Religious people find it harder to understand the world – study

[RozKek]

Couldn't this be caused or correlated with education rather than the individuals themselves?

Apparently it seems as if IQ is correlated with a belief in god; higher IQ correlates with a higher chance of a lack of belief in a god, and from what I've read IQ is quite inherent.

[Shell B]

It's hard to say. Ben Carson had to have been intelligent to some degree. He was a fucking neurosurgeon, but he was also a bible thumper and a Creationist. Crazy.

[John V]

I would say it's an interesting study...but you can only read the first page without paying.

Here's another article about the study which goes more in-depth and raises some problems.

But my second and main concern is the fact that the physical capability factor included, and appears to be substantially driven by, the measure of mentality/henkinen.

Participants were asked to rate concepts like “consciousness” or “clock” as more or less mental, defined here as “anything that has some kind of spirit, or something which itself is mental”. When participants assigned any mentality to items like flowers, rocks, and wind, this contributed to their receiving a poorer “physical capability” factor, just as occurred when they mismatched two images on the mental rotation test.

But these aren’t the same sorts of things. Even putting aside that some botanists posit plant intelligence, thinking that rocks are mental is not a factual mistake, it’s a belief, just like a belief in God or astrology (and it’s a belief, lest we forget, which has a philosophical pedigree and that may be enjoying a resurgence.)

[Doubting Thomas]

The conclusion summed up religious people find science hard there fore gawd done it.

I don't think it's so much that they find science hard but rather that they don't want to understand it so they can keep on believing that gawd done it.  It's so much easier to not believe in evolution when you don't understand it.

[Doubting Thomas]

It's hard to say. Ben Carson had to have been intelligent to some degree. He was a fucking neurosurgeon, but he was also a bible thumper and a Creationist. Crazy.

Well, a lot of people who have book smarts have no common sense.  And his example just shows what a stranglehold religion has on some people's minds.

[GrandizerII]

It's hard to say. Ben Carson had to have been intelligent to some degree. He was a fucking neurosurgeon, but he was also a bible thumper and a Creationist. Crazy.

Well, a lot of people who have book smarts have no common sense.  And his example just shows what a stranglehold religion has on some people's minds.

Lack of adequate critical thinking skills as well. Critical thinking, for most, is something you need to be taught.

[Huggy Bear]

"Researchers claim their results show that supernatural beliefs correlated with “low systemizing, poor intuitive physics skills, poor mechanical ability, poor mental rotation, low school grades in mathematics and physics, poor common knowledge about physical and biological phenomena, intuitive and analytical thinking styles, and in particular, with assigning mentality to non-mental phenomena.”

Study authors Marjaana Lindeman and Annika Svedholm-Häkkinen suggest that, when people don’t understand the physical world, they tend to apply human characteristics to the wider universe, “resulting in belief in demons, gods, and other supernatural phenomena”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/...ld--study/

No shit! One look at religious people just on this forum is plain evidence for the study.

Do you really want to test this theory? This forum is a perfect microcosm of who doesn't understand what.

[Edwardo Piet]

Because Denmark?

[Huggy Bear]

Nice try buddy but Denmark is far from the only example. If you would like me to post other examples, by all means ask.

[Edwardo Piet]

Your logic is terrible. I was joking about Denmark.