Thursday, June 11, 2020

Believing God doesn't make you stupid

A few years ago, I found myself bemused at the statement that atheists have an, on average, higher intelligence than Christians.  Okay, although, I suspect confirmation bias may play a role.  The interesting thing though, is people with Asperger's Syndrome have a higher (on average) IQ than atheists.  Yours truly is an aspie.  If you are unfamiliar with the term, it refers to an autism spectrum disorder, that, since the revision of the DSM, is no longer a diagnosis in the United States.  Instead, people with it are generally place under a level of "autism spectrum disorder", which is helpful to me, as I basically describe it as "high functioning autism, without the language delay", as that is basically what it is.  Now, I am certainly no genius, but I'm not stupid.  I occasionally get mistaken for smart, which is odd, because when I was younger, people thought I was "slow", because I barely talked and how I talked.  Not sure how that correlates, but whatever.  I'm also a little confused about the people that think you can't believe in God and believe in science.  Many fundamentalists are young earth creationists, true, but saying they "don't believe in science", is inaccurate.  Many are farmers, fisherman, and hunters.  They know all too well about pollution, invasive species, and other things that can upset the ecosystem.  They make very good conservationists.  Being skeptical of Darwinian evolution isn't stupid, in some ways, it's common sense.  Darwin was a racist that did not believe white people and black people were the same species (I have an odd ethnic background), whilst some species can interbreed with other species (zebras and donkeys, for instance), they usually produce infertile offspring.  My own ancestry is from Europe, Africa, and Asia, and the Americas.  My mixed ethnic/racial background parents produced fertile offspring.  Know why?  Because humans from those continents are all the same species.  There is variation in the definition, but, generally speaking, a species is one that produce offspring with the opposite sex of the same critter.  Now, I don't doubt evolution, and I think the earth is much older than 6,000 years old, that isn't the point I am trying to make an argument for or against young earth creationism, it is to point out that one does not have to be a dummy to believe in God.  Einstein was no dummy, he believed in God (Einstein was, NOT an atheist, he was a deist), One of his colleagues, Georges Lemaître, the guy that came up with the Big Bang Theory, was a Catholic priest.  I'm interested in herpetology, and try to catalogue reptiles and amphibians, I can tell you the differences between every common box turtle subspecies.  Again, I ain't no dummy.
So, what point am I trying to make?  This, and only this.  Belief in God may seem foolish to those of the world, but to those of us in the world, but not of it, it's the other way around.  Psalm 53:1

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