Can this 3-Question Quiz Predict Whether You Believe in God?

[Lord Emsworth]

I have encountered those exact questions numerous times before and hence got them all correct this time, but I can't recall if I did the first time.

 

[dms1972]

Decades ago I saw a math problem that was a major setup. I'm not going to do the setup right here. You have 2 trains that start 25 miles apart. They are heading towards each other on the same track same track. The first one is going 15 miles per hour and a bee with great acceleration and a cool trick of bouncing off train cattle guards takes off from the cattle guard of the first train. After a half hour the bee meets the second train after going 20 miles. It pounces off the cattle guard of that train and heads back toward the first train always maintaining a speed of 40 MPH. (The right setup gives the time and distance for this trip also). The bee keeps doing this until the trains collide in a great wreck killing all on board and the bee of course.

How far does the bee travel in total?

20 miles?

 

[LilLamb219]

MOD HAT ON

Closed for Staff Review.

MOD HAT OFF

 

[LovebirdsFlying]

MOD HAT ON

This thread is now re-opened. Staff has studied it and would like to note the following:

The OP has made it clear, his intention here is not to show that believers are unintelligent. The quiz and study show that there are different types of intelligence. Non-believers are shown to have a tendency to be more analytical, while believers are more intuitive. An intuitive thinker is more likely to miss the answers, because the answers run counter to intuition. That's all that's being said. No insult is intended.

This said, I got all of them right, and I'm a believer.

Please continue the discussion.

MOD HAT OFF​

 

[durangodawood]

Nutshell:

...analytic thinking may undermine intuitive support for religious belief.

Lots of formerly religious people became atheists/agnostics because they thought hard about it instead of just going with it.

 

[Eudaimonist]

Ironically, any complaints to the thread were probably started by an intuitive conclusion as to what the thread was all about.


eudaimonia,

Mark

 

[TheImmortalJellyfish]

Decades ago I saw a math problem that was a major setup. I'm not going to do the setup right here. You have 2 trains that start 25 miles apart. They are heading towards each other on the same track same track. The first one is going 15 miles per hour and a bee with great acceleration and a cool trick of bouncing off train cattle guards takes off from the cattle guard of the first train. After a half hour the bee meets the second train after going 20 miles. It pounces off the cattle guard of that train and heads back toward the first train always maintaining a speed of 40 MPH. (The right setup gives the time and distance for this trip also). The bee keeps doing this until the trains collide in a great wreck killing all on board and the bee of course.

How far does the bee travel in total?

Surprisingly a cleaver schoolboy can get the answer where many college math majors simply give up.

I can do the answer in my head. I made the numbers here so that it would be easy.

Hint: If you look at this the right way every single person on this site can do the math in their head.

The bee travels 40 miles total before collision, which - given the rate of each train - will occur in 1 hour.

I think in this case, being over-analytical can be very time consuming and frustrating. Some math majors might try to calculate each distance the bee travels in each jump and add those figures up, but the division involved implies an infinite reduction in distance, never to reach zero. The reality is that the time involved is finite with a definite end (impact).