Are theists less intelligent?

I totally, hugely, enthusiastically support and endorse that critique.

I don’t think it can erase what we see when we ask about religiosity and intelligence, and scientifically I would insist that if, in a particular population, we saw an influence of religiosity (or anything equivalent) on “intelligence” (or anything similar), and we had ruled out confounders like education, income, geography, and fondness for cats, we would be justified in concluding that religiosity influences intelligence. Of course we would not want to overstate that conclusion, or make extravagant inferences across cultures or geographies or eras. But it would be curiously irresponsible to suggest that a circumscribed experiment like that is necessarily uninformative.

Sounds fair to me. But wouldn’t you have to show that religiosity makes you dumber over time to infer that it is religiosity affecting intelligence and not just smart people opting out in the first place? Otherwise, isn’t it just a correlation not a causation?

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Dear Christy,

With my open, non-compartmentalized mind, I can accept a large population of unenlightened humans without blaming it on anyone. I learned many years ago from my study of Buddhism, that we are all on the same, long road, to the same destination. Yet, some have started the journey long ago and some have just begun. How can I blame anyone who has walked the same steps that I have once walked?

Non-compartmentalization allows me to hold the words of Buddha, Socrates and Jesus as one sweet a cappella.

Best Wishes, Shawn

Yes, absolutely, and that is the obvious alternative explanation. The paper I referenced above does not solve that one, since people who prefer/emphasize intuition might therefore be more prone to religiosity (as opposed to religiosity inducing a preference for intuition). Nature, nurture, yada yada yada. My own hypothesis is that it’s both: non-reasoning helps religiosity, then religiosity reinforces non-reasoning. And it’s reasonable to postulate that non-reasoning is a cognitive habit/framework that could be built/encouraged very early in development, under the influence of religion. But you are completely right that cause and effect are not distinguishable by the experiments I’ve seen.

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Anytime talk turns to ‘rising above one’s instincts’ (in this sense at least) I lovingly refer to it as the ‘Homo Superior Narrative.’ This narrative is the idea that an individual or tribe have discovered or attained some secret insight or knowledge. As a result they have been ushered onto a higher (read: superior) plan of existence. It’s nothing new really and has taken many forms over the years: first century Gnosticism, Communism, facist ideology, Nietzsche‘s superman, Dawkin’s ‘brights’ - it’s the same plot line just with different players.

Of course, Christian’s are not the immune to the ‘Homo Superior narrative’ either. Every time you hear a believer mocking other religions for their backward pagan beliefs or atheists for being too stupid to see all the “obvious” evidence for God’s existence, It’s the same narrative at work.

Personally, I feel there is something very Genesis 3 & 11 about it, which is probably what makes it so compelling. “Look at us, we have made a name for ourselves! We have become like God!”

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That’s sociology in a nutshell. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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I personally have an issue with this kind of reasoning. Trying to calculate ones intelligence to then shove a label on them and ultimately sort them out in a group is distasteful to me. And it happens more often than it should. How many times have i had to endure comments which all too proudly wave around the common: “Its proven that intelligent people do away with religion, i mean look at the elite scientists! Only a very small percentage of them are religious!”

So they can ultimately point your beliefs and convictions unto lack of intelligence instead of judging the person on their merit.

Now ofcourse i am biased, I am a theist and nobody likes calling themselves a dimwit. But i sincerely believe that if anyone reads enough about a topic, they could form a decent opinion about it.

Enough ranting about the possible usage of this data. The data itself is interesting.

I could see a relation between being brought up in a way that looks down upon a person questioning dogmas and critical thought. And the will to investigate all things.
Ultimately however i feel that no matter how intelligent you are, how high your IQ is:

If you are uninformed about a subject then i wouldn’t trust your judgement on it. Neither do i think that more intelligent people are less prone to their biases and their emotions. We are beings of duality, its folly to think we could be purely rational. And ive seen emotions trump rationality many, many times. Both in myself and others. On both sides of the camp!

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@Christy and @sfmatheson, I really enjoyed reading your dialogue in this thread. One question kept coming to mind though, why is intelligence (or cognitive ability) the thing that matters here?

Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying it is not important or that education is unimportant - I am personally of the opinion that it is a very good thing(!). What I am saying is, when it comes to studies on religion v. Non-religion why does the it always seem to circle back to intelligence? Why not social involvement, family loyalty, compassion, honesty, reliability, work ethic or some kind of economic productivity quota?

Certainly, the idea that religious people are apparently less intelligent is an interesting on and they probably are less reasonable at times. I don’t need a PHD research grant to know that Christians can be unreasonable, I’ve sat through enough bad church meetings to have all the empirical evidence I need ;-). I guess the point I am meandering to is, why does it matter? I don’t mean that dismissively or sarcastically, but genuinely struggle to see why it is such an important discovery? I also wonder if it might reveal a Western bias towards intelligence above all else?

Thanks for reading my two cents and for contributing your $50 a piece to the conversation. :slight_smile:

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People probably do those studies too. Why are atheists happy to point to studies that link atheism to intelligence? Same reason Christians are happy to point to studies that link religion and longevity. If you are going to have a group identity, you want your group to be “winning” at stuff.

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Fair point. :slight_smile:

Edit: further thought, if a group (Religious or otherwise) buys into then idea that science and religion are in a war of ideas (conflict model) then the members of that group may have a vested interest in proving that their army has the most advanced soldiers. That is, the smartest ones.

Because it’s the topic of the thread. It’s, you know, in the title of the thread.

Who says it does? I’m pretty sure this is first time I’ve discussed this kind of research on BL or anywhere else. I smell a red herring.

Those are discussed too, famously even, considering the recent retracted paper about altruism and religion. Personally, I think you should pray that no one does a controlled research study in which honesty is the measured variable and evangelical Christians are a study group.

In both those cases anyone who concludes because I am in the statistically advantaged group and you are in the other one, therefore I am smarter or likely to live longer than you is simply mistaken. Reasoning this way may not indicate anything about your longevity but it definitely shows a fault in your reasoning, which might argue against you being one of the smart ones in the group. Certainly not all atheists are smarter than all theists and not all theists will outlive all atheists.

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Sure. I think most people know how statistics work. But people like rooting for their “team.” We are social creatures.

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Some of us are less social than others and not all of us like team sports.

Yeah, I suppose. But I’m not sure all of Christianity is a very cohesive group, and I know atheists are not at all a cohesive group. I’m not sure how the data in the study mentioned gets disaggregated but I suspect that could make a difference. I wonder if YEC vs EC was looked at?

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Right. There are lots of special people around here. I was neither projecting my own views about studies on atheists or religious people or attempting to explain anyone else’s on this board. I was making a light-hearted generalization about common behavior. Which reminds me of this SNL sketch.

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As I’ve mentioned to in another thread, I often struggle to use the correct tone in forum discussions. Perhaps that is what has happened here. You see I’m struggling to understand why, having had someone go out of their way to invite you to answer their “genuine question”, you would choose to respond with sarcasm? Perhaps I’ve misread your tone, if so please let me know.

I am. Based on real life discussions with people of faith and no faith regarding studies done on religious and none religious people. (Full disclosure: conversations rarely provided sources. Most folk rarely have them at there finger tips). So with the upmost respect you reasoning appears fallacious. The fact that this is the first time you have you have seen this issue discussed on the BL forum does not make my question a red herring. It simply illustrates that we have different lived experiences consistent with the fact that we live on opposite sides of the world, inhabiting different social-cultural contexts.

Fair enough, happy to concede this point. Thank you for the correction.

What impact do you suppose such a study would have on me? I might be wrong but it seems like you are implying I would be surprised by the result? I’m already aware that Christian’s can be dishonest, sometimes tear jerkingly so. Working for an Evangelical* church, i often see Christians at the very best and very worst. I’m sure the same the reverse is true for those working closely with atheists. Personally, I am of the opinion that intellectual honesty requires me to assess the adherent in light of the truth claims of the religion/worldview, not the religion/worldview by the actions of the adherent.

*Evangelical appears to be a much more politically charged term in the US than the UK so I use this term with extreme caution.

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I feel exactly the same. Only because I started the thread doesn’t mean I endorse this sort of thinking. And didn’t some experts say that Inteligence is basically putting triangles in patterns and so on, which has vary little correlation to real life? I also heard that you could score better in those tests if you practice.

Exactly! I personally knew people who didn’t believe simply because they knew some Christians that weren’t very nice, or believed certain stereotypes and that put them off. So that would have nothing to do with being clever.
Also I knew certain militant atheist who believed things that were actually debunked by science, this is why I think statistics don’t show full picture.

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Anybody that disagrees with me is less intelligent than me…at least in some areas.

Everybody thinks this, I think.

I think the factors are too varied for a legitimate “study,” to avoid biases, etc. I’ve heard anecdotal evidence of the difficulty of maintaining an overt theistic stance in many graduate programs, which can exert pressure to avoid those programs, or to make theistic beliefs covert, or to actually change from theistic to non-theistic beliefs. So…do the studies depend on “students who have graduated from certain types of programs”?

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The sarcasm comes out of the depths of my being. I personally account for nearly 1% of the world’s eyerolls.

My sarcasm was meant as a rebuke. What you did, surely unintentionally, was a mild form of gaslighting. You entered a discussion about intelligence and belief, and suggested that the topic is unimportant. You asserted that studies “always seem to circle back to intelligence,” doubling down by listing topics that you inaccurately suggest are not studied in this context. You asked why is intelligence “the thing that matters here” in a discussion about intelligence.

It seems to me (and I could be wrong) that your post was really just about you. You somehow always hear about the intelligence of believers. This is how you have responded to my rebuke. I will take you at your word, while asking you with all due respect to read the post where you claim that the “studies” are somehow problematic. I’m sorry, Liam, but you did not merely reflect on your own experience and muse about what that means to you, or how it makes you feel and react. If that was your intent, it was not at all clear to me.

Your response is remarkable in its failure to understand the context of this whole thread. That context is not whether there are smart Christians or dumb atheists or honest satanists or anything like that. Your entire response, which I quote only partially above, is completely beside the point, which is: if (for example) evangelical Christians are less honest, or more altruistic, or more fond of beetles, than other groups of people, then in principle we can study this, detect it, verify or disprove it, and then discuss what it means. My hypothesis is that evangelical Christians will be, at best, the same as unbelievers on most measures of integrity/honesty.

If you don’t care about whether that is true, great! I’m sorry for claiming that this should matter to you. When I was an evangelical, it would have mattered a lot to me. I think it would matter a lot to lots of people.