quoting post from

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/13...eists-1133560/


not the most recent survey as the thread shows, but it's the one that i'm aware of that polled national academy members

I'm 99% sure it wouldn't be more then 30%!

Lol i hope you are trolling. My guess would be 75%+.

I would be very interested in some of your sources...
Where does your assumption come from?

Ever did serious research about the great philosophers, thinkers & writers of mankind?

Actually most of them didn't deny the existence of God!

I assume that many intelligent people realize without evidence, how can god exist. Also evolution and science highly disprove god. And since intelligent people generally are realists and don't hope for miracles.... I would assume they can logically predict that a god doesn't exist.

This is what I love.

A religion that preaches love, forgiveness and grace telling us we are all going to hell for not believing a fairy tale. Apparently, you can live a truly good life. Do wonderful things for other people. Be a kind and loving person. But if you can't bring yourself to truly believe in an ancient book filled with ridiculous stories written by people who had (0) understanding of the world they lived in, you are condemned to eternal torture and anguish. All this by a loving God.

It is really the ultimate irony.

Someone once said: Logic always sees 3 possibilities but there are 1000.

You can't predict logically that a God doesn't exist. Just like you can't that he does. That's what always made conversations complicated.
But Let me point on something...
If there would be evidence, proof that God exists: Evolutionists, anthropologists, neurologists & psychoanalysts would all have come to the conclusion that there must be God. Therefore there is evidence, let's say a formula... reasoned just like every scientific proof, the entire bible would be disproved! Because it would affect our free-will. [btw science didn't disprove God]
It has to remain an act of faith! That's what you have to think about! You always want to make God to an object, but it will remain a subject.
Faith has nothing to do with intelligence.
To proof that proposition I just have to name Plato, for many of the great philosophers he was the greatest!
In the Theory of Forms he comes to the result: Good (agathón) is the highest instance! It's the all-transcending One! The Good is united with godly conscious. Therefore united with the creator (Demiurge).

In the figurative sense believing in God is believing in good!
And to choose good is the function of life!

I agree with you science doesn't prove or disprove a possible creator of the universe. But does the above mean people like Moses and others who had proof of God lost their free will and had no faith?

Moses was a righteous man in God's eyes (even though he murdered an Egyptian in his early age).
According to the bible God looks at the heart. Therefore he knows our (/Moses) will.

This didn't rally answer my question. You said if there was proof of God there could be no free will and no faith. I have to assume everyone in the bible with proof had no free will and no faith. This includes those who knew about Jesus' divinity. If you are in the divinity camp.

Yeah. Maybe I didn't make it clear enough!
As I already said God sees the heart. God revealed himself to Moses etc. because he already knew him, his will, his motivation and his actions: Everything that he would have done.
If Moses wouldn't choose the "righteous" path, (even before God revealed himself) he wouldn't been chosen to lead Israel out of Egypt.

Not to say that there is no choice because God knew everything; even before creation. This often leads to misunderstandings.
Just because everything is already known by God, doesn't mean everything is determined.

I can't explain it well enough to get in deeper because of my command of english

Alright. Still think this means they had no free will or faith...

I believe there are many people in the US who don't believe, or who essentially believe because they think they are "supposed to", who still answer "Yes" when asked if they believe in god.

As the number of people who do admit to non-belief creeps higher and higher, I think we will ultimately reach a critical mass that will legitimize non-belief for many of these people who will then finally feel comfortable admitting it.

My personal estimate, based on absolutely nothing but intuition and conversations I've had with people, is that the true percentage of non-believers in the US is probably closer to 33%.

When the number of "public" non-believers hits 20-25%, we'll see an explosion of the rest of these people also admitting to it which will bring us to, or close to, a majority of non-believers. I believe this will happen in as soon as 10 years or as many as 20 years.

Or, I could be completely wrong.

And they lived in which century? The people of today are much more likely to be atheists than the people of long ago.

wikipedia


totally agree

Is this really a response in any way?

@Wubbie...since you've cleverly informed us that you're from NYC, well, I think your sample is probably a bit biased. I bet the "de facto atheist" rate in NYC is 2x-3x higher than it is in the rest of the country. So if you're basing your impressions on conversations that you're having in the closest thing the US has to a bastion of enlightenment, then you're getting a skewed idea of the backwardness of the rest of this land of morons.

(travel to the far west end of your/our state, which is where I reside, if you'd like to converse with some people who'd probably shape your intuition a bit differently)

And obviously you could make the argument that Boston should get the nod as "closest thing the US has to a bastion of enlightenment" rather than NY. And there might even be more godless major American cities than NYC or Boston--Seattle, maybe? Portland? SF?

I love me some demographic research, so if anyone has an American atheist map, link that ****, heh

@MatteoBounce...clinging to Platonic Forms in the 21st century does one as much good as clinging to a platonic relationship does for a sex-starved heterosexual male

Yeah, Plato was a great philosopher, if only for the allegory of the cave. But he was constrained by circumstance as much as any human. Reincarnate him today and he'd probably be leading the way in research on chaos theory. He'd be at the Santa Fe Institute enlightening us on the emergent properties of what had heretofore been mystified...such as consciousness itself.

Life is a cruel joke; accept it if you can, kill yourself if you can't. I myself am not sure whether or not I can accept it.

At the top of my head:

- cheating/collusion
- fields that are largely comprised of born again christians
- is a skill or trait important for winning poker tournaments highly valued by the born again christian community (-> compare to not being surprised about asians excelling at math)

I have conversed with people from many cities and states on the subject over many years.