Are There Theists Who Are Just TOO STUPID to Be Atheist?? | Atheist Debates

Added: 2026-05-10

[00:00:02]The Atheist Today's Patreon project presents Too stupid to be an atheist?

[00:00:09]Hey.

[00:00:11]Are you too stupid to be an atheist?

[00:00:14]I I have atheists calling into the show with some regularity to suggest that people are either too stupid or too morally weak to be an atheist and that's why that's what keeps them in it. But you know, this is that it's not that they actually feel something, it's not that we're all flawed thinkers, it's oh, no, no, they're just too stupid. I absolutely despise this. I find it monumentally arrogant, condescending, demeaning uh that oh you you were able to not need a God, but the little people need a God.

[00:00:55]And so I wanted to kind of address this a little bit today by saying what do we mean by stupid?

[00:01:03]I mean this is definitely not about IQ which measures your ability to take an IQ test. Uh I'm not aware of any IQ score high or low that guarantees one is uh more likely to be rational or exclusively rational uh or to come to the right answers.

[00:01:23]Certainly not on every category.

[00:01:27]For the specific types of questions that an IQ test that deals with perhaps.

[00:01:33]There's a great video from Veritasium that I referenced the other day. It's about a year or so old at this point.

[00:01:38]They talked about uh a study that they did by having people take a test to to evaluate and give them a numeracy score, how good they were at understanding and and properly evaluating statistics.

[00:01:52]And then they showed them statistics about a um some kind of cream that was applied to a rash and showed them the number of people >> [clears throat] >> excuse me, who got better or worse.

[00:02:03]And there were more numbers on one, but it was about the increase in your chances of of actually getting better versus the increase in in your chances of making the rash worse.

[00:02:18]And the people with high numeracy scores got got the question correct and understood it.

[00:02:23]And then when they changed the the chart essentially keeping the the data from being about a rash cream and a rash to about gun control and increases and decreases in crime the people with the higher numeracy scores suddenly failed if the conclusion disagreed with the position they held based on their political uh leanings.

[00:02:57]Now that study shows that education, knowledge, numeracy and other smart factors might in some instances make you worse at accurately evaluating evidence.

[00:03:13]Smart people are very good at rationalizing things they came to believe for non-smart reasons. That might be a quote from Shermer.

[00:03:20]Apologies if I've got that wrong, but so when we're talking about smart or stupid in a colloquial sense, it seems that this isn't an evaluation of the person but their conclusions. Anybody who believes X is stupid, which makes this entirely a circular claim at best.

[00:03:41]Um they mean some people just aren't smart enough to spot the fallacies and the flawed reasoning.

[00:03:49]But that can change.

[00:03:52]People can and do learn revisit, rethink re-evaluate their beliefs, deconstruct.

[00:03:59]It probably doesn't happen nearly often enough uh because we're prone to the comfort of thinking we're right.

[00:04:08]And why should we sit around questioning everything we believe if it's working so far?

[00:04:14]And that's that's the pragmatic way we go about life.

[00:04:19]It is inference and induction. Today is pretty much the same as yesterday. You know, the sun rose yesterday, rose today, it's probably going to rise tomorrow.

[00:04:29]And so when when I hear from these atheists who are like, "Oh, you know, some people are just too stupid, too irrational, too whatever to to give up their belief in God."

[00:04:42]Um I I don't I don't know exactly what they think they're accomplishing.

[00:04:50]Because like for example, my IQ didn't go up when I stopped believing.

[00:04:55]I probably didn't get smarter in any broad sense.

[00:04:59]Uh the only way that I might be smarter is if I was wrong previously about something and I'm no longer wrong, that could colloquially be presented as me being smarter.

[00:05:09]Um but I was smart enough to figure that out. I just hadn't got there yet.

[00:05:19]And that applies to any wrong belief cuz being wrong feels exactly like being right as we've mentioned before.

[00:05:24]But many cases when it comes to religion we're talking about unfalsifiable claims that are held for reasons that aren't clearly evidence-based.

[00:05:34]And you could define that as stupid.

[00:05:37]You could say anybody who believes something uh an unfalsifiable claim and doesn't have evidence for its truth uh is stupid. Well, now once back again you're back to a definition and you're creating your own tautology.

[00:05:52]In some cases they might believe out of fear or indoctrination.

[00:05:57]I don't see that that makes them stupid.

[00:05:59]Um victim blaming aside, the world is too easily controlled by fears as we see rampantly every day including manufactured lies that spawn fears and prey on your fears.

[00:06:11]Maybe it's not that they're stupid, maybe it's that they're morally weak.

[00:06:16]Okay?

[00:06:18]But are you saying that if they didn't believe that there was some sort of God watching everything they do and was preparing to judge them they would act more immoral?

[00:06:32]Really?

[00:06:34]Cuz believers have committed every crime you can imagine and some you probably can't.

[00:06:42]Do they believe God stopped watching for that period of time or that they could fool him?

[00:06:48]Uh were they lying about their belief at all in which case they're not actually believers, they're just pretending to believe?

[00:06:55]In which case they no longer fit your they're they're too morally weak to go without God?

[00:07:01]Once again it's possible you could believe that God is watching and believe that he'll forgive you.

[00:07:09]And rationalize at any given moment based on which option, punishment or forgiveness results in the action you would personally like to take.

[00:07:18]The same as we evidently do when presented with data that contradicts our pre our our strongly held convictions.

[00:07:28]Believers in a God aren't the only ones that do this.

[00:07:32]And when you fool yourself into thinking you can't be fooled or that you're above being fooled, it's too late.

[00:07:39]Some atheists, both lifelong and folks who have escaped a religion, are so proud of getting what they think is the right answer to the question, "Do I have good reason to believe a God exists?"

[00:07:50]And they're so impressed with their own reasoning skills because most of us probably are.

[00:07:57]That they think one would have to be too stupid to be an atheist.

[00:08:05]If you're not an atheist, you have to be too stupid is is how they get to that reasoning. I'm not stupid. I'm I'm now an atheist, which means atheists smart.

[00:08:16]It it is bizarre to me because I don't know what your personal motivation the believers out there that are watching this clip, I don't know what your justification is. It could be bad, it could be good.

[00:08:29]It's one of the reasons why for 20 years I've done call-in shows asking people to tell me, what is their justification and should we agree with it?

[00:08:38]I have not seen sufficient justification from anybody and that goes for the person who's never spent time thinking about this who calls into the show and the you know, the expert apologist who I debated on stage.

[00:08:56]Uh many of them.

[00:08:57]I I am I am unimpressed with the stream of fallacies the the lack of evidence and the personal feelings and confidence in an old book that are often used as their justification. But I don't know what your justification is.

[00:09:15]And it would be a mistake to paint you as too stupid or too irrational or obviously fallacious because that's closed-mindedness. That is uh not hey I have the reasonable position, but hey, I have the right position. Uh it the only right position is the one I hold and if you hold a different one, well, you're stupid.

[00:09:38]It is a lazy over simplification that some atheists do where atheists smart, theists dumb.

[00:09:47]And it seems to be done by people who don't properly understand the scope of the subjects.

[00:09:54]Being smugly superior to make themselves feel better perhaps about how little they actually understand the complex subjects tied to religious belief.

[00:10:06]Epistemology.

[00:10:08]Claims, evidence, justification, rationalizations, deception, guilt, fear, indoctrination, and countless other things that are different about somebody else's life. And one of those things might be they have an actual justification that you're unaware of.

[00:10:28]I'm not impressed by someone identifying as an atheist. You can see it when they call in the show.

[00:10:33]Cuz it's like I'm an atheist and then I'm just waiting for them to say but.

[00:10:38]Uh it's the same thing that you know, I I'm I'm not impressed by someone being an atheist. I'm more impressed by people advocating for and practicing humanism and skepticism.

[00:10:49]But also pay attention when you hear callers calling in to the shows or you're engaged with something and they say things like I'm a very skeptical person but.

[00:11:05]My skepticism as I understand it and as I've taught it and talked about it for years, I don't know what it means to be very skeptical.

[00:11:14]You're either applying skepticism or you're not.

[00:11:19]When people say very skeptical, it sounds to me like they're saying ah.

[00:11:24]I'm a big doubter. I doubt all kinds of stuff that you wouldn't expect me to doubt but there are some things I don't doubt.

[00:11:32]Okay.

[00:11:35]Maybe some atheists are just too stupid to be humanists. Maybe some atheists are just too stupid to be skeptics or to stop patting themselves on the back long enough to realize that their perception of others may not be as accurate as they thought.

[00:11:51]I don't know.

[00:11:53]But it's really exhausting.

[00:11:57]For people to call into you know, the college shows primarily exist so that someone can say hey, I have questions, I have thoughts, I believe in this God, this supernatural thing, this position and I have reasons.

[00:12:16]That I think are good.

[00:12:19]Please poke holes in them or if you're unable to, then either accept them or tell me why you don't accept them.

[00:12:28]That's the way this should be done. And yes, occasionally it gets heated. I have been known to call people names individually based on problems with the shows. Problems with their arguments.

[00:12:43]But to just broadly say that people are atheists or people are theists because they're too stupid to be atheist.

[00:12:50]Is genuinely one of the stupidest things I've ever heard.

[00:12:54]See you next time.

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