One's being a NASA engineer doesn't necessarily mean he's extremely smart. At NASA, there are no real overall rocket scientists. There are groups and teams and individuals that are very specialized. Some might specialize in optics, others in materials science (and even a very narrow branch of that). Some might write computer code or design cooling systems. So these guys might have acquired a lot of knowledge in very specialized areas, but that doesn’t mean they are super brains.
Admittedly, one’s being able to get a four-year engineering or science degree does place him in a higher league than almost all JWs and most non-JWs just by virtue of the fact that he can comprehend sophomore calculus when most (including all my family members) have difficulty just manipulating fractions. My parents and sibling couldn’t figure out what 1/2 of 1/3 is.
I had engineering professors who knew their fields, but overall weren’t really that smart. Some knew their fields but lacked the ability to teach even the stuff they knew. To me, one like that is not really smart – at least not in an overall way. Really smart people are smart in general. I mentioned earlier my two organic chemistry professors. They knew chemistry, but, to me, weren’t really smart; I could listen to them talk and tell that.
Most of my exposure to the world of academia has been in math, engineering, and science. It’s only in later years that I acquired an interest in fields such as philosophy and linguistics, and I’ve come to think that maybe, for example, the field of philosophy is one that might require more smarts than engineering and science. It requires excellent comprehension of often abstract concepts, whereas engineering and math are more concrete. If one can comprehend and remember, for example, the basic concepts in physics and he’s decent at math, he should do OK in sophomore physics. However, I think for one to excel in philosophy, he has to be really smart – to have a deep insight and ability to think abstractly.
This topic caught my attention because I get so tired of ignorant people speaking as though certain ones about which they nothing are brilliant. Most people lack the ability to judge whether somebody’s smart. One has to be smart himself to really judge whether another person is smart. I will never forget an incident that occurred over 30 years ago. My mother’s cousin found out that I liked and was good at math. She looked at me and said “Oh that’s great; maybe you should be an accountant.” Some of you might not understand what’s wrong with what she said, but I think others will. Accounting is basically just simple arithmetic, but to her, it was advanced math. There’s nothing wrong with accounting, and I’m sure many accountants are smart people, but the field of accounting does not, in general, involve anything mathematically challenging; it’s mostly just number crunching. That woman has no business judging whether somebody’s smart or what fields require smarts, etc.
Back to the main point of this thread… I just don’t get it. Why would engineer dude be able to explain things any better than anyone else? I had an electrical engineering professor who could not explain electrical engineering, yet this supposed NASA engineer is supposed to automatically be a great explainer of all things Biblical because he’s an engineer who works at NASA??? I don’t think so.
