People with high IQ grow very confident in their ability to control the world and in their intellectual superiority over “lesser minds”. That leads to a tendency to reject inherited traditions as unwanted restraints from primitive times shackles placed upon them by their intellectual inferiors.
Like an intelligent teenager who rejects the rules of his school and parents because he wants to do his own thing and thinks he is smarter than his school teachers.
Ultimately it’s not a choice between science and religion that is a false dichotomy. The choice is between theism and a materialism which if embraced leads to nihilism.
The choice is between materialism and spiritualism (
BTW, materialism can also lead to existentialism and/or humanism; and theism can lead to nihilism if your deity views human life as worthless.
You suffer from myopic Christian vision.
I don't actually disagree with what you said here af_newbie well except for the part I struck out and the gratuitous insult at the end.
Spiritualism, however, does not have to lead to a belief in the supernatural. I don't believe in the supernatural. I think everything in the universe happens through cause and effect and there is a direct cause for every event. Those events that seem "supernatural" are simply events for which we don't understand the cause.
As for materialism leading to viewpoints distinct from nihilism. Well I am not a philosopher and I know they like to split hairs. Here is an excerpt from the wikipedia page on existentialism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism#Criticisms
Quote from: wikipedia
Although nihilism and existentialism are distinct philosophies, they are often confused with one another as both are rooted in the human experience of anguish and confusion stemming from the apparent meaninglessness of a world in which humans are compelled to find or create meaning.[51] A primary cause of confusion is that Friedrich Nietzsche is an important philosopher in both fields. Existentialist philosophers often stress the importance of Angst as signifying the absolute lack of any objective ground for action, a move that is often reduced to a moral or an existential nihilism.
You know what they say if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck. Nevertheless if you want to call this vastly different from nihilism fine. The foundations seem very similar to me.
You may also be correct that a theism centered on a deity that views human life as worthless could lead to nihilism. However, I tend to think that such a religion would lead to something much worse then nihilism. John C. Wright wrote a superb book describing what it might look like. Its a fascinating read. I wrote a review on it here.
Awake In The Night Land (Book Review)
