Knuth the Christian

Knuth, winner of the turing test and world renowned computer scientist is a believer in God and a devout Christian. Many computer sceintists consider his books to be the standard in computer science. The art of computer programming

you tube with him talking about his Christianity

and?
Maybe he also likes popcorn. What is the point?

i like licorice...

The point is the guy is a brilliant mathematician and computer scientist. As a beginning student of computer science/math myself I have just begun to read his books. I was surprised to find out that he was a Christian like me.

The same surprise seems to be happening to me a lot this year, both the chair of the math department at my college, one of my other math teachers, and my biology professor have all turned out to be Christian. Also one of my Chemistry teachers has told me that her and her husband also believe in God, but not so much a Christian God as their nebulous idea of a higher power.

So yes indeed, to me and many other people, Knuth being a Christian is at least a little more important as popcorn. Since this section of the forum is for "infinite" subjects and many here have in the past made reference to the supposed stupidity and/or gullibility of Christians then I believe that my thread is relevant.

Faith != Knowledge

I guess there are different reasons why people are going to be Christians. But why?
The content of the bible is only a fairy tale. Nothing more. Invented and written by humans and not by a higher power. In addition to it, Religions are bad and provoke wars.

But wait... should i believe in the greek guys like Zeus, Hercules and Hades? Or the lovely Smurfs?

Result: Intelligent people can also be gullible and manipulable.

Intelligent people can be good and responsible beings but also the other way around. There are a lot of intelligent people who are criminals, even murderers. In the end they are humans, weak, strong, sick or healthy. Some of them are only partially intelligent, they are good in one field but barely cannot survive in real life. Some are confused, disturbed.

An intelligent man working at Intel in Germany decided to meet with a cannibal to end his life that way, how intelligent is this?

But in the end I am sure that most of them are good and responsible (with or without a religion as a backup).

Lol, Knuth is not the winner of the Turing Test. The Turing Test has not yet been passed by anyone, and if it ever does, we'll be hearing about it from the News all day, not from some post in Hilbert's Hotel.. What Knuth did, was win the Turing Award, which is given to a different person every year since 1966.

More on topic, I have to agree with Wicht. Look at the great minds of 300BC like Pythagoras, Euclid and Archimedes, yet all of them believed in the twelve Gods of Olympus.. I think there's a difference between Intelligence and Wisdom..

Cheers,
Aris

Right good eye...you found a typo. Have you read any of the books? do you know what you get if you find any errors in them?

BTW in case anyone doesn't just want to trash the informational part of this thread, and actually like learning new things, he also is on this list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_scientists

True. Wise people don't post Christian thoughts in a room full of intolerant people that mock a serious point.

Larry made a good point. The greek scientists before Christus were intelligent but also believed in something, some other gods. What about the great scientists in Egypt? They all did good work but believed in some other religion / gods.

But on the other hand you can also say that all of them breath air, eat and drink something. Some of them eat the same food like I do. So maybe I should be happy that I have something in common with them.

Is this intolerant? Not it is not. We tolerate all their religions, the food they eat and the way they dress, but especially we admire their scientific achievements.

Which probably means he doesn't know jack about most of the other sciences out there, like for example Geology, Archeology, Biology or more specific Evolutionary Biology. :P

When it comes to logic and our current knowledge, there's simply no denying the whole religious answer for most related topics doesn't make much sense.

In fact, said person as a mathematician probably will know chance is something illogical when it comes to real life events. Illogical as in something might happen 8 out of 10 times and therefore have an 80% chance of happening, this doesn't mean said event must happen 8 times or even just one time.

I'm thinking whatever the reason why he's quite open minded on the issue probably has little to do with his intelligence. Even brilliant people can have a huge lack of understanding because of a lack of knowledge (or lack of curiosity for a certain topic).

It's really not that much of an issue in the scientific community these days anymore, but more so most scientists prefer a more professional objectivity when it comes to topics they don't know much about or topics we simply don't have that many answers to yet.

I am thinking some scientists are Christian in the sense that their parents brought them up believing in a God and going to church. But perhaps 'being a Christian' doesn't really mean all that much to them?

I know a lot of people that say they are 'Christian', but do not really believe in anything specific when it comes to the topic. Except for perhaps a higher power kind of non-Christian God, very much like the people you've spoke about.

Personally I think these kind of beliefs are very similar to stating you simply experience life the way it goes but hope you can somehow influence the grand scheme of things for a bit; think of it as worshipping mere chance.

It's interesting though, because in my opinion it says a lot about the character of such a scientist if he or she really is willing to take things on blindly on faith so much as to believe in a religion with a story for which little to no evidence at all exists.

I am not surprised mathematicians are strange guys
A friend of mine had the chance to speak with one of them, one of the greatest at national level
" I believe that spheres, cubes etc really exist somewhere " he said " You mean in our mind , I suppose " my friend said
"No...no...I believe that they really exist, they must exist ...somewher ...I am sure..." He replied
My friend realized , after an hour or so, that he was not joking,,,

Well I think, this mathematician obviously was right.

If spheres and cubes would only exist in his mind, then he could not talk about their properties and be understood by other mathematicians. Thus spheres and cubes must have some objective reality.

This has of course nothing to do with a certain mathematician believing in some God, Allah, Buddha or whatever. Not only mathematicians but people generally are strange guys sometimes believing in strange things . BTW belief in some gods is not strange but is perfectly normal, this belief developed ten thousands of years ago during human evolution, and is still in our genes.

Of course I was jocking even though the story is true
I dont seriously think that an ideal sphere and other ideal objects really exist in a iperuranim world same as this guy and Plato believe

Among the mathematicians rank the smartest brains of the humanity, well but many of them are strange guys , to the least

I am reading in these days " The Riemann? hypothesis"
This mathematician cliamed to have discovered a theorem about the prime numbers but the demostation got lost

Well nowadays thanks to the power of the PC its hyphotesis hs been proved to be true for the first 3.000.000 prime numbers

The mathematicia are not happy yet , maybe one day , they claim,we will find a prime number which does not meet the Riemann's Hyphotesis

Strange guys

yes, like grigori perelman who solved the poincaré conjecture. he rejected the fields medal and doesn't cut his hair and fingernails because in his opinion it's not meant by nature to be done.

Yes, and it is believed to have occurred very late in evolution. Something that strikes me as rather odd. Why the need to overcomplicate things?

Because caveman clans who believed in an afterlife, and believed to be helped by a god, could fight more brave against other caveman clans who didnt believe such things.

Well, the whole afterlife idea is definitely a result of waging wars, but it's very questionable if it's actually truly beneficial in war. It's very questionable if, because people wanted to be able to answer other kinds of questions related to existence and unexplainable stuff, many cultures didn't believe in some form of religion anyways. Way before the very first war!

Which reminds me, that technology matters a lot more, fearlessness as can be seen from the genocide on Indians in Ancient America or even the Japanese in the second world war, ultimately can't win a war.

To some extent it's probably not even true that 'every' Indian was a brave person. Hollywood created that image inspired by incorrect depictions of old times. Sensational and often quite surreal, but not very close to the truth in most cases.

I really don't buy the 'it makes man brave' theory so much anyways. A good leader can inspire people even more and probably even without a promise of an afterlife (Obama just promises things will 'get better', same thing no afterlife ), just as long as you can 'fool' people what they are about to do is 'the right thing'... it's all equal.

Religion doesn't improve their physique or stamina or accuracy, where as natural drugs to some extent do. Shamans use to be sort of the priests of a village and I am sure it had everything to do with drugs. Add a bunch of impressive magic tricks and people will believe anything.

Regardless of an empty promise for an afterlife or other supernatural stories, it all doesn't change life on earth or even the outcome of wars and in fact some ancient but truly very religious cultures weren't very fond of waging war at all.

I think the main reason why religions got developed more and more up to this day has everything to do with our natural curiosity and our search for answers (beginning of life, question our existence, why do plants need water and sunshine, and by lack of that.. who or what made it fail? ...things like that).

When it comes to braveness, I think it's more courageous to not fear death without a promise of an afterlife anyways. Hah, when I think about it religion might even make people weaker in a sense!

The whole idea that cavemen must have been savages out to conquer more and more land is incorrect as well. Active competition between different groups is likely to have occurred from day one, as happens with many other species, but war is a very modern thing.

Oh HI,

Testing out my new IMAC forum capabilites now.



Gosh Nitro, are you still here?

Geez, this place is full of narrow minded knuckle-heads, but they did manage to convert "Silverman" after i left.

Yes, intolerant folks indeed.

Okay, my new IMAC and "objective C" are working, woo hoo!

See ya!

Very deep argumentation strategy...
..quick quick, before we convert you ...