Is there a correlation between atheism and intelligence?

[Jenny A]

I'd really love, and I do mean love, to say that people are religious because they are stupid. But I think that's much too simple. I think it has to do with what part of our thinking is most prominent. I think people who are highly religious have very associative brains and not particularly logical ones. In some cases they may have both very logical brains and very associative ones, but the associative part is leading.

Kary Banks Mullis, a Nobel prize winning chemist, believes in UFOs and astrology, but not HIV or climate change. It's really hard to call the man anything other than brilliant. But he believes many really stupid things.

Religion and belief in god is all about making associative connections, without paying too much attention to the possibility of false positives.

Thus, I prayed very hard and my daughter was the only one who survived the plane crash. That other people prayed for their loved ones who died is ignored. Logic corrects that. Association does not.

But there are great leaps in science that require highly associative brains. Darwin's theory of evolution probably took that kind of associative leap.

So I think we are talking about different kinds of intelligence.

However, people who do not realize that god cannot be proved in a logical way, well that's really stupid. That's not only having an associative brain, but not recognizing logic when it laid out in front of you.