Newton was a product of his times. Einstein seems to have been more agnostic, at the very least his definition of God is very different to most religions.

Newton lived only 300 years ago. Newton is a culturally relative choice, here. Why didn't you pick someone from 3000 years ago to site as intelligent? I mean, the difference between Newton and Einstein is actually very large, and the difference between Einstein and a brilliant physicist today is similarly large.

The only things that Newton did that were intelligent were things that modern physicists are still unilaterally willing to do, and holding belief in a deity is not one of them.

PS: Those guys are dead. You haven't met him either. They had less information available to them than we do today by a large margin. Their opinions and beliefs are inherently less trustworthy due to that.

>The only things that Newton did that were intelligent were things that modern physicists are still unilaterally willing to do ...

> They had less information available to them than we do today by a large margin. Their opinions and beliefs are inherently less trustworthy due to that.

i for one congratulate you for being smarter and more Knowledgeable than both Newton and Einstein.

Graduate-level physics students routinely do more complicated work than either of those two did at the height of their careers, and with a better understanding of why. Just as they Einstein did relative to Newton, and Newton to Aristotle, and Aristotle to countless people before him.

You cannot use Newton or Einstein as an example of a knowledgeable perspective and simultaneously ignore the fact that there exist more knowledgeable people today. That is a fallacy; you could just as well cite Aristotle or Thales or Zoroaster. They get worse as they get older, and that's not a coincidence.

I think you really know the obvious counter arguments yourself:

1. You argue through authority, for a subject where believers are infamous for throwing out their reasoning capacity (even becoming creationists)? :-( (Is this some meta level humor?)

2. Do you remember that quote about "standing on the shoulders of giants"? Those two are a couple of the giants we stand on the shoulders of, today. That doesn't imply a claim about intelligence, more than being able to get through a science university education.

> You argue through authority, for a subject where believers are infamous for throwing out their reasoning capacity (even becoming creationists)? :-( (Is this some meta level humor?)

No, i think that the categorical statement of bleachedsleet (five levels up the tree) is a bit offending, to me it sounds exactly like if he was claiming absolute authority on the subject, which he obviously can't.

showing a counterexample is not a bad argument, at least not in mathematics.

1. Don't make bad arguments just because you think someone's position is insulting. (As my point 2 noted, it was a flawed example.) If nothing else, you're not helping your cause...

2. bleachedsleet argument needs that intelligence is very correlated with rationality. Sadly, the correlation is probably quite far from 1. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/opinion/sunday/the-differe...

(Regarding 2: For instance, there is mental disease. For another, if you raise children with one specific set of answers and they don't see any criticism of those answers, you can make most of them believe in anything all their life. Including creationism.)