I started reading this CTMU thing recently. I'm only a few pages in, but some thoughts:

1) The language is very obtuse, and it seems be purposefully so because it contains almost no definitions.
2) It's not science as much as an essay/several essays regarding science.
3) It seems to rest a lot on fairly dated philosophy

I won't claim to be superintelligent, but I'll arrogantly admit that one of my really solid strenghs is in understanding language. So far this thing seems a bit airy so far. There doesn't really seem to be a theory here, insofar as its more of a convoluted gap-concept drawing on the classic weaknesses of empiricism.

Now, ofcourse this guy could be operating at levels way above my understanding, but it certainly does not feel like it.

That's a tall order. Why don't you just request that God show himself to you?

There is always David Blaine, you can watch him do miracles with your own eyes

Newton was pretty smart and he spent like 95% of his time working on his skills as an alchemist.......so he wasn't that smart after all.
He also tried to mathematically decipher the prophecies of Daniel and find out when the world is gonna end, etc...
A real, real crackpot he was.

If you want to prove some ambiguous concepts as "souls" and "Gods" mathematically, well, that moves you automatically into the realm Newton was spending a lot of time in. Crackpotlandia.

As a side note: everything above an IQ of 155-160 is hard to test, so he probably came up with the tests himself. And he should know that there are roughly 7 billion people living on this rock and a vast majority of them never tried an IQ test. Nevertheless, he is probably in the top 1.000.000 ha ha
Btw, the average IQ is NOT 100, but surprisingly (or rather not), somewhere around 90. So even if you have an IQ of 100, you are already above the norm.

Or short for "Don't Believe The Hype"

Yes he was, and he was an atheist.

No, Einstein had a strange, somewhat pantheistic view of the world. And based on Christopher Lang's Wikipedia article, so does he. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Langan)

Nice post Rize. Einstien was the man!

Has Hawknis IQ ever been tested?

This thread is too funny... so allow me to add to the lunacy with tv references and retarted poker logic:

Tony Sopraron's IQ is 134 and Tony Blundettos IQ was 158. TS is 1000 times smarter then Tony B was.

Sheldon on TBBThas an IQ that cant accurately be tested, yet hes wrong all the time.

If this guy can prove all this stuff and hes so dope let him prove it. Why Isn't he unifying theroys and blah blah blah.

I have played so many math teachers and smarter than me mathy type people and have seen make the dumbest most retarted plays you can imagine. I dont think a lot of thease guys can beat 10NL. I play in 5/10 games (which run bigger than Borgats 10/25) and dont see them anymore. My friends and I are in a poker study group, and I grantee the donktard math teachers I used to see at 1/2 and sometimes at 2/5 have a higher IQ than 75-80 percent of us.

There are a lot of math teachers and mathy people that are better than all of us, Im just saying that IQ doesn't equal poker skill why should it equal atheism

Both perfectly reasonable things for a smart person to devote time to given our knowledge of chemistry and the prevalence of christian education at the time. He couldn't just hop on wikipedia.

? The mean IQ is 100, it's standardized at 100.

Also OP's point is not contingent on a high IQ being the sole qualification for achieving insight on the existence of god, it is just handicapping. He probably gives it too much weight but he is not wrong, I know if I had to choose between a guy with 70 IQ and a 170 IQ to offer insight on this (or pretty much any other) question, with no further background info to go on my money is on the second guy.

Take the 1000 most successful poker players and compare to 1000 randomly selected poker players and I'm willing to bet you see a higher average IQ with the former group.

But regardless they are different things, poker is partly about information processing but also about other things (like understanding people), answering factual questions is almost entirely information processing.

The guy gave lessons in crushing IQ tests.

I don't think an IQ of 195 necessarily means you're "smart". People assume intelligence is a fixed and evenly spread attribute.

This guy does pretty well at IQ tests. Both his answers and his methods for finding them are probably quite smart solutions. That doesn't mean he's perfect or that the way he thinks about everything else is smart. This guy is capable of bias and imperfection in his thinking just like the rest of us.

I have a friend who does well at a different kind of test - exams. He is completing a Masters at Oxford in Economics, which I'd imagine is quite difficult. It still doesn't stop him being a complete dumbass at times. He was completely suckered by these absolutely horrible arguments (http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...1&postcount=63). The flaws are obvious but he didn't notice them.

What's important is why he believes in God. The simple fact that he does is completely irrelevant.

People don't understand how smart Chris is. Here's simple math to help you guys. Most of you have an IQ of about 100 such is average. You wouldn't take a man with an IQ of 70 seriously because well he'd be a ******. Many of you hold Einstein in high esteem probably because of his popularity and the simple fact that you've been taught he's the height of intalectualism. His IQ was 160 Chris has a minimum IQ of 195 wich is the number he modestly uses. It is most likely over 200 and his relationship to Einstein is that of yours to someone who took a very small bus to school.

It really does. Someone with a higher IQ will process information better. Now knowledge on the other hand has nothing to do with IQ. This is where people get confused. I know many people who think that a degree makes them intelligent but it only proves they can retain information and duplicate it on a piece of test paper. Many intelligent people simply don't give a flying **** about school or for that matter a lot of other things society deems a suitable intellectual pursuit.

I don't have time to find my old posts - however, there are many studies showing that the higher your IQ, the more likely it is you do not believe in God. Among the 'Great' scientists, it is over 90%. My old posts show the links.

I know nobody is paying attention to how IQ actually works, so this is futile.

But Langan says "In a world of 7 billion people, I have statistical evidence to suggest that no more than 1 in 8 billion people can match my intelligence."

And people not only call this claim "modest," but they actually take it at face value.

I am certainly no expert on intelligence, but this is completely wrong, no?

They will tend to "process information" better, but that doesn't mean they always do and that their thinking isn't subject to strong bias or imperfection in certain areas.

Some people think that a high IQ means you think very well in regards to everything, therefore this guy's opinion on God is worth something. I look at it more as a standard instance of imperfect human thinking, that can even afflict the best of us.

Unless of course this guy knows something we don't. I'm not prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt just because he's good at IQ tests.

edit: I'd also imagine that a big part of IQ tests is not just finding the right answer, but finding the quickest method of getting the answer (test time limits). Speed is not that useful in regards to the question of God.

If it is true, I suspect he will provide us with the 'Theory of Everything' very soon (Not).

Some of us do...keep on fighting the good fight.

according to this, Chris Langan has an IQ of 195

Guys, there's a HUGE range of religious perspectives, NOT just two camps of atheists and Bible-thumpers. There are agnostic, deistic, pantheistic, polytheistic, etc perspectives, and some people have a combination view of the world that's hard to describe.

Both Einstein and Langan have points of view that border on pantheism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheism). They are both non-atheist and non-traditional-religion views. They do not easily fit into a simple camp. Stop posting out of your asses what you THINK they believe without researching it.

It's only a matter of time.

This is horrible...I scored 183 in an IQ test (I took the test when I was a scholarship student in a private high school at the age of 17). Never in my life I thought that it was an important result. At best, the score might be slightly correlated with academic success.

Depending on my limited experience, I would venture to say that in general people who have average intelligence tend to be more religious than people who have (moderately) higher intelligence. However, I feel that the issue gets "complicated" when we approach the extremes on both sides of the spectrum. People with very low intelligence have difficulty with abstract concepts (such as God) and tend to be either "literal" in their understanding of God or be "amoral" in an almost animalistic sense. People with very high intelligence (I have known five such guys personally, so take this with a huge grain of salt), I think, tend to become either "extremely atheistic" and even refuse to think about the subject of religion at all (two of my friends were like that), or they become "spiritual" in a weird way. Two of the rest of the three believed in the "real existence" of mathematical and mental "objects" and were vaguely religious (they were not following any of the established religions, though, they simply thought that universe itself was a mathematical structure) and the other one was a Spinozist essentially.

My readings of the leading philosophers of the past tend to support my personal observations. People whom I think had really high intelligence (Plato, Spinoza, Leibniz, Newton, Nietzsche, Einstein etc.) almost always held the common religions of their times (relatively speaking) in low regard but at the same time had "weird" quasi-religious ideas ("Monads" of Leibniz, "Eternal Recurrence of the Same" of Nietzsche, "Ideas" of Plato, Newton's beliefs regarding alchemy, Einstein's Spinozistic "awe" of Nature etc.


Whatever...I think you do not have to take this Langan guy too seriously.

Cheers