Many scientific studies have been done on the subject and the overriding conclusion is that the lower the IQ the more likely a person is to be religious and the higher the less.

Are these studies as straight forward as they seem or are there other factors that need to be taken into account?

And why should religious belief be linked with intelligence? Is it because the more intelligent you are, the less likely you are to simply believe what is told to you and the more you want to reason things out yourself?

Is this why most young children believe in Father Christmas but most adults don't?

Or is this too simplistic?

This graph from

http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics...vs_iq.html

Shows a worldwide snapshot of religion and IQ.

How can that graph stop at an IQ of 110? Isn't that meant to be the average these days. I demand us more intelligent people get a position!!!

(August 27, 2008 at 2:40 pm)Tiberius Wrote: How can that graph stop at an IQ of 110? Isn't that meant to be the average these days. I demand us more intelligent people get a position!!!

That is the highest average IQ in any country. Duh!

I'm confused. I swear I've seen a pretty much identical thread to this somewhere else. Same link to website too and also the thread has exactly the same name..?! Unless somehow the majority of the posts in this thread were just deleted and it IS the same thread?
I'm sure I have seen this exact thread with the exact same link and same name before...only EXCEPT the latest reply (not including this, the one before this).
I guess its possible I'm thinking of another forum...but I don't think so...and if so the similarity is UNCANNY!
Anyways, that aside:

(October 26, 2008 at 12:00 pm)Godan Wrote: That is the highest average IQ in any country. Duh!

There IS a pretty strong connection between religiosity and intelligence though IMO...I'd say its mostly because if you're dumb anyway you're more likely to be religious (because religion is dumb and gullible. And stupid people like it IMO) - but I can also imagine how atleast occasionally religion can lower your intelligence...just like learning things (that aren't utter bull) can raise it.

So, I took the raw data that was listed on that site and played around with it in SPSS. After using GDP of the countries as a covariate and utilizing the residual from that through linear regression I ran a second regression. The original run with just IQ and the religion scores yielded an Rsquared of 0.52 and once I covaried out GDP from IQ there still appeared the same downward trend as in the original graphs with an Rsquared of 0.28 making the variance change of approximately 0.24. Therefore, while the website is correct in that GDP does seem to play a part it is not a refutation of the results that there is still a significant negative trend between IQ and Religiosity and therefore suggests that a higher IQ is still predictive of a lower religiosity score.

(October 26, 2008 at 12:00 pm)Godan Wrote:

IQ has nothing to do with how much education you have. They are indicators of how well you are likely to do in education. This is why IQ tests only require basic literary and math skills. Most IQ tests contain questions that ask about certain patterns and relationships, for example:

Hand is to glove as foot is to...

(Correct answer is "sock" or sometimes "shoe")

Besides, history has shown that there are an extraordinary amount of people from poor uneducated backgrounds who have genius level IQs. The fact is, there is a very strong positive correlation between intelligence and disbelief in God, mainly because people with high IQs are able to spot patterns and contradictions within religion more than people with lower IQs.

Also, in no proper scientific study would the "best fit line" on that graph be straight for the religion/gdp data. It is a clear curve. The religion/IQ data however is a clear straight line.

(October 26, 2008 at 9:55 pm)Tiberius Wrote: mainly because people with high IQs are able to spot patterns and contradictions within religion more than people with lower IQs.

I've got forum deja-vu again, lol. But anyway, basically I don't think I could agree with you more here without being dogmatic.

Quote:Also, in no proper scientific study would the "best fit line" on that graph be straight for the religion/gdp data. It is a clear curve. The religion/IQ data however is a clear straight line.

I agree.