(January 18, 2020 at 9:42 am)Daniel Wilson Wrote: I was very surprised to discover that only 10% of the Nobel prize winners are atheist:
If you've been sufficiently scolded, we can go back to the thread topic.
I think it's fair to say that Nobel Prize winners in any field, not just science, are almost certainly intelligent people. This includes the winners for literature.
And you're correct to say that this works against the assumption that intelligent people are likely to be atheist. It would be interesting to make a list of non-science Nobel recipients and correlate their religious beliefs.
But I think we have to face the fact that very intelligent people can be religious, and I think that if we spend time arguing that religion is bad or false we have a duty to understand why such people can reach different conclusions than we have. It would be closed-minded to assume that they choose religion out of ignorance, or mindless fear, or something like that.
Here's an example I've found recently: The French phenomenologist philosopher Michel Henry. He fought in the Resistance during WWII, then went on to get a brilliant degree from France's most difficult university. His dissertation committee looks like a list of Who's Who in European philosophy. He wrote important books in the tradition of Husserl, analyzing how the experiential lifeworld of humans determines how we see the world, and what implications this has for aesthetics and ethics.
It would be very difficult to argue that he is not intelligent.
After years of serious thought he came to argue that scientism has had a profoundly bad effect on our culture. And finally he decided that Christianity offered the best alternative to this. He was not a dumb literalist of the type people argue against on this forum.
They don't give Nobel Prizes for philosophy, but if they did he would have deserved one.
