Why are some mathematicians and such so strongly drawn to relegion. (America, myths)

[1984vt]

I was reading a thread in relationships and someone said their ideal man must be educated, intelligent and preferably an athiest. Most of the extremely intelligent people I have met had advanced degrees featuring statistics, chemistry and engineering etc, and they had studied religion and/or were theologists and believed in a greater being.

Why do you think a large segment of this group of highly intelligent people are drawn to religion?

Please note: I used "some" and "segment" so I am not stating that everyone with a high IQ or mathematician is religious so no torching please.... Thank you.

[WillysB]

I was raised with a religious, somewhat fundamentalist background. My head was fairly screwed over by that background. It took me years to find my way into a working reality during which I studied some religion, some physics, some philosophy.

There came a point at which it all started coming together and understand how the laws of physics, numbers, engineering and even religion fit together. I would think those qualities you reference would lead those persons to a like resolution. A fitting of universal laws and religion.

[june 7th]

Finite mathematics + philosophy...

It's there...

[Huckleberry3911948]

could it be smart people sense there is a god?

[ParkTwain]

Originally Posted by 1984vt

I was reading a thread in relationships and someone said their ideal man must be educated, intelligent and preferably an athiest. Most of the extremely intelligent people I have met had advanced degrees featuring statistics, chemistry and engineering etc, and they had studied religion and/or were theologists and believed in a greater being.

Why do you think a large segment of this group of highly intelligent people are drawn to religion?

Please note: I used "some" and "segment" so I am not stating that everyone with a high IQ or mathematician is religious so no torching please.... Thank you.

Why do you assume that your personal experience is representative of the rest of reality?

[Boxcar Overkill]

Actually, the more of the hard sciences one has studied, the less likely they are to believe in God.

[Roxolan]

Originally Posted by 1984vt

Why do you think a large segment of this group of highly intelligent people are drawn to religion?

Unchallenged religious upbringing? Personal crisis forcing them to take refuge in a delusion? Some form of peer pressure?
Being highly educated makes you more resistant to these factors, but not immune.

(I disagree with your "large segment" claim, though. As Boxcar said, scientific level is strongly correlated with atheism.)

[coosjoaquin]

I'm a mathematician and an atheist, I've never met a deeply religious mathematician and I'm surrounded by hundreds of them.

The "large segment" claim is of course fallacy from anecdote followed by confirmation bias. I've yet to know of any large scale polls carried out to answer this question but I suspect that a lot of them will be agnostics, deists or atheists. Mathematics, at least the pure aspects of it, has the tendency to destroy conventional notions of religion with it's philosophy.

[cncracer]

Here are some numbers for your math. Only 7 percent of members of the American National Academy of Sciences believed in God. Only 3.3 percent believed in God in the UK’s Royal Society. These are unquestionably the repository for both countries highest IQs.
Gallup poll studies in the US in the general population have shown that those with higher IQ’s tend not to believe in God."
For me the real question is whether increased intelligence makes people atheist or being atheist makes them more intelligent, it appears atheist brains are developing faster without the myths of religion.
Is this an example of evolution in action with Christians getting left behind like the monkeys and apes before them?

[newtoneer]

its all about numbers and Jesus as the powerful one