This thread is brought on by another thread of Subfallens and is something that I have actually been thinking about for a while.

Sub seems to feel that there are certain people that are so far above our individual intelligence that we should take everything that they say as gospel and are fools if we disagree with them. Now on the surface this seems almost reasonable. But what happens when two intelligent people disagree?

This obviously happens. One might say that they pick the one that is more intelligent and go with him, and you could do what Sub does and equate intelligence with atheism, then you never have to question your own worldview! But for those of us that are not going to define intelligence that way, how do we know which one is more intelligent? We obviously could not do this on our own as we are not intelligent enough to make decisions without them, so how could we decide?

Maybe we can go with the majority? Has the majority always been right?

Furthermore, how can we even trust these so called intelligent elite? If their brain power is so far beyond ours, how could we know that they are giving us the truth? If someone came to me that spoke fluent Chinese and started talking while inserting gibberish that sounded like Chinese, would I ever know? How would I be able to differentiate? What if my intelligence is so low that it would be impossible for me to ever learn Chinese, I would be stuck possibly living a lie.

That also leads me to the question of whether or not the so called intelligent elite are without bias. Isn't it very possible that some of the intelligent elite want something to be true, or not true for that matter, so they use their intelligence to come up with a way that they can seem right. How would I be able to differentiate between what they have gotten correct about life and what they just want to be correct about life? After all their intelligence is so far above mine it would be like me trying to pick out the gibberish words from the Chinese man.

Ok, that's good enough to get the ball rolling. Sub I expect you to answer these questions, but use small words as I am most certainly not apart of the intelligent elite.

i counted ten questions.

Seems like a straw man to me... unless sub really does think this?

Funnily enough this is what I think of Christianity, you consider a bronze-aged book written by goat herders or whatever as so far above us that we are fools if we disagree with it.

Did you look at his thread? He is basically ridiculing me and other for disagreeing with people that he has put on a pedestal. And he has said in the past that if person X of a superior intelligence disagrees with me, I should just believe him and stop disagreeing.

It depends on the subject. Everyone agree that certain subjects (eg electronic engioneering) are such that if a extremely intelligent person disagrees with a moderately intelligent one and they have studied the subject equally hard, the smarter guy, if he is unbiased, is a giant favorite. On the other hand there are many subjects (eg French Literature) where he would have very little edge. There are even subjects (eg getting a stripper to leave the strip club with you withoput paying her) where the smart guy is an underdog.

Where there is debate concerns subjects that have only a component to them that requires high intelligence. When to go for it on fourth down. Does God exist. In subjects like this the super smart are moderate favorites over the somewhat smart. But because there are aspects to the question that do not require great intelligence people want to say that the edge is non existent.

No, his thread is saying something completely different, which is that if someone is a renowned expert in a given field, you should tend to believe their opinion more than someone who has no relevant qualifications - for matters pertaining to that field.

For example, you should choose to believe Ed Witten on cosmology rather than believe Splendor. Is this a contentious statement? It seems blindingly obvious to me, and is completely different to an 'appeal to authority', which is what your post is about. Which is ironic - since Christianity is essentially an appeal to authority to a book written thousands of years ago.

But what happens when the extremely intelligent person and the moderately intelligent person are both significantly smarter then yourself, how could you really know which one is the extremely intelligent one and which one is the moderately intelligent one?

DS, what do you feel about the subject of free will? I have been accused of being foolish for disagreeing with someone who is more intelligent then me, but agreeing with someone who is also more intelligent then me. How do I know which one is more intelligent and which one is less bias?

First of all; being in the top 5% isn't necessarily dramatically high. Secondly that is hardly what Subfallen is saying.

It's fine that people believe "god is eternal" and "god needs no cause", but when such statements are thrown around as if they should somehow be equal in worth with the works of a long range of brilliant astrophysicists then it does indeed get on your nerves, because it is clear there isn't anywhere near the expertise to make that so.

And it's not like these works are "untestable gibberish". Good academic works and theories might require one to be a giant in the field to develop, but understanding them and testing them (if only by proxy) does not.

But this God fellow is supposed to have a really high IQ.

But who is to really say what qualifies someone as a renowned expert in something like "free will"? And how do I know that his worldview bias does not drastically taint his conclusions?

There are no "experts" on free will. You will have to make do with current neuroscience or accept that your assumptions are in fact only assumptions.

Ok, well pick whatever % you want. The point is that there are plenty of people that are significantly more intelligent then myself.

I believe this is exactly what he is saying, whether or not anyone would admit it in this context.

There are many things like "free will" that would fall in this category, which is what the thread is about. And still if I am not intelligent enough to understand the theories and the testing, how could I possibly ever know whether or not the are sufficient?

But I was told that I was a fool for not agreeing with Chomsky (I think) in regards to free will. So are you saying that I am making assumptions and they are not?

Depends what you mean to be an expert on 'free will'. How can one be an expert on something which does not exist?

Free will has certainly never been observed, so anyone assuming it exists is making a bigger leap of faith than one who isn't. However - Personally I don't know what Chomsky says on free will, I know him largely as a linguist and for his contributions on the cognitive revolution.

As a qualified guess based on his works I would assume his stance to be the typical one for a cognitivist; that free will is beyond inquiry and thus beyond his works. I could be wrong. If I am, someone will probably googletard it for me.

I've not said that. Rather, that elite scientists understand reality much better than the rest of us. I've also admitted rejecting scientific consensus does not make you a fool. You may have good reasons, related to life utility, for doing that.

So the word "fool" has no place in the conversation. However, if you reject scientific consensus, you cannot also claim to be interested in truth.

'Intelligence' is a vacuous notion. Who cares. I'm fascinated by people who can describe reality in useful ways.

The best we can hope for is successive approximations.

Nobody is talking about "the truth", period. It's incremental; we just hope to steadily build more complete, more predictive models of reality.

I don't have much to say about this, because again I don't think 'intelligence' is a useful concept.

You still have the problem of head counting though. And even worse, say 2 supersmarts disagree, but ss1 has IQ 185 and ss2 has IQ 190? And what if ss1 is a mathematician and ss2 is a biologist, or a (ugh!) philosopher? What if someone like Lanagan(?) with IQ >= 190 says Darwin (maybe IQ 150-160) is an idiot?

Maybe it's because of this that intelligence has nothing to do with Biblical faith - even a child can get it, and it isn't a question of IQ, but of the will.

Edit: There's another aspect to this - something Craig often emphasizes. Theism offers evidence and arguments for God's existence and the truth of Christianity. None of the arguments can be shown invalid and none of the premises and be demonstrated false - though some of the premises are inductive and therefore probabilistic, they are plausible and unrefuted.

What Craig then emphasizes is that if you say more than "I don't believe in God", i.e., "God doesn't exist" or "It's probable that God doesn't exist", or "It's improbable that Christianity is true", you have made a positive statement and therefore have the burden of offering evidence and arguments to support that statement. Whenever Craig does this he never gets a response - and I've never seen one. All the work of atheists is trying to disprove something.

The importance of this is that if ss's can neither refute positive arguments and evidence nor provide them for their assertions, IQ becomes irrelevant. They are only offering unsupported opinion and whatever they have in expertise, when that expertise has no bearing on the issue, is no more than an unwarranted appeal to authority.

'Intelligence' as measured by IQ tests has nothing to do with anything that isn't an IQ test. It's not a useful concept.

So at no point am I allowed to disagree with the current scientific consensus and still be interested in truth? So the scientific consensus is always correct about truth? And they hold monopoly on truth?

I assume you are thanking God for that as you read this.

(No one on this forum is in that group.)

How do you know who is better and describing reality in a useful way? And what constitutes useful? Who decides which reality description is more useful?

Er...he said "I don't have much to say about this, because again I don't think 'intelligence' is a useful concept."

It's not like he claimed bricks levitate.

If you can sell this to DS your life has meaning and purpose.

Really? No one has been observed making choice A with the ability to choose B? So you are saying that this morning while making my lunch and I chose to bring an apple instead of a banana, that was an illusion and that I was unable to choose banana?

When I was talking about "useful" I was referring to his comment about some being able to describe reality in a more useful way.