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).