Perhaps Christians are smarter than Muslims which would make their religion more likely to be correct. Then again Christians might not want to use this argument even if it is true.

I love how many things your hilarious "group X is smarter than group Y" worldview gets stuffed into.

Your statements seem convoluted.

-Pancho

Pancho seems blind

Simples. All we have to do anytime there's a disagreement is statistically analyse the IQs of participants on both sides. The side with the most smart will be 'more likely' to be right. Unless you have some other definition of 'smart' that you're working to?

This would be awesome, when you vote in a political election, you would be asked for your IQ as well as your candidate. Or we could settle all the great philosophical debates simply by doing an IQ calculation. No more conspiracy theories, no more arguments.... period.

We should have a name for this method too, maybe 'Simple Measure All Trenchant Supersagacity' (SMARTS)

Noice.

(As a world view it doesn't really explain why so many smart people disagree with each other, but.. wotevs...)

Huh?

-Pancho

You missed the point of my post and my definition of "smart" is slightly different than IQ.

But putting that aside, OF COURSE it is true that if say 70% of a group of people with significantly higher IQs disagree with 70% of a group of people with lower IQs the first group is more likely to be right. That's undebatable when the right answer is knowable. And its wishful thinking when people try to say that the concept doesn't hold when the answer can't be proven beyond a doubt.

(I am assuming equal knowledge about the subject and equal degree of conviction. If the slightly dumber guy will bet a lot more than the smarter one I will pick him. I go into this in greater detail in my book DUCY.)

Do you ever question your assumptions?

-Pancho

I did, because I don't think it really matters. Whatever it is, it's some measure of cognitive ability.

It seems trivially true because in practice there is never 'equal knowledge' (and conviction level seems irrelevant?), so this model doesn't seem useful, even for those with a Rationalistic viewpoint.

Bad assumption-making is a funny business.

Good luck pushing sales for DUCY. I see that it's currently ranked #649,617 for Amazon book sales.

I have a copy.

Sklansky's book aren't bad.

-Pancho

I got a FREE copy. DUCY?

Heh same here and I didn't hate it. I can't remember the bonus I got it for but it was through here.

In fairness I still think TOP did more for my game than any other book I read.

This makes me interested in the actual sales number.

Why do you care so much about number of sales? Hellmuth's book did alright and was totally ****ing ******ed.

It took you 143 words to say absolutely nothing of value. You didn't support your assertion at all!

To be fair, it usually takes me many more words than that to say nothing of value

My use of "religion" in that post needs to be qualified. Obviously it's only referring to a pretty specific way of approaching Christianity, and not the most common way at that.

After the qualification, I would probably support it (in a descriptive way) by citing Christian theologians who advocated such a way of approaching things. For example, this line from Pseudo-Dionysius is representative: "Theology does not demonstrate the truth, but exposes it nakedly in symbols, so that the soul, changed by holiness and light, enters into it" (Epistula IX, I)

That certainly wouldn't support any assertion that they were correct, but partly the point was just that zumby's question presupposed a way of thinking about religion which some religious traditions would challenge. I don't suppose I could actually demonstrate that those traditions are right. There is a healthy amount of bull**** involved :P

Most Christians would not consider someone who thinks it is very unlikely that Mary is a virgin, or that Jesus Christ came back from the dead, a Christian, no matter what they thought or felt about anything else. Being a Christian means believing something that most very smart people think is ridiculous.

I will (wrongly) assume you have data to support this claim and will (wrongly) expect that you would produce said data.

There are some surveys cited here. They don't ask the same question, but it seems reasonable to infer from the data that a majority of Christians would consider belief in the resurrection essential to being Christian. Anecdotally, it also seems reasonable from my experience.

This is true of only some denominations. I would not expect it to be true of most mainline Protestant denominations in the US or of Quakers. For instance, only 70% of American mainline Protestants believe in the Virgin Birth. Do they all believe that the other third of their co-religionists which don't believe in the Virgin Birth--which would include some clergy and theologians--aren't even Christians?

It all hinges on what you mean by "the resurrection." I will agree with you that American Christianity is deeply grounded in a literal resurrection. But that's not the only view.

http://religionnews.com/2014/04/16/c...ill-christian/

It's also a question where *how* you ask the question dramatically influences the way that the question is answered. For example, most people would assent that someone who "Trusts Jesus as their Lord and Savior" is a Christian, without stopping first to ask them about a literal resurrection. Or if someone simply lists the text of the "Four Spiritual Laws", there is no statement about a literal resurrection*:

1. God loves you and created you to know Him personally.
2. Man is sinful and separated from God, so we cannot know Him personally or experience His love.
3. Jesus Christ is God's only provision for man's sin. Through Him alone we can know God personally and experience God's love.
4. We must individually receive Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord; then we can know God personally and experience His love.

At #3, you might say that there's something implicit there about what the "provision" looks like, and that it might be implicitly hiding there, but if you only held to "While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" there won't be a lot of pressure to keep pushing towards the resurrection.

* I don't know whether this is technically the original version of it, but all versions are similar to this and none of them to my knowledge place particular emphasis on a literal resurrection.

Agreed. I'm not actually sure what point Sklansky was trying to make, and I would be cautious of concluding too much from survey data in any case. I mostly went looking for some data out of curiosity.