FACT: Religious people are LESS intelligent, on average

RStringfield said:
Yeah, I think yurt is right. There is another cause that was not controlled. There are some serious outliers including some of the highest IQs being in generally religious nations. But I am guessing if you did control for the socio-economic factors the religious would look even stupider.

The US is smart and generally religious.
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The US is the dumbest nation in the world.
 
(Dagbladet.no): Atheists do statistically have a higher IQ than devout religious people. A new survey done by the Danish Helmuth Nyborg, a professor in development psychology, based on an American survey shows this, according to the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. The researcher claims that the difference between the IQ of the believers and non-believers is 5.8 points.

- I'm not saying that believing in God makes you dumber. My hypothesis is that people with a low intelligence is more easily drawn towards religions, which give answers that are certain, while people with a high intelligence are more sceptical, the 70-year-old professor says, which has recently retired after a long controverse with the University of Aarhus.

The study is based on a survey made among 7,000 people in the U.S., the so-called National Longitudinal Study of Youth. It contains intelligence tests on a representative selection of the American youth, where they have also replied to questions about religious belief.
 
Jngreznex said:
(Dagbladet.no): Atheists do statistically have a higher IQ than devout religious people. A new survey done by the Danish Helmuth Nyborg, a professor in development psychology, based on an American survey shows this, according to the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. The researcher claims that the difference between the IQ of the believers and non-believers is 5.8 points.

- I'm not saying that believing in God makes you dumber. My hypothesis is that people with a low intelligence is more easily drawn towards religions, which give answers that are certain, while people with a high intelligence are more sceptical, the 70-year-old professor says, which has recently retired after a long controverse with the University of Aarhus.

The study is based on a survey made among 7,000 people in the U.S., the so-called National Longitudinal Study of Youth. It contains intelligence tests on a representative selection of the American youth, where they have also replied to questions about religious belief.
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so the more skeptical we are, the more intelligent we are.....

very weak basis for determining overall intelligence
 
Yurt said:
so the more skeptical we are, the more intelligent we are.....
very weak basis for determining overall intelligence
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I'd say the converse is probably true, that more intelligent people tend to question more.

There are some problems with the study as published, though, and I think that Damo, as a mathematician, will agree with this.

First, a correlation of 0.6 is hardly robust, statistically. I don't recall the level of significance, but as with all survey types of studies, answers must be held suspect in any case.

The score that represents average intelligence is 100. The graph shows a cluster of very low (impossibly low, obviously skewed toward an unrealistically low level given population statistics) scores at the more religious end of the spectrum. At that level, there should have been a majority of points hovering around the 100 mark. As the scores proceeded along the "percent of atheists" x-axis, given the hypothesis of the study, there should have been many scores much higher than 100. If each dot represents a single individual, as it seems, I'm going to declare the interpretation of this study invalid. It is not supported at all statistically.
 
Thorn said:
I'd say the converse is probably true, that more intelligent people tend to question more.

There are some problems with the study as published, though, and I think that Damo, as a mathematician, will agree with this.

First, a correlation of 0.6 is hardly robust, statistically. I don't recall the level of significance, but as with all survey types of studies, answers must be held suspect in any case.

The score that represents average intelligence is 100. The graph shows a cluster of very low (impossibly low, obviously skewed toward an unrealistically low level given population statistics) scores at the more religious end of the spectrum. At that level, there should have been a majority of points hovering around the 100 mark. As the scores proceeded along the "percent of atheists" x-axis, given the hypothesis of the study, there should have been many scores much higher than 100. If each dot represents a single individual, as it seems, I'm going to declare the interpretation of this study invalid. It is not supported at all statistically.
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It represents a single country, not individual.

I'm guessing that people in Zimbabwe's scores are shot mostly because they can't even read any test.
 
RStringfield said:
Yeah, I think yurt is right. There is another cause that was not controlled. There are some serious outliers including some of the highest IQs being in generally religious nations. But I am guessing if you did control for the socio-economic factors the religious would look even stupider.

The US is smart and generally religious.
Click to expand...

None of the studies I posted claimed that religion causes stupidity, only that stupid people are attracted to religion.
 
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