Intelligent people less likely to believe in God

reply to post by DaleGribble


Oh I do understand. Faith and religion have the power to give a person hope, and the ability to accept that which in other circumstance they could not. I am not thumbing my nose at your faith. I am only making the point that even in circumstances, blindly following is wrong. To retrieve hope or comfort from anything does not make it wrong. Religion should be used for such comfort and hope, and even a guideline to live well, but not as fact to follow blindly. We as human beings need hope and comfort, and our instincts make a need for guidelines to live. The stories in any religous text show us a model of life, not rules to follow blindly. We question why musn't we kill? The answer is simple, we wouldnt want to be killed. Why musn't we steal? We wouldnt want to be stolen from. They are all guidelines set by our texts. And most religions have these same guidelines, from Christianity to Muslim, and even Paganism and atheists follow these. How much you know really doesn't indicate your intelligence. It is how much you question that makes you more intelligent. If you come to the same conclustion, that is fine. But if you follow blindly and become one in many head of cattle, that is being herded to their demise... My point has been made. Thank you all for listening.

Originally posted by Anti-Tyrant
Both have been warped, Both have been manipulated, and in both cases, by Humans.

*cough* unknown implications *cough*

Originally posted by cashlink
YEP! I am very smart, after I got the internet (drool) uh! I grew up LOL
I do believe in God, but nothing more, I used to be a Christian and all, but I found out that some men wrote the Bible, and everyone dosent interp
the good book the same way.
I also relised that Christianity IS the new Religion.

Yes sir reeee had it not been for the internet, Id still be a Christian and Id wouldnt known any better LOL.

Now I need to brush my teeth.

wtf?
sorry
for
the
one
liner...

How is this surprising at all? Faith requires no actual thought to have, while thinking intellectually, AND philosophically both require some intelligence. Religion played its role in our survival as a species, but I'm afraid its time has begun to wane. Hopefully people can begin to enjoy life based on what life is and not what you think you'll get.

Tip for the other thoughtful folks:

Never argue a religious person using fact and reasoning, faith does not abide by those laws. To disprove something ethereal you must use ethereal arguments. Its quite easy to disprove god with the nonsense people believe in itself.

I find this thread very,very,very classy(sarcasm)........Ignorance is NOT defined by a difference of opinion......if it wasnt for the grace of god i wouldn't like most of you...does that make me ignorant? I love you all peace

Originally posted by Quazga
You seem to be one who has an emotional attachment to the fact that "religion is good reasoning"

No, I have looked at the data - not this one, as it is not in any online journal I can find, but other studies which have attempted to do the same thing. Your the one with the emotional attachment to trying to find ways to verify your world view about religion.

Originally posted by Quazga
However, I can also understand that those who are inclined to dealing with rational thought are also inclined to stop believing in what they perceive as fairy tales. It's really not that tough. More and more of the educated people I meet don't believe in God. More and more of my friends have stopped believing in God.

Then your not being rational. First this is a hasty generalization logical fallacy. If you were interested in finding the truth, you would look at the data. I have:

It would be VERY simple to prove causation between intelligence and religious adherence. Send a survey asking people about their level of education, IQ, and their religious practices - large enough to be statistically significant at the 0.05 level. Put all of the religious practice variables as dependent variables and all of the education/IQ variables as independent variables in a multivariate regression (possibly a logit regression, depending on whether or not the variables were dichotomous). Control for things which would naturally influence education and religious practice - cultural variables, income, demographics, etc. using those as a independent control variables.

If you found a high R squared (0.65 and above, to be generous) and the coefficients showed your education variables were inversely correlated with religious practice while being statistically significant, then you could publish it and incite a media frenzy. Atheists around the world would worship you.

There is just ONE MINOR PROBLEM HERE. ITS BEEN TRIED - AND IT HAS FAILED. The R squares come out to low, critical independent variables do not show up as correlating or statistically significant, etc. There are legions of foaming at the mouth atheists in Academia who would absolutely love to have a study like this where it came out in their favor. Unfortunately, it never does, for any population sampled. It gets published but the media doesn't pick it up because it doesn't flow with the anti-God sentiment that is trendy. Why?

Because the research shows there is no causation relationship between belief in god and intelligence. I have looked at the research, and made conclusions from it. The research is clear, regardless of my personal beliefs - and what exactly is yours based on - spurious correlations without meaning?

Sure the article is true. There is a inverse relationship between intelligence (which has gone up) and belief in god (which has gone down). This is absolutely meaningless, because it does not provide any evidence that there is a link between the two. In fact, it could be a completely spurious correlation - as most correlations are.

Ah, another piece of anti-religious propaganda.


Does that make the Satanist Elite "unintelligent"?

Originally posted by dragonfire2159
I don't know if it's "intelligence", as defining levels of intelligence is extremely subjective. I feel that perhaps people who are "intelligent" may just practice introspection and critical analysis of the world. After thinking about the world and society for a while, one inevitably begins to question the mechanisms of control being put in place, one of the most prominent being religion.

When looking at all religions, there's a general flow of goodwill toward others and bascially striving for peace, however, these ideas are negated by all the obvious "human" insertions of greed, lust, pride, hate, judgement, etc. So, perhaps, instead of saying intelligent people don't believe in God, perhaps intelligent people can't accept the man-made creations which are present day organized religion and their interpreations of God, as in the fear-mongering/punishing God. Just my opinion.

Wow, it's rare to find someone who mirrors your beliefs to a tee... BRAVO Dragonfire, BRAVO!

But the conclusions - in a paper for the academic journal Intelligence - have been branded "simplistic" by critics.

Interesting how the paper can brand intelligence simplistic. Yet there is always an easy explaination for why "God" exists or to explain how everything became.

reply to post by Brainiac


Actually its obvious why its simplistic - its a correlation, and does not prove causation. Its extraordinarily simplistic. So simplistic if it wasn't for the fact that it fed atheists what they want to hear, it would have never come to anyones attention.

reply to post by Anti-Tyrant


The technology may be different, the times may be different but the fundamental concept of how we, as a society, see god is still the same today. The same blind faith that has killed innocent millions throughout history, the same blind faith that convinced terrorists that flying planes into buildings was a good idea, and the same blind faith that keeps people ignorant to the facts. Like the people who believe the dinosaurs aren't real, or that the earth is only 12,000 years old.

Not all individual cases involve people living in a delusional dream world, but when your world revolves around a blind devout faith to a specific ideaology, you are not going to listen to anything that counters what you believe to be true due to scripture. Again, the times are different but the concept is still the same. There is no difference between Nicholas Copernicus being denounced by the Catholic church during the inquisition and people believing in intelligent design today due to biblical scripture. The cause is the same religious fundamentalism where one's own world view is assumed as correct and anyone elses is simply flawed regardless of what the facts imply. The facts can easily be ignored to facilitate one's own world perspective. It's basic ignorance.

You just have to be smarter than that to rise above such ignorance. History itself shows how evil and insane religion is. You don't need my word for it.

-ChriS

[edit on 13-6-2008 by BlasteR]

Originally posted by ALightinDarkness
If you found a high R squared (0.65 and above, to be generous) and the coefficients showed your education variables were inversely correlated with religious practice while being statistically significant, then you could publish it and incite a media frenzy. Atheists around the world would worship you.

There is just ONE MINOR PROBLEM HERE. ITS BEEN TRIED - AND IT HAS FAILED....

Because the research shows there is no causation relationship between belief in god and intelligence. I have looked at the research, and made conclusions from it. The research is clear, regardless of my personal beliefs - and what exactly is yours based on - spurious correlations without meaning?

Sure the article is true. There is a inverse relationship between intelligence (which has gone up) and belief in god (which has gone down). This is absolutely meaningless, because it does not provide any evidence that there is a link between the two. In fact, it could be a completely spurious correlation - as most correlations are.

Hmmm. I wouldn't say it was meaningless at all. And it is remiss to just throw around the assertion - 'spurious correlations with no meaning'. You appear to have a fair grasp of the statistical issues, but I'm not sure you fully understand how this applies to social & behavioural sciences.

R^2 of .65?

rofl. That's an regression coefficient of around .8, no? That would be fairly rare in social and behavioural sciences. At r = .3 we are talking about a moderate relationship, and r = .5 and above is strongish.

From what I gather, Lynn et al found r = -.6 between religious belief and IQ across 137 countries. That's actually a very good correlation. Which would be R^2 of .36, so accounting for 36% of the variability of the data by this bivariate model. And from my experience, r = .6 is very likely significant well below p = .05.

The study has passed peer-review, it is 'in press' at the journal 'intelligence'. So it most definitely hasn't 'FAILED'. But I still need to read it in detail before I take it too seriously.

However, I do agree that an 'a to b' (or 'b to a') interpretation is much too simplistic. But this is not meaningless, it is suggestive of some form of causal link. At the minimum, if the study is robust, we can see that religious belief and IQ are very likely to be negatively and significantly related.

I think thou doth protest too much, my dear.

[edit on 13-6-2008 by melatonin]

Hey, dose anyone have a toothpick!
Anyway it all boils down to this, All Religion have caused wars, and downfall of great Nations.

It is a tool written by man to control man and to exstort money.

Thats what I have uncovered.

It never ceases to amaze me that we who believe in God are labelled as mentally deficient, but if you believe that " the Intergallactic Council exists" then thats acceptable and intelligent.
Eintein believed in the God of the Bible.

reply to post by melatonin


I'm not sure if you were trying to insult me by saying I "seem" to have a good grasp of it, but...I have enough graduate education to understand statistics. I'm also a graduate student in the social sciences, so I actually do know the context we are working with here. As you and I both know the media absolutely loves spinning academic research whenever it fits their agenda. And you and I both know simple correlations have no meaning in terms of causation. And since research has been done in this area, and NO ONE has found strong evidence of causation, its pretty clear what is going on here - an agenda.

I had to laugh at you thinking an R squared above a 0.65 would somehow be impossible - its pretty reasonable, especially if someone were doing a quality regression that has a ton of controlling variables, in which case the R squared would naturally be higher than normal and they would need to run some other statistics to make sure the results were not due to the high number of controlling variables.

Also, I'm not sure who in the world all of a sudden set standards for what was a moderate or strong strong relationship...I'm pretty sure we didn't have a conference about that...and I'm pretty sure the professor I worked for as an RA who taught quantitative methods would laugh at me if I told her those guidelines. Perhaps 0.65 is a bit high overall, but it would certainly need to be higher than 0.36 if everything was properly controlled for.

IQ is known to be only one measure of intelligence and the literature is in much disagreement about its validity, if they were interested in finding out the truth they would have included educational variables and other standardized test scores in a multivariate. Ive gotten numbers in the 0.35 range simply due to have so many independent variables. An r squared is pretty of 0.36 is pretty laughably low for what the paper infers, since it only explains only 36% of the variation and is not controlling for anything obvious. I'd love to know what the p is, but I'll take your word on it that its < 0.05. I'd also want to know how these people were surveyed to determine how generalizable it was. But hey, even bad research gets into journals as long as it fits someones bias.

It has FAILED in an attempt to imply causation, and a random correlation is just that - spurious until proven otherwise.

I think thou doth want to use questionable research tactics to verify your world view, my dear.

The key phrase of the day is: construct validity.

[edit on 13-6-2008 by ALightinDarkness]

It's obvious that intelligent people will have trouble believing in a god. That belief requires one to set aside all notions of common sense and have faith in the un-proveable.... However, I think the belief in gods or spirituality is something that is hard-wired into the human brain - a by-product of evolution that is no longer required, but something which takes a long time to dissipate. Basically, those of us without the ability to buy into spiritual belief are technically "handicapped", even though our world view is less superstitious and foolish. This explains why there are so many seemingly intelligent people who are able to subscribe to religious belief.

Big problem : who wrote the article thinks the Christian god is the only god, no other religions exist
Also he sees God as some all powerful being creating stuff, and deciding to punish his own creation, like he would really care about the dust particle that is our planet, and had nothing better to do then send us all to hell

Of course intelligent people do not believe in such a god. He has been hijacked long time ago

"The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us."
Black Elk - Oglala Sioux

"A human being is a part of a whole, called by us 'universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty"
Albert Einstein

"Believe nothing on the faith of traditions,
even though they have been held in honor
for many generations and in diverse places.
Do not believe a thing because many people speak of it.
Do not believe on the faith of the sages of the past.
Do not believe what you yourself have imagined,
persuading yourself that a God inspires you.
Believe nothing on the sole authority of your masters and priests.
After examination, believe what you yourself have tested
and found to be reasonable, and conform your conduct thereto."
Buddha





[edit on 13-6-2008 by pai mei]

Again, this is one of those quasi-political arguments, the value of which is always lost due to misunderstandings of context.

Are we discussing the literal, physical existence or non-existence of a supreme being, or is this about God in a metaphysical, philosophical sense? Frequently you will find an atheist claiming the former does not exist, only to find himself debating a believer who professes the existence of the latter - a thing which cannot possibly be determined through science. Invariably, neither position provides so much as an iota of valuable insight.

Originally posted by ALightinDarkness
As a PhD student in the social sciences, I have a very good grasp of it.

Cool.

As you and I both know the media absolutely loves spinning academic research whenever it fits their agenda.

They do. Indeed, media reporting of science is generally dreadful.

And you and I both know simple correlations have no meaning in terms of causation. And since research has been done in this area, and NO ONE has found causation, its pretty clear what is going on here - an agenda.

That I disagree with. A reliable strong significant correlation is suggestive of some form of causation (could be a to b, b to a, unknown(s) to a & b). It does not mean a causes b (or b causes a), but it is certainly something that would say to me - time to get into this relationship in detail. If it had no meaning, wouldn't even be worth the time, no? Yet I see scientists using bivariates all the time.

If you think that only multiple regressions are appropriate in this type of study, you have just discarded much very fine and robust research out there.

I had to laugh at you thinking an R squared above a 0.65 would somehow be impossible - its pretty reasonable, especially if someone were doing a quality regression that has a ton of controlling variables, in which case the R squared would naturally be higher than normal and they would need to run some other statistics to make sure the results were not due to the high number of controlling variables.

Aye, but we are not talking about multiple regression in this study. I also never said impossible. I think I said 'fairly rare'. and for a bivariate it is. And in this case expecting R^2 of .65 to be, what was it you said, 'generous' is pretty laughable. r = .8 is a very very strong correlation.

And your 'spurious correlations' blah was indicative of someone who just wants to dismiss this issue out of hand. I'm not, I raised my concerns earlier in the thread. But your approach is more troubling to me, especially so if you are a PhD student.

IQ is known to be only one measure of intelligence and the literature is in much disagreement about its validity, if they were interested in finding out the truth they would have included educational variables and other standardized test scores in a multivariate.

I agree. But if you go on to be an independent researcher, you'll learn to use what you have to hand.

An r squared is pretty of 0.36 is pretty laughably low, explaining only 36% of the variation and not controlling for anything obvious. I'd love to know what the p is, but I'll take your word on it that its < 0.05. I'd also want to know how these people were surveyed to determine how generalizable it was. But hey, even bad research gets into journals as long as it fits someones bias.

But it certainly isn't meaningless. I'm sorry, it just isn't.

Oh, trust me. If you ever find r = .6, it is more likely than not to be p < .05. Not certainly, but very likely.

And again, I agree. Bad research does get published. Peer-review is a necessary but not sufficient degree of quality control. I take that bias comment as pretty much poor form. Peer-review generally involves much more than one individual, so you are taking pot-shots at probably 3 experts with differing views here. Indeed, implicitly at people you don't even know who reviewed this manuscript.

Also, I'm not sure who in the world all of a sudden set standards for what was a moderate or strong strong relationship...I'm pretty sure we didn't have a conference about that...and I'm pretty sure the professor I worked for as an RA who taught quantitative methods would laugh at me if I told her those guidelines. Perhaps 0.65 is a bit high overall, but it would certainly need to be higher than 0.36 if everything was properly controlled for.

.65 for R^2 is much too high for some sort of barrier for acceptable relationships in behavioural science. I'll tell you a little story, I used to work in pharmaceutical research all those years ago, I would knock of assay calibrations of .99999999999999999 all the time. When I moved into a behavioural science as an UG, I did a study and found a correlation of something like .35, which I said was poor. And it is! For chemistry. But I was told it was actually a moderate relationship. It's just something you might have missed or overlooked. Around .3-.4 is moderate, .5+ is strong.

I'd also want to know how these people were surveyed to determine how generalizable it was. But hey, even bad research gets into journals as long as it fits someones bias.

I also want to read the full study. I'm still unclear how they really went about it, so I won't take it at face value for now. But you do appear to just want to dismiss it.

It has FAILED in an attempt to imply causation, and a random correlation is just that - spurious until proven otherwise.

Not spurious at all. That's the wrong approach. It shows a significant negative correlation between two variables, that is not random. And it is most likely not spurious. That's what the stats are for. If we are at p < .05, we are talking about less than 5% false positive.

So we accept it tentatively and study further. Maybe someone will get out there and do a more thorough analysis using your favoured multivariate techniques.

I think thou doth want to use questionable research tactics to verify your world view, my dear.

Not my research, so you might want to direct your complaints to Lynn et al and the journal editor.

The key phrase of the day is: construct validity.

Yeah, great phrase.

So, you question the relationship between IQ and intelligence? OK, fair enough, I raised a similar concern earlier in the thread. However, it does measure something of interest that has been shown to have predictive validity in numerous ways (neurological, social, educational, behavioural etc).

Or do you question the veracity of their measure of belief/non-belief. I'm interested myself as to how they went about it. I have an inkling, and if I'm correct - not the way I would have went about it. But you sometimes have to work with what you have.

[edit on 13-6-2008 by melatonin]

reply to post by Flatwoods


Furthermore, I suggest we more clearly define the concept of "atheism", as it has become popular in some political circles to view atheism not as a viewpoint, but rather as a form of political ideology. Anyone who's seen the Ben Stein movie "Expelled" will know what I'm talking about. The movie refers to atheists "Darwinists", and tries to paint anyone who doesn't believe in God as some kind of leftist radical who wants to ban religion from the public discourse entirely.

But what if you're just a person who's heard of God(or intelligent design), but doesn't buy it? Maybe those of us who are atheist should start calling ourselves skeptics instead, as the religious right has been slowly redefining the concept of atheism in order to fit their own propaganda.