Atheists are more intelligent than Religious people

53 out of 63 research studies found that belief correlates negatively with intellignce. This study explains why - religion is instinctive, it requires intelligence to overcome it.Atheists are more intelligent than religious people, say researchers | The Independent | The Independent

The article does report that the conclusion is based on the assumption "if religion is an evolved domain", ie part of human instinct.I'm not convinced it's that simple. I would need an explanation as to how religion can be assessed as an instinct in the same way as other instincts - suckling, for example. Perhaps the paper does this and it is not reported though.

There have been too many religious people who are also geniuses for that to be true. Jonathan Edwards, Isaac Newton, John Owen are a few.

You left out Donald Trump.

There may be an element of self-selection here, where people that tend to react instinctively are more drawn to religion (and demagogues like DTrumph) while people with more intelligence may be drawn towards education and learning about options for intellectual pursuits.I think this is a trend these days where science denial is seen by some as a positive opinion, but in the past being educated and intelligent was revered even in church.This would explain the people mentioned by Faith in Message 3: Of course they could be outliers in the studies, not enough of them to affect the data.Enjoy

It's an average Faith. No-one is saying that religious people can't also be intelligent or that atheists can't be dim, just that on average religious people aren't as intelligent as atheists.

What did most of those 63 studies all have in common? They were conducted in places where there majority of people were religious.So we can simply religion from the equation and come to the conclusion that, the more intelligent someone is, the more likely they are to question the prevailing orthodoxy.The authors of the meta-analysis discuss this rather obvious explanation, and admit that it may play a role. They seem to be resistant to the idea that it explains away the whole phenomenon, on the basis that:

quote:

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Atheism might be considered a case of nonconformity in societies where the majority is religious. This is not so, however, if one grows up in largely atheist societies, such as those that exist in Scandinavia

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Which is a fair point, but not really relevant, since I can't see any studies in their analysis that looked at Scandinavia (though I could easily have missed them - this is frustratingly not easy to see from the paper without reading each of the 63 studies independently). There is one from Finland, a country which could probably be considered majority atheist; though I can't find access and I am little unclear what info the meta-study is looking at (the paper's abstract says the sample size is 20; but the meta-study says 142).Either way; it seems to me that there could be something to the idea that religious belief is negatively correlated with intelligence; but if you really wanted to test it you should begin by studying irreligious societies and seeing if the relationship holds. Otherwise you haven't addressed the obvious alternative explanation.

Another conclusion might be that religion makes you too stupid to question the orthodoxy.

Are you suggesting that instinct should always be questioned?

yes

Yes.

Can you explain why you seem to think that we wouldn't question instinct? To most of us it's pretty obvious. After all, we have evolved higher level intelligence.

To put a different spin on it, magicians and illusionists have long played with our instincts in order to fool us. The whole point of the scientific method is to question our instinctive reactions to phenomena around us.The emergence of the modern scientific method came about because of a battle between the Rationalists and the Empiricists. The Rationalists proposed that we could reason our way to a conclusion in an instinctive manner. The Empiricists argued that our instincts were not reliable, and we should therefore verify our conclusions through experimentation and empirical facts. The Empiricists won, and what we got out of it is modern science.

We have a name for folks that don't question their instincts. "Psychopaths"

I think that's a bit harsh. Empathy is also a human instinct, and ignoring or lacking empathy is what marks many psychopathic behaviors.