cause sensations similar to experience B by using stimulus A" and you are taking that to mean "if you have experience B it must mean it was caused by stimulus A", or "experience B can be explained as being caused by stimulus A". That's not true, though. A causing B does not prove that all B's are caused by A's.
There's not much else to be said, I think, because I can't prove to you that my experiences were real, and you can't prove to me that they were caused by some neurochemical fluke rather than by my consciousness leaving my body. I'll just leave it at this: I think it's worth keeping an open mind on this, and if you're curious about it there are books that will work to teach you the method so you can experience it yourself. Academic discussions are one thing; actually feeling yourself separate from your body, float in the air, go places, experience things, and then float back down into your body and "click" into place - and all without ever losing consciousness or going to sleep - is another thing entirely. In my experience it pretty much renders the academic discussion moot.
@Fjordman Europeans certainly were not as intelligent in the past, when they were more Christian. Average IQ is going up by several points per decade, and someone with an average IQ from 1900 would count as retarded today.
ReplyDeleteThere's also a strong correlation in between IQ and how liberal a person is. In this case, I doubt the correlation is causation, but the correlation is given by the longer exposure of intelligent people to education, which is partly scientific and partly liberal indoctrination - just like JudgeStone pointed out.
ReplyDeleteAgain, IQ doesn't define how smart a person is in the end, but the ability of a person to be smart. Also, expecting someone who is brilliant in a field - like a scientist, to have great understanding of politics is naive and it's a logical fallacy to appeal to the authority someone has in a field to how they interpret things outside of it. For example, I am willing to bet that someone who graduated middle school 50 years ago was more intelligent than someone now, even though someone now has a higher potential to grasp that knowledge earlier due to a higher IQ.
@MnMark: You seem to be saying that rational people should open themselves to alternative forms of evidence, such as subjective interpretations of experiences. We are all aware that such experiences do happen, and perhaps religions wouldn't exist without them. What I want to know is why you think this type of evidence is solid?
ReplyDeleteIt's an important difference between being intelligent and being wise. The problem with today's Westerners is that they've gained so much in intelligence, while losing the basics of traditional wisdom. That's why one can see some of the most intelligent people on the planet, such as the Scandinavians or the Brits, leading the world top of liberal suicidal policies.While some nations less gifted in the IQ department from Eastern Europe and the Balkans still show some common sense regarding their survival as groups.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I consider myself an agnostic. But an overwhelming majority of my fellow countrymen identify themselves as Orthodox Christians. It's an important mark of our national identity. And I respect it, as the ancient Greeks showed respect for "the gods of the city", irrespective of their personal convictions. I don't contradict them, I don't mock their belief, I respect the rites and customs of our church, I support our national church in front of the attacks from the liberal activists (their last attempt was the remove the icons from the walls of the public schools, because the icons might offend the religious minorities). I think this is the wise thing to do. We will survive as long as "the gods of the city" are still with us.
We are all aware that such experiences do happen, and perhaps religions wouldn't exist without them. What I want to know is why you think this type of evidence is solid?
ReplyDeleteYou're right of course, it's not solid evidence for purposes of convincing other people. It proves nothing to other people. But it's solid evidence for me, personally. I suppose it raises the question of what we really know. When I feel myself separate from my body, then move around, move through floors and walls while feeling a sort of thickness in the "air" when I'm doing it, go places, meet other entities, then return to my body, feeling a click as I re-merge with it, and open my eyes without having been asleep or unconscious - well for me that's as solid as evidence gets. I know that was not a dream or hallucination because there was no "waking up", no transition in states of consciousness. I was normal awake "me" the whole time. If that was a dream or hallucination, then I am still in it and have been for a couple decades. Which I suppose is possible. Maybe I'm actually sitting in a mental institution right now hallucinating that I'm a middle aged man typing a comment on a blog. But I have to go on the assumption that I'm not hallucinating, and that I can tell the difference even if only after the fact. And so all I can say is that if it is possible for me to know anything, I know the OOBEs I had were not hallucinations.
But again, your're right, my personal experiences prove nothing to anyone else, which is why all I can rather lamely do is say "try it yourself and you'll see".
As an educator for some 50 odd years I can attest to the inferiority of today's students. Mark Bauerlein's great book called THE DUMBEST GENERATION enumerated the evidence for their broad and unyielding stupidity. I corresponded with Bauerlein and disagreed only on the causes. I told him that he ignored liberal philosophy as a cause, something he seemed to concede.
ReplyDeleteThe widespread use of computers and electronic gadgets has created increasingly adroit minds at skillfull navigation that solves various problems and quickly provides information.This type of thinking actually relates to several components of IQ tests and may contribute to the so-called Flynn Effect. Thus, IQ is not increasing every decade in real genetic terms so much as we are literally stimulating brain functions that were barely touched by the environment of 1900 or 1930.
While IQ surely underwent modification since the great diaspora of the past 50,000 years,it varied very considerably geographically, as Lynn's research has shown. The Flynn Effect may be in part nutritional but it is far more likely an artifact of increasing environmental stimulation of brain functions rarely used in the simpler, elementary school only world of our ancestors.WhenJews came to America and settled in NYC, most worked exceedingly menial jobs to survive. With the evolution of society and a growing economy they quickly broke out by excelling in school. In a matter of decades Jews were attending college when most Americans were lucky to complete high school.From there they dominated professions like medicine and law.High IQ's-the Ashkenazi inheritance-sufficed to win in a real meritocracy.
Jews seem to violate the Flynn Effect but they supplied a rich home environment with chess and cross-word puzzles when most Americans were doing back-breaking factory or farm work.The case for a less stimulating early environment is a sound one.
The large jumps in cognitive proficiency discovered by Bruce Lahn and his colleagues were highly unusual events at 37,000 years ago and 5800 years ago.We have yet to fully understand the role of microcephalin and ASPM but they seem to have large brain development payoffs in modifying other brain-building genes.
IQ is, as rebelliousvanilla points out, the capacity to be smart and not a total guarantee.As Lewis Terman discovered long ago, high IQ kids grow up to be healthier, happier, and richer than others. The Flynn Effect should not be taken as evidence that today's youth are smarter because IQ is genetically based and terribly resistant to short term effects. We are likely about the same as our ancestors but the electronic marvels around us make us much dumber in literacy, cultural knowledge and aesthetic sensibility while stimulating relatively unusused abilities such as spatial reasoning and logical analysis.It is a tradeoff technological progress combined with liberal parenting has effected relentlessly, but Europe must endure the same fate.In fact, Flynn himself detected a drop in IQ in British teens between 1980 and 2008.Again, my surmise is that culture itself can create declines if it is either unstimulating or so disorderly that cognition becomes less effective. If Theodore Dalrymple is a good observor, then Britain's problem is more of the latter.
@MnMark
ReplyDeleteBut I have to go on the assumption that I'm not hallucinating, and that I can tell the difference even if only after the fact. And so all I can say is that if it is possible for me to know anything, I know the OOBEs I had were not hallucinations.
Mark, I find this pretty interesting. I wonder if after having an OOBE and upon 're-merging', have you ever written down detailed accounts of what you experienced and where you went? Have you ever then tried to revisit the same place in a normal waking state to see if it agrees with what you perceived to have experienced while OOB. If I were to ever have such an experience, it seems like I'd have a natural curiosity to try to verify it (if possible). Your experience?
Not a facetious question. I'm genuinely interested.
Dear atheists, the purpose of this comment is just to say that I am atheism resistant, not necessarily to convince you. I make things worse for you in the next comment.
ReplyDeleteLike Bible refers, dogs will return again and again to sniff their own vomit.
The quote content by Dennis has been expressed much better by other atheists, like second generation Frankfurt school cultural marxist Jürgen Habermas in Communication and Evolution of The Society:
http://www.amazon.com/Communication-Evolution-Society-Jurgen-Habermas/dp/080701513X
However it is equally wrong. Christianity never was a science. It is not it's purpose. Christianity never had the steering goals comparable to science. Bible may explain some things within the limitations of people thousands of years ago, but it doesn't reduce the importance and relevance of striving towards God, in the same way than our present scientific mistakes don't reduce the recorded meaning of our striving towards God for people that come 5000 years after us.
Every experience is relayed to us through our brains. It is possible that science may imitate religious experiences, in the same way that movies imitate visual experiences. Even if the neuron firing pattern in the brains would be exactly the same, the imitation is not same thing and doesn't tell us about the origins of genuine religious experiences.
If God wants to do something, he does it in the way he wants without our having ability to have influence on it, know about it or study it.
Martin Luther's experience? Maybe God primed his thoughts to react religiously to a particular storm. Maybe God influenced weather to create a special storm. Maybe God influenced him directly to create religious experience. Maybe it was combinations of those. Maybe God did something else.
Whatever it was, we will never have the ability to study God or his actions. If we try, it is either impossible or God will guide us to error.
My intention here is not to claim anything about the origin of God one way or another, just to deduct from science that atheist scientists trust.
ReplyDeleteThere is a topic in science that has caused anxiety to atheist scientists. The likelihood of intelligent design and thus God arises from science. Read first the following three texts. Filter away any religious/ Christian influence in your mind if you want:
http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/quotes.html#Nemqn50e99O1
http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/designun.html#ikv8XFV5HU6p
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmo_03.htm#FO
Atheists scientist have tried to get rid of the enormous accuracy of constants, forces and ratios needed for our universe and life by invoking multiple universes. That means that when there is and have been enormous number of universes, the overwhelming majority of them uninhabitable, there is and have been also huge number of habitable universes. Thus our universe is not special, just one of the random habitable universes. But if there is and have been huge number of habitable universes during extremely long time scales, then it is probable that in one of them was a being, perhaps many beings that developed to the level of superbeings and one of them rules the multiple universes. Our God.
*****
A little bit critique of Darwinism. Whatever turns out to be true in each issue dealt with, Darwinism is not so settled as it's advocates try to present.
Jonathan Wells has received two Ph.D.s, one in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California at Berkeley, and one in Religious Studies from Yale University. He has worked as a postdoctoral research biologist at the University of California at Berkeley and the supervisor of a medical laboratory in Fairfield, California, and he has taught biology at California State University in Hayward.
http://www.discovery.org/a/10661
*****
Song and blond female beauty:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRROjP1L_F4
a Finn: I don't know whether you noticed, but this post did not contain any pro-atheist or anti-theist arguments. It merely pointed out some characteristics of atheists vs. believers. Higher IQ people are also more liberal, and I don't argue in favor of liberalism.
ReplyDeleteJust thought I'd point that out.
Dr Plokta: "Average IQ is going up by several points per decade."
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry, but I don't buy that. Consider me a skeptic regarding the whole Flynn Effect. During the Paleolithic era the intelligence of Europeans rose on average by one IQ point or less per millennium compared to sub-Saharan Africans. That of Ashkenazi Jews rose by perhaps one IQ point per century between the eighth and the eighteenth centuries, and that may well represent the fastest rise of mean IQ for any ethnic group in human history. But several IQ points per decade now with our degenerate culture, unhealthy food and low-IQ mass immigration? No chance in hell....
Re: Mangan
ReplyDeleteOk. But I assume you noticed the tone of the contents and some of the comments. They are recurring themes.
If the IQ of, say, more than half the population was behind a bottleneck due to poor nutrition and childhood diseases, I don't see why IQ couldn't shoot up considerably in a relatively short time. By analogy, it didn't take long at all for people in many countries, the Netherlands and Japan come to mind, to have an average height several inches taller than just a couple generations ago. But using your logic, that couldn't happen.
ReplyDeleteThe upper classes in Europe were always taller and smarter than the masses, so now the masses are catching up.
I'm no expert, but I always perceived the Flynn Effect as similar to muscle building.
ReplyDeleteLet's say an average guy of 1,85m length and 85kgs would hit the gym 5 times a week and watch his diet very severely for six months or so. This man will certainly lose weight very fast and his body would become more muscular, he'd sink to 78kgs or so. Indeed, his physique would change considerably, especially if he kept this program up for years.
His 'normal' body weight, without the fitness/diet program, would still be 85kgs and less muscular, but because of his schedual he could maintain his weight considerably lower and muscle mass higher. He would have changed himself, because of this. This man would, even with this program, hit a wall. He'd realize that, short of steroids, he couldn't get leaner anymore.
Same as the FE. If we'd get stuck on an island without intellectual stimuli, health care (natal care) and varied food, we'd get duller. Our children, born on the island would be brought up without any intellectual stimuli and would even be more duller. Their genes, however, did not change -- too fast.
We could and should organize society in such a way that people reach their potential, but potential does not mean there are no physical boundries. Most people will never become as muscular as Schwarzenegger, no matter how much they work out and watch their food; most people will never be up to physics PhD's, no matter how stimulating their environment.
In Scandinavia, the place with the highest HDI (year after year after year the best) the FE seems to have stagnated. This is why I think the FE hit a wall -- the wall being their genes, which can't be expressed 'better'.
Just, my two cents.
John D. wrote: Have you ever then tried to revisit the same place in a normal waking state to see if it agrees with what you perceived to have experienced while OOB. If I were to ever have such an experience, it seems like I'd have a natural curiosity to try to verify it (if possible). Your experience?
ReplyDeleteMy experiences were mainly of very nearby locations, such as the room and hallway of the places I lived in at the time. So there wasn't much to use for confirmation as you mention. The other problem is that it was difficult to control where I was when out of body. For instance, one hot summer afternoon I decided to take a nap but before I could fall asleep, I floated out of my body, down to the foot of the bed, and bobbed around on the floor like a balloon, out of control. I got in a panic because I couldn't seem to get back to my body, and thrashed around above it until a woman's voice said, right behind my ear, "stop it!" and I stopped thrashing and calmed down and floated back down and clicked into place. It takes practice to learn to control where you're going. And I became less interested in spiritual matters, actually, once I started having these experiences because I now knew that I would survive my death and so making the most of this life right now while I have it became my concern.
I highly recommend the three books by Robert Monroe on his experiences ("Journeys Out of the Body" was the first - though his later two books are better, I think, because he'd had decades more experience by the time he wrote them - and there's an online PDF of the book here). He was a radio executive and engineer who began spontaneously having these experiences in the 1950s and learned to control them to a great degree before he died in the 1990s. He reports a variety of confirmation experiences involving friends and family who saw him while he was out of body - one of whom got a bruise on her side where he "pinched" her while out of body. He's a very reasonable man, not some wild-eyed shyster. His three books are fascinating, especially when you start having these experiences and they confirm the things he wrote about. He eventually founded an institute to study how to induce these experiences with sound frequencies.
I didn't intend to go off on this subject to this degree but wanted to respond to your question.
Thanks for taking the time to explain, Mark. I find the subject fascinating. Would like to experience that for myself.
ReplyDeleteMnMark,
ReplyDeleteIt does seem that if one had even the most rudimentary control of where one went during the out-of-body experiences you describe, it would be a trivial matter to determine whether they actually are what they seem, or are a subjective illusion. One would need only to read something written on a piece of paper in another room, etc.
Have you ever tried anything like this?
(Count me with John D. here - I'm not being facetious, and am genuinely interested.)
Malcolm,
ReplyDeleteIt takes practice to learn to control your movement when you are out of body. Your perception is different and your movement is a function of your will, which can be difficult to focus since it seems like one's emotional state is more vivid there too. You also find yourself getting "snapped back" to your body before maybe you want to go, for instance if your body is cold or in a position where your arm is going to sleep or you need to use the bathroom. It seems to be something you definitely get better at with practice, but I only once managed to make it happen by willing it. The other times it happened on its own.
That non-physical dimension is actually quite a few different "layers" of "focus", the ones "nearest" the physical plane being the ones where you can move about as though you are a sort of ghost. But it's easy when you are new at it to have difficulty maintaining the focus and then either finding yourself in another "plane" or else snapping back to your body.
It's all very fascinating and life-changing. And what's so cool is that it's there for anyone to learn to do it. Read Robert Monroe's books and other books and the techniques for learning it are described. It takes patience - it didn't happen for me until about two years after I first learned about it, got interested, and started to pay attention to the whole thing - but if you are interested you will succeed. The fact is we all do this every night as we fall asleep. You know that sensation you have sometimes as you near sleep where your body suddenly jerks? That happens when you start to separate from your body before your mind is fully asleep and your semi-awake consciousness (which fully believes it will die outside the body, as we are implicitly taught in our culture) notices the separation starting to happen, gets scared, and jerks you suddenly back into your body, making your body twitch. Once you learn not to be afraid of it, you can just go ahead and "roll" right out of your body without losing consciousness. As Monroe points out in his book, it's easier to do this after you've slept a few hours - otherwise you tend to just fall deeply into sleep as you relax deeply in preparation for the separation.
"...large numbers of the original immigrants to North America, i.e. those who founded the U.S., came because of religious persecution...the current American population has to some extent inherited the religious beliefs of the founding population"
ReplyDeleteWithin the U.S., this does not hold up at all. The original immigrants to the U.S. who came for religious reasons were primarily the Puritans of Massachusetts and the Quakers and related believers who came to Pennsylvania (also Catholics in Maryland, though their numbers were small). For the most part, the descendents of these people (except for those who became Mormons) are not particularly religious today.
The southern colonies, on the other hand, were not religious settlements, and most of the original immigrants did not move to North America for religious reasons. Yet it is their descendents who make the American South, rather than New England or Pennsylvania, the most religious part of America today.
Cornelius Troost, I can attest the inferiority of today's students and I am merely 19. But this doesn't mean that they have a lower IQ than their ancestors, provided not much out of group breeding took place and standards improved, which is the case of the last 50 years(even though from what I see from foreigners, out group breeding started to be more popular in the West). If you do a ceteris paribus analysis and consider in group genetics constant, it's normal that IQ rose along with the better environmental conditions. Now, this just means that the capacity of people to comprehend, probably went up, but the tools they function with are fautly(liberal ideology). Also, you have to realize that once someone's mind is formed, you have to overcome tremendous cognitive dissonance in order to change it, if they invested emotional capital in the ideas they have, no matter how big their capacity to reason is. And most people today have a relatively big emotional capital invested in liberalism.
ReplyDeleteAlso, nobody can deny that today's environment is more challenging intellectually than the one there was at the end of world war two.
a Finn, I'm more or less non-religious, but I can't say that God doesn't exist(even though you are not required to prove a negative). Evolution is a scientific fact, but still it doesn't explain how life began, just how we got to where we are. So, there is a probability that if God exists and created us, he might have started life and let us evolve. To be honest, I wish I could be religious because I would just become a nun due to the huge disgust I have for today's society. lol
I have a question related to this. Anyone has researched which part of the DNA intelligence comes from? yDNA, mtDNA or autosomal DNA?
When I feel myself separate from my body, then move around, move through floors and walls while feeling a sort of thickness in the "air" when I'm doing it, go places, meet other entities, then return to my body, feeling a click as I re-merge with it, and open my eyes without having been asleep or unconscious - well for me that's as solid as evidence gets. -MnMark
ReplyDeleteMoving through floors and walls would be a nifty trick. Should be easy to just do a circuit round the room while playing poker and see every other player’s hand. Or at the casino, whip under the blackjack table and come up through it to see the dealers face down card and gain a big advantage. Or is personal advantage against the rules of OOBE? Or is it useless because you’ve got your eyes closed? If this OOBE thing were true it would alter the whole way we look at the Universe and that’s pretty serious so it is mighty peculiar you haven’t even bothered to test it. Look, MnMark this would be the easiest thing in the world to prove, as Malcolm points out, but you can’t do it, let’s face it, there’s no such thing as OOBE.
Re: Rebelliousvanilla
ReplyDeleteIt tells us something that atheist physicists and other atheists expected physics would somehow prove that God does not exist, but now physics of atheists inadvertantly points towards God.
Proposed atheist fix, the multiple universes is a horrible theory. There is not a shred of evidence for it and it must assume what is in practice infinite number of universes. There are about 10 to the power of 83 atoms in our universe. The numerous ultra fine tunings and other fine tunings in our universe ensures that there would have to be so many multiple universes, that 10 to the power of 83 condensed to one atom and compared to all our universe's atoms is not nearly enough. And despite it's bad quality it still points towards God. If atheists say there are in practice infinite number of universes, then we can consequently also say that superintelligent, all powerful God is in practice a certainty.
This quote summarized it well:
Robert Jastrow: "For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries." (14)
For me, God knew that science would inflate people's overconfidence and rebellion against God, so he underwrote the universe so powerfully and unmistakably, that it is like direct evidence about God. Those who look will see.
One more:
http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/cosmoconstant.html#0R1uf9ef5tAp
God has always been with us.
Rebelliousvanilla, you are rightfully disgusted with society, but find something local you like and can live with.
ReplyDeleteFor rebelliousvanilla:
ReplyDeleteFor age 19 you are certainly precocious.
Your quip about the postwar West versus today favoring today for intellectual stimulation is naive at best.Problems such as the Cold War, political upheaval in your neck of the woods, spy scandals,etc. were abundant after WWII.It was a time of much political difficulty across the globe, the rise of existentialism, and soon the first signs of the Civil Rights Movement in America.David Reisman's The Lonely Crowd was a portant.
That said, today we are innundated with electronics that require a small amount of cleverness for operation, but little else. The political atmosphere is far worse because of our culture wars based upon the clear victory of liberalism and the constant brainwashing by the Left.In the clash of cultures there may be stimulation but it is enervating and sickening to live in a closed-minded society claiming quite the opposite about themselves.A PC world is not necessarily one where good thinking is respected or promoted. Indeed, it is the opposite.
Secondly,MnMark is a nice colleague here but is naive about OOBE. As I write in my book, a team of scientists at a Zurich hospital were probing the brain when they touched the angular gyrus region.The woman immediately reacted with an OOBE.The electrical stimulation disrupted the integrity of the perceptual apparatus and caused confusion as the patient tried to create a coherent experience from a faulty perception. So-called spiritual experiences are disturbances of the percepual apparatus but have no bearing upon extermal reality nor spiritual "reality."
[ ... ] link is being shared on Twitter right now. @zenx, an influential author, said RT @1ndus: Xtreme [ ... ]
ReplyDeleteCornelius Troost, the complexity of politics is deeply irrelevant because I doubt many people bothered to discern them - I doubt housewives cared about the Cold War and how it should be solved nor did children(and from my reading, the influences of the environment on IQ is pronounced in children). Today though, we have all this virtual world that teases our brain and our perceptions. I mean, we do get faulty beliefs skills and perceptions from it, but our capacity to reason through the prism of the ideas we incorporate in our belief system is probably bigger than it was.
ReplyDeleteObviously, politically and culturally, the world was much pleasant in 1950 and I think I would have rather lived in the second world war Western Europe and enjoy the interwar and the couple of post war decades than live now in it.
There is a significant difference between religious faith and religious observance. While plenty of people in the pews may have doubts about the existence of God, they are certain that the moral admonitions to good behavior are valid. Meanwhile many who ignore those restrictions on behavior still profess faith in the supernatural.
ReplyDeleteIn other words calculated as: "The numerous ultra fine tunings and other fine tunings in our universe ensures there would have to be so many multiple universes, that 10 to the power of 83 condensed to one atom and multiplied with the number of all of our universe's atoms is not nearly enough.
ReplyDeleteI'll say it again: the fact that a scientist touching someone's brain with a probe in a certain spot can generate an experience of a certain type in the subject is no proof that OOBEs are simply a brain electrical fluke.
ReplyDeleteIf A causes B, it does not prove that all B's are caused by A. That's a logical fallacy.
My belief, based on my own first-hand experiences, is that we are beings of pure energy that use bodies, via the medium of the brain, while we are alive. If that is true, as I believe it is, then obviously there is some electromagnetic sequence of events occuring by which we meld with the brain or separate from it. It may be that this scientist found the right spot to stimulate with his electrical probe that triggers in some way an aspect of that separation. He may be duplicating with his probe something that we can learn to do with our consciousness. Robert Monroe's institute has had great success using certain frequencies of sound - different ones in each ear - to help people easily have an OOBE.
It's interesting how firmly some people want to hold to the view that we are not actually created, divine, conscious beings, but that what we think of as "I" or "Me" is simply the side-effect of some meaningless electical phenonmena occuring in slabs of flesh we call "brains". How curious that the electrical side-effect gets "intellectual satisfaction", or whatever it would want to call it, from believing that it has no meaning, no purpose, and is nothing more or less than a bunch of atoms that happened to bump into one another in a certain random way. Weird.
Here's an analogy: imagine that we are all drivers of our own cars. No one can see the drivers, they can only see the cars - each other's cars and their own car. Many drivers believe there is no such thing as a driver, there's only cars that have really sophisticated on-board computers that SEEM like they might be drivers.
But some drivers report having found a way to get outside their cars by pulling an ejection lever, and they see other drivers outside their cars while they're outside their own. But no one who is in their cars can see those drivers outside their cars, and those who haven't experienced it themselves are justifiably skeptical. All they've ever seen with their own eyes are cars.
Along comes a scientist who figures out how to reach in the window and pull the ejection lever a little so the driver partly ejects from the car briefly.
Aha! says the scientist - I have proven there are no drivers, because I was able to make the car report that it felt like it was outside itself for a moment.
Um, no, I'd say. You haven't proven anything at all about whether there are drivers or not. All you've proven is that you can pull a lever that makes the driver - or the car, the scientist can't say which - report that he/it feels like it is outside itself for a moment. That's interesting, but it proves nothing about whether drivers exist or not.
Now I will grant you this - if you want to start with the premise that there is no such thing as a soul that can separate from a body, then this scientist's experiment gives you the ability to say that that premise has not yet been proven false. Because if OOBEs can be proven to actually exist, it would seem to prove that there IS a soul. But being able to say that your premise that there is no soul has not been disproven yet is not the same as being able to say that the non-existence of the soul has been proven. The most you can say is "I can keep believing that there are no such things as souls, because a scientist said he made someone feel like they were out of their body by prodding their brain, which would be an alternative explanation for OOBEs." What you CAN'T say is "We now have proof there are no souls," nor can you say "We have proof there are no OOBEs."
MnMark, the whole thing though comes to this - you don't have to prove a negative. Someone who makes a positive claim has to back it up. Like this, I can say that you are a murderer and you can't prove that you're not.
ReplyDeleteStill, what you say is interesting and I will read that book you recommended about OOBE.
It's interesting how firmly some people want to hold to the view that we are not actually created, divine, conscious beings, but that what we think of as "I" or "Me" is simply the side-effect of some meaningless electical phenonmena occuring in slabs of flesh we call "brains". How curious that the electrical side-effect gets "intellectual satisfaction", or whatever it would want to call it, from believing that it has no meaning, no purpose, and is nothing more or less than a bunch of atoms that happened to bump into one another in a certain random way. Weird. MnMark
ReplyDeleteIt is not weird at all, in fact it is the very opposite of weird. Weird is believing you can travel outside of your body and converse with ‘entities’ – any child could tell you that. Next you’ll be travelling to different planets and galaxies and other such silliness. Look, all this paranormal stuff never gets beyond the weird stage, it doesn’t develop like a real science does and that’s a sure sign of its uselessness. Report back when you can demonstrate something useful like being able to read a notice pinned to the wall in the room next door.
perhaps the most interesting, the decline of religious belief in the 20th century due to the Flynn Effect.
ReplyDeleteWouldn't it be more accurate to say "the decline of religious belief in the 20th century correlating with the Flynn Effect?"
In the context of discussing the evidence for atheism correlating with IQ, saying that the rise of atheism is due to the Flynn Effect begs the question.
For rebelliuosvanilla:
ReplyDeleteFor 19 you are clever indeed, but your belief that the reasoning of today's youth is superior is probably wrong.Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation thoroughly dismisses this tendency to enoble youth, as Rousseau once did, as poppycock.
Every kind of standardized testing done in America since the virtual boom has failed to show unusual gains in literacy. Dumbing down of schooling to accommodate blacks and Hispanics has proceeded apace.The literacy of our youth is quite pathetic these days.
The virtual world of unlimited choice leaves immature minds to revel in their immaturity. Few will seek real challenges but will instead gossip and preen in social circles. Their ability to reason critically is stunted by the quality of their company and the PC barriers to courageous thinking.
Those whose intelligence is really superior in math and technology do very well, as we all know, and these engineer types never worried much about literature or the arts anyway. The problem-solving they do in creating new chip designs or better software are fairly esoteric parts of society and no measure of our general ability to reason.
The eminent scholar E.D. Hirsch has often proposed changes in America's schools to restore knowledge as an urgent aspect of all learning. Knowledge is proven essential as the key to critical reading, a skill becoming extinct in America. Those of us who are older benefitted from the era when knowledge counted and books were read in abundance. No more.
So I cannot agree with your rosy picture. Illiteracy is rampant here and newspapers are dying.I see no evidence of better thinking but for the Flynn Effect, which may have little to do with "g" after all.What Bauerlein sees is a lack of educated adults guarding against low standards,ahistoricism, vulgarity, and trendiness.Civilization itself depends uopn the defense of youth against corrosive forces like porn, hip-hop, and pop culture's degenerate side.Virtual reality contains many diversions into this cesspool.In America we also face the post-modern ethos across the liberal spectrum and the current "project" of Obama to make low achieving blacks into Ivy League scholars.I see no hope in the face of new crusades to transform reality.
Cornelius Troost, if I would be saying that the young people of today have superior reasoning skills, I would be wrong. There is a difference in between having the capacity to be reasonable and actually doing it. For example, I had the capacity to be logical and analytical, like I am today, even when I was doing drugs and partying my way to self-destruction. Just because I had the capacity, it doesn't mean I was. I was just a pathetic 'princess mentality' idiot. If you'd ask me if today's people are more rational than people a century ago, I would tell you that obviously not. They're actually worse off by any standards - math, literature and everything probably. The case I make is that they have a better capacity to reason, in the sense that if they were provided with the right tools, they would do it. For example, I don't think that white American women are stupider than Romanian women(they're actually probably better based on IQ differences), but no Romanian woman would go run alone in a dubious park filled with minorities who disproportionately hurt the majority like Chelsea King. Most girls here who go with a cab home after parties usually go with a male friend of theirs which leaves with the cab to take him too after that, she paying the fee to her place and him to his. But we are not told that we are invincible, that there's no difference in between races and so on. For example, all the Romanian women that I know of wouldn't take the cab driven by a non-white person and we talk about it explicitly. We are more reasonable than white American women, despite white American women having a better capacity to be.
ReplyDeleteI have a really good example to give you about capacity versus doing it, but it's too personal to actually say on a public site. I already said too many things online in public, which will force me in the near future to write under a different name and not say anything about my real life.
About the youth, things will get worse before they get better. When the pain of destroying the current belief system will be smaller than the real world consequences of it, we will witness a big revolution in the way in which people think. This is why I want the current paradigm to fail as soon as possible - I know and feel the real world consequences of a belief system I don't have and that makes me see the truth(not cognitive dissonant) instead of ignoring it like most people do.
So yes, you are right, the situation isn't rosy, it's abysmal. I wasn't referring to how people are, but their capacity.
For rebelliousvanilla,
ReplyDeleteI understand you much better now. My idol as a college student seeking a doctorate was Michael Scriven, a philospher of science from New Zealand stationed at Indiana university. In public debates he defended atheism with glorious analytic thinking that was magnified by his blond hair and good looks. He seemed a model of the best in human nature. He and I cooperated while he was at Berkeley and I at UCLA. However, my book on critical thinking for teachers was rejected by my publisher only after I had done 10 chapters!! I was left high and dry. Scriven did a book called REASONING for McGraw-Hill and they also censored him because an editor thought it too abstract!! So we both realized that editors are not inclined to offer "how-to" books in this domain. It was very frustrating.
If reasoning is related to problem-solving it is probably the core element in the "g" of IQ. Thus, people like Ashkenazi Jews have more of it than others. However, they also helped lead the Sixties revolution and transformed our schools into training grounds for moral relativism and muticulturalism.They were prominent in the Bolshevik revolution in 1917.Thus, their reasoning is not impressive in the arena of politics, whatever it may be in academia.They assiduously defend radical leftism today.While high IQ's are a blessing in many areas of work, they offer no guarantees of sound thinking in the political and social realms.The capacity to do good thinking, mostly a function of IQ, seems limited by the kinds of ideology dominant in any society.In a corrupt Russia, for example, many brilliant hackers do crime rather than legal activities.Bulgaria was run until recently by former Olympic wrestlers whose IQ's can't be too high, but enough to create wealth amidst a political transformation.Mafias can substitute amoral criminality for IQ if they have enough governmental support. The Russian mafia in America is entirely Jewish, so they can readily combine IQ and psychopathy.
In short we can't change IQ in significant ways and we can't teach better reasoning perhaps because it is bound up with IQ in the first place. Scriven and I tried, but we never got to first base.Teaching logic is always a good idea, but applying it may often find emotional bias lurking under the table.