Hi, Frako.
frako writes:
So what would then be the cause that atheists score better on iq tests, and do better in school, that less religius people do better on SATs.....
I can see only 2 plausible causes that would explain this corelation
1. "smarter" people tend to question the religious garbage more and more often become atheists.
2. Religious people get dummied down by their garbage and lack of thinking.
The stats you cited don't actually tell you that atheists score better on IQ tests: those stats only deal with an entire
nation, not with individual groups of people.
Take a look at the data referenced in
this blog post, which breaks down IQ scores of Americans by religious categories. Jews and Episcopalians apparently tended to score higher than atheists.
Based on this, what would we conclude about atheists? Could we conclude that atheists are "dummied down" because they question the "religious garbage" of Jews and Episcopalians?
No, we couldn't: this data doesn't tell us anything about why Jews have higher IQ's than atheists, nor about what effects "religious garbage" might have on people's IQ scores.
-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)
Darwin loves you.
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