Is There a Correlation Between Atheism and IQ?

[Joel]

I would tend to agree. This thread has been mostly based on some pretty thin dervative evidence.

Indeed. Altough it has made for some interesting discussion.

 

[selfAdjoint]

http://www.objectivethought.com/atheism/iqstats.html

Loseyourname posted this link at the beginning of this thread but I think that it should be posted again. The evidence here is far from thin.

1. I am really dubious about the studies from the 1930s and earlier for three interconnected reasons: I don't thin the tests were really good yet, it was the depression and attitude were skewed by events (marxism was popular in colleges and many of these studies were on collefge students), and finally I don't believe the professionalism of many of the investigators was high enough for them to do the careful attention to disturbing factors that would tend to weaken their conslusions.

2. Many of the studies talk about weakness of religion or broad-mindedness toward atheism, which are miles away from being atheist. That higher intelligence people tend to be more tolerant is no surprise, and was not the point of this thread, to judge by its title.

 

[BicycleTree]

Why are you questioning the professionalism of researchers you know nothing about? And there were only a few studies from the 1930s.

The evidence is fairly plain. Perhaps the reason most of the studies did not ask (some did!) about absolute atheism is that most people are not atheist so the results are less accurate for a given sample size.

Tolerance of disagreeing viewpoints generally indicates that one is less certain of one's own viewpoint. It's a sliding scale from complete dogmatic belief to agnosticism to atheism. And some of the studies did expressly ask about atheism.

 

[selfAdjoint]

Why are you questioning the professionalism of researchers you know nothing about? And there were only a few studies from the 1930s.

The evidence is fairly plain. Perhaps the reason most of the studies did not ask (some did!) about absolute atheism is that most people are not atheist so the results are less accurate for a given sample size.

Tolerance of disagreeing viewpoints generally indicates that one is less certain of one's own viewpoint. It's a sliding scale from complete dogmatic belief to agnosticism to atheism. And some of the studies did expressly ask about atheism.

Sure I know about sliding scale, but in the case of atheism you don't have religious opinion = a(atheist) + (1-a)(theist), or if you do then NONE of the studies were capable of telling that. The world is full of irreligious people and broad minded people. Very few of them are atheists.

We can differ on the professionalism of the researchers but the full power of statistics (factor analysis and principal component analysis) didn't become available until the middle 1930s, and it wasn't the custom then to obsessively worry about whether your distribution was normal and whether your significance tests were valid.

 

[BicycleTree]

I don't know about factor analysis or principal component analysis, but by the central limit theorem the mean of your distribution is always about normal for a fair sample size. How much rigor are you talking about? And are you positive that significance testing was not around at the time?

Anyway, if you find a moderate correlation and your sample size is in the hundreds, your result is probably significant. They didn't have to _know_ how significant it was for it to be so.


Let's say I have a room full of people who said on a poll that religion is not very important in their lives. And I have another room of people who said that religion is very important in their lives. Now I bet you $20 that the first person you talk to in one of these two rooms is not atheist. Which room do you enter?

Let's say that I have the same two rooms except that everyone in both of the rooms also answered on the poll that they are not atheist. And you pick one of the people at random except that you get to choose the room, and my bet is $10,000 that the person you pick will still not be atheist in 20 years. Which room do you choose?

 

[marlon]

I have the highest IQ ever : 290 and i am a catholic fundamentalist. Just read my signature.

TOTUS TUUS EGO SUM

marlon

my point is : YES they do relate...Now, close this thread

 

[Lacy33]

So let it be!

"TOTUS TUUS EGO SUM"
"YES they do relate...Now, close this thread"



I agree!

"dalet-yud" "di" (enough)

 

[selfAdjoint]

Good enough.