Religion and IQ

I'm going to ignore the country graph, I think it's silly.Otherwise, I strongly suspect all that is being measured here is the tendency of the intelligent to adopt culturally differential opinions and attitudes. I predict if you were to measure this in China, where Atheism is the norm, you'd find that the religious have a higher IQ on average.Even if the correlation is true, it's not clear that it means anything since it's abundantly clear that there are large numbers of clever believers, and stupid atheists.

What's that got to do with what I said? Again, I really don't think such country based comparisons mean anything at all. What are you trying to deduce from any link between religion and IQ? That people are only religious because they're dim? Well, this is simply not true - the existence of highly intelligent believers proves that.

Repeat after me: correlation is not causation.

I already answered this:Intelligent people are more likely to question, and/or break, social norms; since the studies you reference regarding personal IQ/belief correlations were performed in countries which are predominantly religious, higher IQ correlates with belief.As I said earlier, I predict that if you perform such a study in China, you will find that the religious tend to have a higher IQ than the general population.

Of course there's no evidence for it, that's why it's a prediction.There's no evidence for your interpretation either.

But your evidence doesn't support any causal link. All you have is correlation.

That's not what I'm disputing; I'm disputing your assertion about that the correlation tells us anything at all about religion. As opposed to merely being a consequence of a third cause.

You'll note my comment was a response to his response not an out-of-context note on what he was saying.

Yeah, I usually expect responses to make some sense.