 103.9 FM, WZO Radio, Knoxville. Ladies and gentlemen, Digital Freethought Radio Hour. Hello and welcome to Digital Freethought Radio Hour on WZO Radio 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Today is Sunday, July 19th, 2020. I'm Larry Rhodes, or Diver 5. And as usual, we have our co-host, Wombat, on the phone with us. Hello, Wombat. God is so good. I think that's as far as I got in that song. And we're all grateful. It's a good one. It's a good one. And our guests today are Dread Pirate Higgs, a red leader, and George. So hello, everybody. Hi. Digital Freethought Radio Hour is a talk radio show about atheism, free-thought, rational thought, humanism, and the sciences. And conversely, we'll also talk about religion, religious faiths, gods, holy books, and superstition. And if you get the feeling that you're the only non-believer in Knoxville, why are you just not? There are several atheist free-thinking and rationalist groups that exist right here in Knoxville. And we'll be telling you how you can connect with them right after the mid-show break. Did you know that there was an atheist calling TV show broadcasting right here in Knoxville? It has been for over 10 years. Did you know that, Wombat? Yes, and I downloaded it, let's see, Friday, and I've been playing it all this weekend. I can tell you it's a really good combination between Animal Crossing, Pokemon, and maybe Stardew Valley. You go around, I know, it's crazy, right? It's addicting as heck. He wants you to stop him. I just go around and I pick up ooblets, which are like these tiny little animals, and you can have them grow crops and your fuels, and you go and be Larry. It's really amazing. It's really cool. I highly recommend checking it out. Nope, nope, not it. It's not a game, it's just a show. And that matter of fact, this was on TV, Community Access TV for 10 years in Knoxville. But just this year, it switched over to video streaming so you can find it on YouTube, and we'll tell you more about that after the mid-show break. If you'd like to interact with us during the show, you can go to Facebook and search for Digital Freethought Radio Hour. You can find it on our page there and use the messaging function to send us questions or comments. Wombat, we're going to be talking about intelligence and how you defined it. Is that correct? Yeah, I want to go all through about intelligence. Our religion, if you are, if it's possible to be intelligent and religious, are you any more intelligent if you're not religious and we'll pick on IQ for a little bit. But before we go into all that, I take it up to our own venerable, the Catholic Church for invocation. Our once was a church with a creed that claimed I would have no more need. But they came to implore. I give bucks at the door. Then my pockets were empty indeed. Rahman! Rahman! Bad. So I wanted to talk about intelligence today. It was something that had been hankering in my mind since we were talking about knowledge last week. And I figured before we dive deep into what intelligence is, let's talk about what we think intelligence is. We'll do a quick roundtable. George, I know you like defining things. How about you start us off? What do you think intelligence is? Well, I don't have an answer for that, of course. Yes, I do like defining things because I've done that for a living. Oh, whoa! Everybody on the same page and we know what we're talking about when we give a definition right up at the top. And that's why I often remark about that. I think we sometimes assume that other people know what we're talking about. Sure. First of all, I want to comment on something that just popped into my mind, which is this, there are different types of intelligence. Interesting. Well, give me one definition of one type. Okay, let me think for a moment. Don't worry, it's just a library idea. Physical intelligence can be manifested by a mechanic and you watch the guy working with his hands on your car and you realize that he has what I call intelligent hands. So he's capable. Oh, yes. Okay. Red Leader, I'm going to throw this out to you. How Jesus did it.com, representing here. Intelligence. You have this very intelligent thoughtful pose going on right now. What would you say intelligence is? What would you expect to see if we looked it up in the dictionary? I'm at a loss. I have no idea what to comment about this. I'm totally at a loss. You know, I feel like a Christian would be happy to tell you, like, hey, all these guys don't know. I'll be happy to step in and tell you, like, maybe I can throw something out here. Is intelligence just knowing a lot of stuff? What do you think about that, Red Leader? Do you think intelligence is just knowing a lot of stuff? I don't know. I've seen intelligence in dogs and animals and octopuses. When you're talking about accomplishing a task, a problem, then we see it in lower animals and as far as intelligence and humans, I don't know. I don't really have a definition for it. Well, adding to what Dale said, Red Leader said that accomplishing or solving problems, I think, solving anywhere from a simple to complex problems, the higher intelligence and the more complex problems that you can address and solve. Okay. Now we're getting somewhere good because I like that. I like that. I like that as definition. It's not just being able to do something, but it's being able to take a problem and make it not a problem anymore, like resolving situations. And the more complex the problem, the more intelligent, or the more complex a problem that was resolved, the more intelligent that person must be or animal or whatever. That seems to be a really good marker. Gary, can you add to that? Well, I would agree. It's the capacity for solving problems with information that you put together in novel ways. Okay. So it's not what you know. I mean, if everyone has access to the same information, intelligence is how well somebody could use that information to solve a problem or create a new novel situation or idea. But couldn't you say that having a vast amount of knowledge that your fingertips are accessible through your memory would help you solve more complex problems that could also add to the... Yeah. But I mean, someone with higher intelligence may be more inclined to learn more. And that's where I think some people conflate smarts with intelligence. Those two things are pretty distinct. I'd also wonder about access to information, not necessarily being intelligence, because I'm walking around with a smartphone that has access to all the internet, Wikipedia, all of mankind's scientific documents, music, art, all on one rectangular device. That doesn't make me any more intelligent, in a sense, because almost everyone has access. Absolutely. It's how I use that information, right? Exactly. And that's the kind of thing you see all over the internet is just how the assumption that you have all this access to information makes you smarter. It doesn't. You can still be done as opposed and use all this information incorrectly. Right, right. A lot of it depends on how much you have incorporated in yourself in the atmosphere. Where you all talk at once. Sorry. Yeah. What I'm saying is a lot of it depends on how much of that information or knowledge you've incorporated into your own self that you have instant access to when you're actually doing problem solving. If you have a phone and you access the internet, you only have access to the things that you know about and can find or search for. But let's say that you've gone to college, got a doctorate and done 20 years of research. You have an awful lot of more knowledge at your disposal to solve the problems that are facing you at any particular time. And you would not even know where to look on the phone for information to solve. I'm not saying it doesn't help. But I would think if you have a phone and you have the PhD and you still can't solve this problem and it's a really simple problem, that might be a sign that as George was alluding to, you may not have intelligence in that area. And maybe it's better to seek out an expert in that particular field. Being intelligent enough to ask for help if you need it is also, in my opinion, like an empathetic sign of intelligence, like emotional intelligence. But I was going to Dredd. Dredd, what were you saying about someone launching into space? Well, like I said, there was that flat earth or who died launching himself to prove that the earth was flat. Oh, no. Is this real? Yeah. No, he died. His parachute failed or deployed as the rocket launched. He built the rocket himself. Oh, no. I guess he's clever enough to do that. But clearly, you know, abuse of information available on the internet doesn't always render success. What do you think, Red Leader? I'm going to throw this out at you. Does having access to the internet make you any more intelligent? Say your internet goes out, do you become any less intelligent as a person? If you have internet, do you get more smarter? How does it work? What do you think? I'd say if you have a question in your mind, you can get it answered a lot quicker if you have a phone. Okay. So like access to information does help. I think we're all on the same page there, right? Yeah, I believe that an intelligent person though, I had one friend that when the internet first started getting popular, he'd go in there and just wander around looking at all different. And I said, well, what was your purpose for getting on the internet? He goes, just to look around. In other words, he had no real reason. There was nothing he was going to look for. I imagine that if a person's using the internet as a tool, they would have the question in their mind and then they would go researching. That just seems like another source of information like the encyclopedia or any other area. Dred, what do you got? I was just thinking that, you know, if... Oh, geez, I completely lost it. Sorry. No, it's okay. It's okay. I was thinking how do you apply this to say an all-powerful, all-knowledge, all-intelligent being, right? Like say you have a God. It doesn't have to be the Christian God. But how do you assess, if we can assess intelligence by offering a problem that needs to be resolved and at varying levels of complexity and seeing what's the capstone of complexity of a problem that can be resolved and saying, okay, because you clear this, you're this intelligent. If the problem is for at least... I'm sorry for going back into the Christian model, but I need to figure out who my true followers are and who my true followers aren't. So I'm going to set up a system where I make a world and just put a book around the Stone Age or Bronze Age and with a couple of sheepherders and we'll just see what happens. There's not just one book. There's 10,000 books. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you have to consider the canon. So this applies even to like Muslim face as well. There is the idea of Jinn or demons or Satan, you know, people, supernatural forces that are capable of telling lies or convincing people who might mean well that they actually believe something that may not actually be true. Like demons that can fool people's minds. And if those are in play, what isn't questionable at this point? Like what can you take 100% confidently? Can I believe in God with 100% confidence knowing that there's also Satan whose job is to convince people of things that may not necessarily be true? Like it's very hard to take things like that with absolute level of confidence. Hey, we got phones. We'll edit this out. But George, make sure you meet yourself if you can. Larry, we have these things called demons. We have these things called Satan. Well, I don't think, I'm not convinced that we do, but how can you believe in God 100% seriously? I don't believe that we have them, of course. But if like Christians believe that Satan is real and he has the ability to create illusions and create miracles and do magic, what chance do we possibly have to know what is real and what's not real? What's good, what's bad, because he can make us see or believe anything. That's really not something that I think that a good God would allow to exist. Right. And it's not just knowing things that makes you intelligent because you can know things that aren't true and you can actually make things way more complicated or harder for you to live by. Look at the coronavirus situation that we have. How many people became experts in biochemistry and viral infections overnight? Maybe after a couple of YouTube videos and now are using that haphazardly. Dred, what do you got? Well, and that was the point I was going to make, actually, is intelligence is not about having access to information. It's about being able to evaluate the merit of that information. You know, someone going on the internet, they may have access to 10,000 sites that talk about COVID and virology and all the rest of it. But, you know, a more intelligent person would be able to sift through that information to determine what is more likely to be the case and what is more likely not and sort of be able to divide the wheat from the chaff. I really love that. George, what do you want to add? Would deductive reasoning be part of this mix? For sure, absolutely. Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, I think so. And I think that plays a lot into, like, what SE is, is just, you know, it benefits us to be able to do that. And all we're doing is trying to act like a coach where we encourage that kind of thinking in other people. I think critical thinking really plays a big part in intelligence. Like, can you effectively use it to solve these problems and improve your life and the lives of other people around you? Though we have this misnomer, I believe, and I'll throw this out. I believe that atheists have the impression that because you're religious, you're not as intelligent because you are devoting a lot of your time and effort into something that we aren't convinced is true. And I feel like that could be a dangerous sort of assumption because, one, from talking to people who are religious, I found that the smarter you are, the better you are at convincing yourself that something is the case. Pressurized. That's right. Yeah? Absolutely. Yeah. And I see it from, like, you know, the people who are, like, way, way above me, college professors, I'm just like, wow, wow, that's really impressive. My coworkers, who I admire greatly, have a God belief. And it almost startles me because I always assume that, oh, you must think like me. No, you believe in a God. And you know the periodic table all the way to 104 elements? That's... All right. Yeah, you know what? I just had surgery last week. That's why I'm wearing this thing. And my surgery was done in a Baptist hospital. This is the second time I've had surgery in a Baptist hospital. And I'm thinking, but I thought the Baptist don't believe in science. Hmm. So, yeah. It's hard to say you believe in science and not evolution at the same time, too. Yes. It's just the science that contradicts the beliefs. I mean, the rest of the science is okay. The rest of the science is okay. It's the cherry pick science. They don't have a problem with the science of germs, you know, the theory of disease or the gravitational theory or any other, the other thing. It's the evolution theory. It's the create... When it applies to human beings. Yeah, when it applies to human beings. Unless it's a way to make medicine or vaccines, then in which case they'll be like, you know, I'll just take the vaccine, but this has nothing to do with evolutionary problems. Of course it does. We don't like that. We obviously see cherry picking. We see, you know, like a lot of egocentrism in there, but it's not necessarily a mark of someone not being intelligent. I can say this as a person who was Christian myself. Like, I didn't feel any smarter when I lost my religion. I just felt like I had a door open that I walked through and I'm like, oh man, there's this whole other room in my house I'd never been to. Oh, I got a decorate again. I know it's so big. It's like, oh, but it's empty. It's so empty. What am I supposed to do with all this stuff? I was way more comfortable back there and I tried to turn around and go back and it's locked. And you're like, well, I can't go back in there anymore. So I guess I'm stuck here in this big, empty room now. So like that's how it felt for me. So if anything, it felt like I lost stuff, but it did give me the opportunity to like resettle, redecorate. And I feel like that's really important. If I may, just one thing you had pointed out and something I read in a recent Daniel Dennett book is we're all subject to Dunning-Kruger syndrome in some aspects of our lives. And you're just playing that a second. Yeah, I was going to explain that. So the Dunning-Kruger effect is the idea that you can overestimate your confidence in a subject with which you become acquainted. For instance, internet people becoming, suddenly becoming virologists and bacteriologists in post-COVID. But that can certainly be the case for everyone. I've suffered that syndrome in some respects in the past. With some things I assumed to know a lot about and then found out subsequently that I was absolutely way off base. Sure, same here. So we're all subject to that, I think. Absolutely, yeah. And just to throw something out, do we, I became an atheist as I was going through college, but it's not becoming an atheist that gave me the college education. It's the fact that I still, you know, went through all the process of studying and working hard and taking on the test. I don't feel any, I don't think, I'll just put it to this point again. I'm not saying atheism made me any smarter, but I have seen the trend that typically people who are religious, who go through a collegiate experience end on the atheist label. And that's only because you get critical thinking and you're talking shuck into you to the poor. It's like, I can't hold these two conflating or competing beliefs anymore. I have to go to the mortal world. Right. And I'm stuck here. And that's where the cognitive dissonance steps in and either you figure it out or you just walk blindly through, right? Or you're a ticking time bomb for someone else. Just go on mingle.com, Christian mingle.com. Everything will be okay. That says a lot about mental compartmentalization. It does. For sure. And it probably goes back to what George was alluding to before, like there's different intelligences. Maybe there's like a religious intelligence versus like a reality intelligence, maybe? Just like, hey. Well, I was just thinking about more pedestrian sorts of things, you know? Like, you know, a long, long time ago, I was being given the army physical exam. Okay. You know, to send me off to Vietnam and get my brains turned into mush. And there was one part of that exam, which was really well put together. It was an intelligence test that assumed that you couldn't read. And it was a bunch of questions posed to the applicant in pictures. And it was actually designed to test your mechanical intelligence. And I thought, wow. How come nobody ever put this to me in college? You know, I've got two college degrees and nobody's ever come from that angle before. I've never heard of it. Hmm. Yeah. I don't think we can like blame someone for being ignorant as a lack of intelligence. Like, I don't think those are applicable. That's correct. Red Leader, you know a lot of magic tricks, right? Like, you've written an entire book called How Jesus Did It about like how magicians today could have done what Jesus did with his technology even back then, if he actually did it. I'm wondering like, from your impression, is an audience that sees a magic trick and believes what the magician is telling them, less intelligent or any way incapable of intelligence? Did they do something dumb? Not less intelligent. James Randy said that, oh, this is James Randy. Oh, I thought that was an orc. I thought that was an orc from Skyrim in the background. Okay, now I got it. No, one of the things James Randy said was that it's, one comment he made was that it is more difficult to fool or impress a child with a magic trick. And being is because as a magician, he plays on your assumptions. In our daily life, we assume all kinds of things in order to go out the day a little bit more efficiently. We don't have to rethink everything all the time. So he uses those assumptions. I like that. Yeah, yeah. And kids are way more of a blank slate. At one point, I was working for a guy that was, he had a magic shop and they were wanting some props created. One that I was looking at the plans of was a stocks. The person would be in the stocks and you would think, oh, he can't get out of that. But where the middle went, it looked like braces. It was actually a cut. It actually came up. But you looking at it, you assume that that's a straight, solid piece or you make all kinds of assumptions. Children don't tend to make assumptions until much later. Yeah. And assumptions, one of the hard things about it is they're hard to give up and they can actually interfere with your ability to solve problems, which goes back to what we're saying about intelligence. In fact, there's a thing called, and I was talking to Tracy Harris about this, actually. It was interesting because there's a thing called Occam's Razor, which has, I'll explain what it is as part of this quote thing, but like, people believe Occam's Razor is the simplest answer is the most correct answer. And that's not true. That's not what the rule of Occam's Razor is. Occam's Razor is the answer that makes the least number of assumptions is often the right answer. And there's like some asterisks there, but it's about assuming that you're right. And we run into a situation where it's very easy to make rash judgments based on how simple the answer is, but it's very easy to come up with simple lies. And, you know, and some lies or even some statements offer a lot more questions that we just don't really to think about. Like for example, God did it. You don't have to worry about like this whole rain, condensation, things like, no, God did it. That's the simplest answer. Occam's Razor, that's the answer. That's the answer. It's like, you don't realize how many additional questions you just brought up to the table or something like that. Larry, I think your audio went out, but it sounds like you have something you want to say. All right, Gary, go for it. I was just going to say that God raises about a thousand more questions than it answers. Like where it came from and did you have a family of parents, you know, just all kinds of things that you just assume that there are answers for when there really aren't. Right. Anyway, we're at the bottom of the hour. We probably need to take a break. Yeah. This is Digital Freethought Radio R, WZO Radio 103.9, OPFM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We'll be right back after this break. 103.9 FM, WZO Radio, Knoxville. Digital Freethought Radio Hour. Hello and welcome back to the second half of the Digital Freethought Radio Hour and WZO Radio 103.9, OPFM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Today is July 19th, and we're going to talk about Freethought groups that you can join right here in Knoxville. First, there's the Atheist Society of Knoxville. ASK was founded in 2002. We're in our 18th year. We have over a thousand members, and you can find us online by searching for Knoxville Atheist or go to KnoxvilleAtheist.org. By the way, if you don't live in Knoxville, you can still go to meet up and search for an Atheist group in your town. Don't have one? Start one. Also, there's the Rationalists of East Tennessee. R-E-T is another large freethinking group here in Knoxville, and you can find them at rationalist.org. Click on Upcoming Events to find out more about them. Earlier in the show, we said we talked about the Knoxville Atheist called in TV show. It's on YouTube. Just search for Free Thinkers United Coalition of Knoxville, and you'll find their streaming version of a TV show and their archives as well. You can also search for Freethought Forum. Not too interrupt, but I sound a little confused. It sound like you said we had a TV show. That's kind of cool. We should talk about that more. I'll bring it up next time. Next show, we'll talk about it. That would be great. That's not a thing you should let under the radar. We want to let people know. If you're interested in getting involved in the TV or this radio show, come to an Ask Meeting. Meet us online. Go to Ask an Atheist. No, what is it? Knoxville Atheist on Facebook. Atheist Society of Knoxville on Facebook. Lots of different ways. On the show with us today, we have our co-host, Wombat. We also have red rider, George and Dred Pirate Higgs. So we were talking about intelligence. Where did we leave off? Sure. We were talking... Oh, no. Guys. Guys. I don't know where I keep putting this. Dred, do you know where it is? There was a question. Has anybody had a supernatural experience? No. There's something... I had something and I can't find it. And we have to... Where is the love? Where is the love? Love, the love, the love. Where is the love? I would like to make an announcement. You can do it right after we handle this listener feedback question. We got a really great message from Brandon. He said, hey, I'm a huge fan of the Let's Chat podcast. Ever since it popped up on my radar, you guys are awesome. And he wanted to ask a question about Essie. Essie, of course, being a way to talk to anyone about anything about triggering emotions or ego and stuff like that. It's a great way for two people to work together to figure out if someone reached their conclusion in a reliable way. And he wants to use Essie as a way to talk people out of racist ideologies. And he thought it could be really useful right now. And I thought, wow, that's very powerful. Dred, I'm going to fill this out to you. What's Essie? I just explained it, George. Anyone else, just hit J on your keyboard and you'll restart 10 seconds back. Hi, Higgs. What is, do you think Essie is a good way to deal with someone who has racist ideologies? I think so, because it helps that person sort of unpack how they came to formulate that particular ideology. I think it's a great opportunity to really just help people reflect more upon themselves and how they come there as opposed to sitting on the end beliefs without sometimes even knowing how they got there. Sure. I love that answer. I also would just add, if you go into the belief thinking, I'm going to change this guy's mind because he's a racist and I'm not a racist, that's the wrong mindset for Essie. Absolutely. You aren't there to try to change someone's mind. You try to figure out how they arrived at their conclusions. And if you work with them and you reach a dead end that says way more than you saying, oh, well, you're wrong because of X, Y, Z. No, I was working with you and we can't work together between the two of us to get to this conclusion. Yeah. And if you're really sticking to the Socratic examination as the methodology for street epithemology, that produces pretty fruitful results. Cool. Brandon, thank you so much for that feedback. Anyone else who has more feedback, feel free to leave a comment or email us. We'll supply all of our contact information at the end of the show. And I just wanted to take a quick break. I'm just going to turn this over to Chris. Dail, Dail, Dred, you got your hand up? I just wanted to mention because you had brought up Occam's razor. Oh, go for it. Yeah, so have you heard about Hitchens razor? No, throw it at me. That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. That was Christopher Hitchens. I dig it. Thank you for that. I believe Dale has been trying to say something. Dale, what were you going to say to him? I had an announcement a few minutes ago. It's probably too late for it now. Please. But there are atheists who really can sing. Who can sing? Can think. Who can sing. Oh, sing? Oh, sing? Like sing? Like back when we were singing. Oh, I'm one of them. I'm one of them. In fact, I'm probably going to play one of my songs in the mid-show break. We actually have a live stream, someone following us on the live stream, who makes a comment, if I may. He says, when I use SE on people, they always feel challenged and quickly back out. Is there anything you'd recommend there? Go ahead. I think SE is just a way to ask a question. But it's one tool in a box of tools to have a good conversation with somebody. And one of the more important tools compared to SE is, are you being personable? Are you comfortable? Do you understand body language? Do you understand how to have a conversation with people that's enjoyable? Are you friendly? There's a lot of things you have to work on, other than just asking the proper SE question in order to facilitate a good conversation with someone. And my recommendation to get better at that is to do SE on topics that aren't particularly charged subjects. Be like, hey, what's your favorite Marvel movie? Well, yeah, well, that's the problem. What I was going to say was it depends on if the person came to your table willing to talk, or if you're using SE, like on a plane where you're just talking to the person next to you, if you broach a subject that they're afraid to go into, they're not going to feel comfortable. They're going to shy away from it, and they actually may have actual fear of broaching that subject and searching into it. Absolutely. You might ask your streaming person more details about it. Yeah. Gary, do you have anything you'd like to add to that? That's a great question, by the way. Thank you for that. Well, he just says he thinks it's also a cultural thing. There may be a cultural element there. So maybe he's working across cultures. I'm not sure, but yeah, and it's not something that works good for Anthony Magnobosco. It wouldn't work well for me. Wouldn't work well for Reed. We all have to develop our styles based on the culture that we're in. And even Larry's got his own style. Like he mixes standard argumentation with some essay. So he'll argue with you and then he'll throw some brainers at you. And you're like, oh, why is he asking me these deep questions? I thought he wanted me to get angry. I don't know what's going on. Yeah. And same here, I don't do the same style as Anthony or as one that. I think it's all about flavor and finding the fit that works for you. Right. I think the most important thing when you're doing essay, number one rule, keep it positive, right? And then if you can, being comfortable in your own skin while you're talking to people is a big part of keeping it positive. Make it a conversation, try not to make it an argument. Not a confrontation. Not a confrontation. Oh, I'm going to steal that. That's so good. You heard it here first. I'm taking that. And then the last thing is let them do the thinking, right? Like you're not there to guide them to the conclusion. You're there to follow them to it and see if you can get there together. That's the most important part. All right. So we had a really great question from Dale before we broke off to the end. It was, oh, Dale, do you want to say the question? Do you remember it? Yeah. Go for it. Have any of you ever had a supernatural experience or something that you thought was a supernatural experience? Maybe somebody close to you has had a supernatural experience. Cool. Larry, I'll throw this up first. I'll throw it up to Larry first. No, for Larry? No. I'm going to be interested in George's answer, but Dred Pirate, have you ever had a supernatural experience? At the time, I might have thought it was. But over the years, I subsequently come to realize that it was a lot of my own wishful thinking that was used in that. And I'll just throw out my quick answer. It kind of goes back to what Red Leader was saying. As a kid, it's sometimes easier to start off with more of a blank slate. Whereas an adult, you feed yourself with more assumptions, some valid, some not. But when I was a kid, I could definitely say that I felt like I had a supernatural experience. But that was only because I had no standard for what supernatural was. And now that I'm an adult, I recognize that I have no basis to say what is supernatural versus what's not. I don't have a supernatural measuring state. And as a result, I don't know. And I'm probably convinced that I'm more convinced of the natural experiences that I've had, because I have no way of knowing if I had a supernatural experience or not. So I'm not convinced that I've had any. George, what do you got? Well, I had a supernatural experience a number of years ago in a class about such things. And I also have a scientific explanation for that supernatural experience. That sounds conflicting to me. What do you mean by supernatural, Mr. Definition? What is a supernatural? What is supernatural? What's supernatural? OK, an experience that would seem to defy science. Oh, well, that could be anything. Then if that's the case, then, yeah, I had some ice cream that was strawberry that tasted like cherry. And I'm like, this is supernatural. And don't you hate it when I have it? You can put it. OK, you can put on it anything you want. But I'm saying this is where I'm coming from. You were surprised based on the expectation that you had before. OK, that's fair. Yeah, that, let's say, based upon what most people would consider their own scientific knowledge, it doesn't make sense. OK, I won't go into the whole story, because it's going to take five minutes. If you want to hear it, I'll tell you. Yeah, we can do it after the show. OK, but however, it was a phenomenon that is called psychometry, in which an experience is recorded in an object to be played back by somebody else. Cool. Experienced by somebody else. This happened. Cool. OK. All I want to say is a lot of the supernatural experiences that people have come down to interpretation. I know people that if they have a cold breeze, if they sit in their house and they get a chill or a cold air coming by, well, that's because a ghost went by. That's an area of interpretation that they just say, oh, that couldn't be natural, so it's got to be supernatural. Well, in the case of, let's say, what I described here that was called psychometry, or I'll call it telepathy, I have a scientific explanation for this, for the possibility that makes sense to me, because I have experience with radio. I understand how radio works. I understand the physics of it. And at least in my own mind, I have put together a rationale for how this could have happened in the scientific realm. I have an experience that I can't explain scientifically, because sometimes I just become a goldfish and I don't understand how it's possible for someone to become a goldfish. That's supernatural. Yeah, I know. There's no explanation. I have a scientific explanation for it, but it's just supernatural. Yeah, it is. One thing, yeah, you were going to ask Dale? Yeah, I want to go to Dale. Have you had a supernatural experience, and would you like to talk about that? One time, I was wet out of sleep for four days, and I saw an elf. That's not good. Dumped down behind a bolt of cloth. And I kept telling myself, there's no such thing as an elf behind that cloth. But no matter how much I could tell myself that, I could not stop myself from walking around the bolt and taking a real good look. Also, a spaceship once landed in the field behind my house. I'm more inclined to believe in spaceships than supernatural. That's not supernatural. We have spaceships. Those aren't supernatural things. Like, I'm so upset that we don't go to the moon more frequently, but like, spaceships, we have them. That we can make them. It's not that surprising anymore. Let me tell you what happened. What happened was, my dad was going to sleep, and he had to glance out the window, and there was that spaceship. Now, we're talking about the spaceship from the 1950s. You know, the fins on the bottom, and it's pointed, you know, like that. And he tried to go to sleep. He was thinking, he explained. He said, well, if the aliens are going to come and get me, there's not a whole lot I could do about it. I'm just going back to bed. And then he thought, no, I have to have somebody else see this, so he woke me up. And I looked out the back window, and there was a glowing spaceship about 150, 170 feet tall in the field behind our house. And I said, let's go look at it. And he said, no, you're not going anywhere. You're staying right here. But I got my binoculars, and I looked at the spaceship. Come to find out that what it was was a tree, was a pine tree, and it was such a distance away that it looked exactly like a spaceship. But there had been a mist, a dew. And in our basement, we had a bulb, a light bulb, that did not have the frosting on it. It was one of those naked bulbs, clear. It was shining out of the basement, hitting that tree, and then just like the signs on the road that have the little beads, it reflected that light directly back at it. But if I had not gotten those binoculars, I would swear to this day that the spaceship had landed in the field behind my house. Yeah, interesting. There's a lot of things that we can't go back in time to verify. So when we have these impressions of things that are just memory, it's just this weird thing. Larry. There was one thing that happened to me. Like Dale's father, I was going to sleep, and I turned off the light, and I was going to sleep, and I hear this big explosion. It was like the hot water heater blew up or something. And I turned on the, I sat up, turned on the light, and I looked down at the dog that was laying next to the bed, and he looked up at me, like, what's up, boss? I love it when I see that. Yeah, like, yeah. Well, that was just my imagination. It was an audio hallucination. So I turned off the light and went back to bed. But if I didn't have a dog there, Right, right, right. I went throughout the entire house and never saw any problem. Then I would, you know, was that supernatural? Was that a ghost? You know, that kind of stuff. But it immediately put it in the realm of hallucinations. I'm going to fill this out. I don't think, I think red leader and laborer are exemplifying what it means to be intelligent. Where it is, we've had this issue where we couldn't explain something, we had a problem, and we did maybe some basic, or maybe we did some investigation, maybe our dog looked at us or maybe we got, maybe we did some work and looked at some binoculars and tried to look how lights refracted and try to understand what we had seen in the past and try to make sense of it. And we came out with a rationale that is way less based on assumptions, like outcomes raiser, and came out with a better understanding of how reality works, maybe learning some things in the process. And I'm like, that is what intelligence is to me. Like those are very intelligent results to arrive at. And there are some people who don't do that. That's very clear, yeah. Yeah, I think I was thinking back about this radio show host. Larry, let me know if you remember this guy. He was a radio show entrepreneur. He had a lot of channels, a lot of TV shows, and he said the world was gonna end. He was like this very famous pastor. Are you from what that guy's last name was? I don't. He was a Tuesday pastor. He spent more money on any single event than any other human being. Yeah. I know who it is. Okay, yeah. I can't think of his name. You'll get it. He was about three, four years ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He said the world is gonna end sometime in August, I believe, and his followers believed him. They looked at him as an authority. They sold all the possessions and put the money in the bank, went to him and all congregated, gave him his money, their money, for whatever reason I cannot imagine. To buy posters and stuff like that, yeah. They spread the word. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And it didn't happen. Hey, don't spoilers. No spoilers yet. We, they said the world's gonna end at six o'clock. They all go to New York, or one of them goes to New York. He spent his entire life saving exactly as Larry said. And he's standing there in Times Square with a sign saying, this is your last chance to repent. Everyone's around him and just being like, it's not gonna happen dude. It's not gonna happen. He's like, I'm confident. He's interviewing with the news. 5.59 happens, six o'clock happens. Nothing happens. 6.01, 6.02. And he just has the most confused expression. Still a Christian to this day. Still very much a believer. But like, that is a person, that is an example of a person who can't take those experiences and overcome his assumptions. Like, he can't be like, hey, that's a spaceship. No, it's not. Well, it's still a spaceship in my head. Like, I feel like that's the lack, that's the lack of intellectual honesty, maybe if we're talking about different layers of intelligence that we're seeing there. And I think intellectual honesty plays such a big part in intelligence in general. Shred Pirate, I wanna go to you. Have you ever had a supernatural experience? Maybe, you said no, but like, have you ever had an experience now that we're defining it more of like misinterpretation of something in the past that you really felt then? Oh yeah, the idea that I may have seen ghost or that sort of thing. And yeah, I mean, that sort of thing was much more frequent when, certainly when I was a much more religious person. And for a few years, I dabbled in the occult and actively tried to practice magic and bring up spirits and all that kind of stuff. And yeah, I fooled myself quite a bit thinking that I was getting somewhere with it, but ultimately I was just fooling myself. Anything spectacular? I feel like you're walking around some pretty awesome stories. Well, probably a lot longer than we've got the four minutes for. I mean, I may bring something up on a later time. I remember when I was in like first grade, I was writing like the tricycles that they gave out to kids and I was gonna ram straight into the kid in front of me because I couldn't stop fast enough. And I shut my eyes. And the next time over to my eyes, I was on the other side of the kids still going at just as fast. So like either in my head, I thought, oh, I went through the kid and just physics time worked out for me. But in my, looking back now, it's like maybe the kid got out of the way, maybe I was just swerving out of the way, just through my nerves. But like in my head, I've kept that with me for like maybe 17 years of just like, hey, proof of God, I was on to like better things cause I could have died then, I could have had something happen to me then, but it didn't happen. Therefore God, I needed that. I needed that to like hold up this crux. That's how, that's how strenuous people hold, you know, their faith basically, just on these like misinterpreted circumstances. But hey, you want, oh, now we're gonna pull out the big guns. Speaking of things people misinterpret as the past, like the Bible in a sense is basically just a chronicle of misinterpreted points of view. And I think who better to talk about, you know, misinterpreting things in the Bible than how Jesus did it, red leader, is there anything in the Bible that may be misinterpreted? Is that even possible? Well, when you're talking about supernatural experiences, there's these coincidences that people have happened where you pick up somebody in the phone, you rank, you pick it up, it's them. Well, I had an odd one with the Bible. I was writing a section of my book about circumcision, about using circumcised penises as a weapon of mass destruction that's in the Bible. Well, it's in the Bible, it's in there, it's in there. Anyway, so I'm sitting there writing this part about how they did this and it was a weapon of mass destruction. But anyway, while the TV was on, it was one of those Terminator shows. But anyway, the Terminator girl starts talking about the exact verse of the Bible that I was looking at. Now the chances have got to be a bazillion to one that while I'm writing on it, this girl comes on and starts talking about circumcised penises as weapons of mass destruction. So, but you know, as a deist, I'm not allowed to think in supernatural terms, but isn't that just incredibly, I found it to be incredibly coincidental? I mean, this is a really obscure part of the Bible. What, you know, coincidences do happen. I mean, if you weren't writing on that book, I mean, you still would have seen it and you wouldn't have thought anything about it. And would you say one in a billion and then there's like, what, seven billion people on earth, lots of people writing books, things like that. There are so many stories in the Bible just for that one to come up on this girl. You have a chapter and verse on that. Yeah, you can give it at the end of the show. I would like to throw out one last pick. This is picking on the idea of how can we measure intelligence. There's this idea that if you have an IQ number, that represents how intelligent you are. And the means of how they test IQ is different based on, you know, there's not even like a major organization that assesses it. But I was talking about the idea of how they test IQ that assesses it. But I was talking about this with Dred Pirate. The concept of intelligence quotient or quotant or however you want to pronounce it, should be quotient, refers to it's your intelligence based on your local population. It's not, IQ is never taken globally, like where you're competing against like people from China or India and stuff like that. It's typically around the people who've taken the test who are in your near immediate area. And if that's the case, if you're in a place and a bunch of smart people move in, your IQ goes down even though you haven't changed at all. Whereas if you move to a place where there's not as many smart people or maybe you're one of the only people, maybe your IQ jumps up a bit because you're now average or at least beating the average. So yeah, I don't know how you came up with that profile. So I am a member of Mensa. Cool. In fact, I'm a local secretary and proctor for Mount Mensa here in Western Canada. And the test again, we were talking earlier about defining what intelligence was. And it's not about who you know, it's not the culture of milieu in which you exist. It is broader, it's based on your capacity and ability to solve problems based on the available information. And the Wonderlich tests which are used now sort of as the standard for Mensa, there are different kinds of intelligent tests, right? Like LSATs. And I mean, all the SATs are essentially aptitude tests that measure to some degree intelligence. And so these cross the borders of language, of mathematical acumen, of all kinds of these things that might be a benefit to people who have a college education, for instance. They do, you know, suss out intelligence on a much more fundamental level. And so that would be my contention is that there is a valid way of determining relative intelligence through IQ. And I thank you for that. I would always wonder, is there a better way of measuring intelligence than measuring IQ and reducing it down to a number? Because I look at things like the Wonderlich and we have things called NFL here in America, I'm sorry, in USA, I know Canada, sorry about that. You guys have American football too, or Canadian football too. But you would do the Wonderlich as part of your assessment to determine how good of a football player you will be. And that test is available to you right now. If you're watching this, you can take the Wonderlich test right now. And it's what it is is a bunch of basically basic high school level assessment questions that you only have like 12 minutes to answer, but you have like a hundred questions. So it's more of a question of how much you can answer in a short period of time and you're supposed to skip answers that you might take too long on because your score is gonna be based on the average of everybody else who also did the test. So it doesn't actually have to be perfect just gonna be a suss on that average. I did that test on multiple times, each time getting slightly higher than before, but I noticed that it's more of a gimmick of what I'm about to anticipate and being able to regurgitate that thinking process appropriately to like get us to squeak my way towards a higher score. And I wonder like if I can eat my score by like 30% higher by multiple taking of the test, am I really measuring my intelligence or just my ability to do well on this test? Or the ability to learn how to take tests? That too. Take that test. I mean, if you're doing the same test over and over again. No, it's different questions. It's different questions. I know, and I wonder like is, if that's the case, isn't there a possibility that people with really high IQ levels are just people who've taken the test a lot of times and are really good at taking IQ tests? I feel the same way applies to SATs as well. I did really well on my SATs, but- Absolutely. Fundamentally more when I was in college and realized how much I didn't know and how to work with people and do research and figure out what's good information from bad information. Like that's SAT, you couldn't put my college experience in a piece of paper that I have to answer with multiple choices. Like there's just, there's no, I don't know if there's a compatibility. I'm fine with Mensa, I'm fine with IQ. I wish there was a better acceptable way to measure intelligence than those methods. Well, you know, one thing I should note about the Mensa IQ test anyway, is that they're evaluated by psychologists and the way they're evaluated, so I mean, you made the point that you could skip questions or you can make guesses. So it's not like they just, you know, stick the template over the answer sheet and mark off the ones where the holes align with the answers, right? Answers are often, I mean, they're evaluated within the context of other questions. So like some psychology tests where, you know, you're asked the same question in various different ways to get around you, get around a person, you know, trying to game the test as it were. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So these IQ tests, especially the one you're like, are done in the same way so that it's, you know, it's a hard one to actually practice. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, I hear you. It's evaluated on a broader, you know, sort of in a broader fashion than just sticking the template over and chucking the ones you got right into the hole, so. I'm at least relieved that there's efforts to make it better, but maybe. Yeah, I imagine there might be. Yeah, Dredd, where can we find your stuff at? Well, we're streaming live on my YouTube channel, Mind Pirate, P-Y-R-A-T-E, and we do that on Sundays at eight o'clock to nine o'clock. Cool. In the morning. And George, I know you probably don't have anything. That's totally fine, but hey, is there a website you would recommend, Red Leader? We should check out. Yeah, Larry asked me for the. For the, uh. After verse. Yeah, about the weapon of mass destruction. Uh, I believe, Larry, if you look in the book, it's either under the joy of circumcision or adventures, more adventures in circumcision. Your book. And there will be a reference to keep it. And what's the name of your book? Yeah. Now you can find it at howjesusdidit.com. That's howjesusdidit.com. Yeah. Now, Dale, you're also a sculptor. Did you do the sculptor behind you? Yeah, good question. Yes. It's very good. That's James Wren, haven't it? I met him. Cool. Very cool. Yeah, I knew that. Very nice. Yeah, it's very nice. You can find myself on Let's Chat. You're probably here right now, so thanks for watching this video. Yeah? Larry, I'm all good. Okay. This has been digitalfreethought.com, Radio Hour, sorry. You can find my book, Atheism What's It All About on Amazon. Be sure to check out our blog at digitalfreethought.com slash blog. And for our radio show archives, our atheist songs and many articles on Facebook on the subject of atheism. If you have any questions for the show, you can send them to askanatheist at noxfieldatheist.org. You can find our podcasts not only on digitalfreethought.com, but on iTunes, Institute of Lubanary, podcast.com, et cetera, et cetera. If you're watching this on YouTube, be sure to like and subscribe and to be notified when new episodes are available. Also, I'd like to remind everybody at the end of the show that everybody is going to somebody else's hell. The time to worry about it is when they prove that heavens and hells and souls are real. Until then, don't sweat it and enjoy your life. And we'll see you next week, 7 o'clock on WZO Radio 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Say goodbye, everybody. Bye. Bye. I'm in.