Ship of Fools: Religious people less intelligent

Thread: Religious people less intelligent Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.

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Posted by Curiosity killed ... (# 11770) on :

This news story in the Independent caught my eye - the abstract is available free from here

How likely is this to be true? (I'm not paying to look at the full paper but suspect there may be people who can read it)

The abstract gives the following reasons:

quote:
Three possible interpretations were discussed.
First, intelligent people are less likely to conform and, thus, are more likely to resist religious dogma.
Second, intelligent people tend to adopt an analytic (as opposed to intuitive) thinking style, which has been shown to undermine religious beliefs.
Third, several functions of religiosity, including compensatory control, self-regulation, self-enhancement, and secure attachment, are also conferred by intelligence. Intelligent people may therefore have less need for religious beliefs and practices.

Is it true analysis undermines religious beliefs? And is it true that more intelligent people have less need for religion?

Posted by Zach82 (# 3208) on :

Well, "Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?" (1Cor 1:20)

Posted by jacobsen (# 14998) on :

What about C.S.Lewis? Super intelligent, and who came to Christianity in a real sense as an adult, after the usual nominal religious upbringing which left him an atheist. Not all of his religious thought processes hold water imo because he tried to express them via academic logical routes rather than those of emotional/inspirational intelligence. (I have never found the "proofs" of religion convincing.) BUT Lewis was intelligent and religious, if a pain in the butt a good deal of the time.

Posted by Andromeda (# 11304) on :

It would be interesting to read the actual study ad see how they've defined religiosity.

Posted by Porridge (# 15405) on :

I think I'll reserve judgment until we've actually figured out what "intelligence" is. Oh, wait -- and "religiosity."

Posted by Curiosity killed ... (# 11770) on :

Yes, Andromeda, that's why I was hoping someone might be able to read the report.

I suspect that this meta-analysis may not necessarily be comparing like with like - religion and/or religiosity needs definition before any studies can be carried out, and I wondered if the 63 research papers used all started from similar definitions.

Posted by hanginginthere (# 17541) on :

If we were to compile a list of intelligent people who are also religious it would be a very long one. (One of the things that has always baffled me about Dawkins' claims along the lines of this article is that as an Oxford professor he must know an awful lot of intelligent believers.)

It is difficult to discuss the individual claims in this abstract without reading the whole article, but to say that analytic thinking is more intelligent than intuitive thinking seems to me dubious at least. Also intelligent believers, far from conforming unthinkingly to dogma, as implied here, bring their intelligence to bear on the claims of religion, as they do with any other claim. Just because they come to a different conclusion from that of non-believers says nothing about the intelligence that has brought them to that conclusion.

Posted by Raptor Eye (# 16649) on :

My reaction to the op, without reading the links, leaves me wondering not only how intelligence and religiosity are being narrowed down, but also whether to be religious is to conform, and why some suggest that religion is a need.

Posted by Sioni Sais (# 5713) on :

On the subject of "intelligence" I'm puzzled and/or amused. The abstract to the study includes the line "intelligent people tend to adopt an analytic (as opposed to intuitive) thinking style, which has been shown to undermine religious beliefs".

That's clear enough but as far as I know we measure intelligence on the basis of the ability to analyse information. Doesn't that make the methodology circular?

The first and third parts of the abstract are also a little contradictory. The first states that "intelligent people are less likely to conform" then the third states that "several functions of religiosity, including compensatory control, self-regulation, self-enhancement, and secure attachment, are also conferred by intelligence" which has me wondering if intelligent people conform just as much, only by a different route or mechanism.

Anyhow, there are plenty of smart people on the Ship and some of them aren't atheists. I'm not much worried by a bit of popular science writing in a mainstream newspaper.

Posted by Lord Jestocost (# 12909) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Curiosity killed ...:

First, intelligent people are less likely to conform and, thus, are more likely to resist religious dogma.

Well, quite. And, therefore, the belief they have will be well thought out and founded on the personal experience of their encounters with God. The church I go to was essentially founded by nuclear scientists from a nearby research establishment 50 years ago and it still has a very strong, white collar, frighteningly brainy attendance from the same place. Unchallenged religious dogma is very rare.

Posted by Adeodatus (# 4992) on :

From the Independent article (they screwed up the parentheses, not me):

quote:
More intelligent people get higher level jobs (and better employment (and higher salary) may lead to higher self-esteem, and encourage personal control beliefs.

Or, as Jesus might have said, "They have their reward".

Posted by Mudfrog (# 8116) on :

Of course, there are no Christians with BAs, MAs and PhDs, are there?

[ 13. August 2013, 13:08: Message edited by: Mudfrog ]

Posted by SvitlanaV2 (# 16967) on :

The fact that this survey was carried out in the USA seems relevant. When religiosity is widespread throughout all social groups, then the atheism that exists is probably a deliberate reaction against that dominant culture. It's not surprising that the well-educated, self-confident, intelligent people are the ones pioneering that reaction.

Secularisation has penetrated the whole of British society so deeply that you don't really need to be particularly 'intelligent' to be an atheist. Interestingly, though, British churchgoers tend to have a higher level of education than the general population. This could be because churchgoing, as opposed to simply claiming a CofE/RCC/etc. identity, requires not only a knowledge of religious content and requirements, but the ability to reflect on and justify one's religious involvement in a society that's largely post-Christian in this respect.

[ 13. August 2013, 13:09: Message edited by: SvitlanaV2 ]

Posted by would love to belong (# 16747) on :

quote:
Originally posted by SvitlanaV2:
The fact that this survey was carried out in the USA seems relevant. When religiosity is widespread throughout all social groups, then the atheism that exists is probably a deliberate reaction against that dominant culture. It's not surprising that the well-educated, self-confident, intelligent people are the ones pioneering that reaction.

Secularisation has penetrated the whole of British society so deeply that you don't really need to be particularly 'intelligent' to be an atheist. Interestingly, though, British churchgoers tend to have a higher level of education than the general population. This could be because churchgoing, as opposed to simply claiming a CofE/RCC/etc. identity, requires not only a knowledge of religious content and requirements, but the ability to reflect on and justify one's religious involvement in a society that's largely post-Christian in this respect.

A very thoughtful post if I may say so. My own experience of Protestant churchgoing in the UK confirms to be that I am among peopleof higher than average intelligence.

It may be different in the US. It may also be different among RCC adherents, I don't have any experience of RC churchgoing.

Posted by SvitlanaV2 (# 16967) on :

would love to belong

Thanks. I have to say, though, that I'm not too keen on emphasising intelligence with regards to Christianity, and it seems like a poor strategy for atheism as well.

Jesus Christ came for all, and God, so liberation theology tells us, has a bias to the poor, and a special place for the oppressed and those who suffer all kinds of disadvantages, including intellectual ones. And many atheists would presumably like everyone, the intelligent and the unintelligent alike, to abandon their gods; focusing on the intelligence of atheists and the foolishness of religious people surely risks undermining that goal.

Posted by Albertus (# 13356) on :

I couldn't see anything in the article about the culture(s) in which this reserach took place. On the subject of education- which is I know not the same thing as 'intelligence'- IIRC the last British Social Attitudes Survey suggested that religious belief and, I think (but I'm not sure), practice are higher among people with now or low qualifications and people with a degree or more: it's the ones with a bit of education, but not all that much, who tend to be most sceptical. At the risk of sounding snobbish, that's pretty much in line with my experience of people.

Posted by Andromeda (# 11304) on :

Of course, even if religious people can be shown to be less intelligent than non-religious, that doesn't mean belief in all religions is itself unintelligent.

Posted by Caissa (# 16710) on :

I suppose a study would require the provision of IQ tests to randomly selected groups of religious and non-religious groups.

Posted by Marvin the Martian (# 4360) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Adeodatus:
From the Independent article (they screwed up the parentheses, not me):

quote:
More intelligent people get higher level jobs (and better employment (and higher salary) may lead to higher self-esteem, and encourage personal control beliefs.
Or, as Jesus might have said, "They have their reward".

Or, to put it yet another way, they don't have any holes in their life that need to be filled by religion.

Posted by Hawk (# 14289) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Marvin the Martian:

quote:
Originally posted by Adeodatus:
From the Independent article (they screwed up the parentheses, not me):

quote:
More intelligent people get higher level jobs (and better employment (and higher salary) may lead to higher self-esteem, and encourage personal control beliefs.
Or, as Jesus might have said, "They have their reward".
Or, to put it yet another way, they don't have any holes in their life that need to be filled by religion.

Or not aware of them.

Posted by Marvin the Martian (# 4360) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Hawk:

quote:
Originally posted by Marvin the Martian:
Or, to put it yet another way, they don't have any holes in their life that need to be filled by religion.
Or not aware of them.

That amounts to the same thing as far as this conversation is concerned.

Posted by seekingsister (# 17707) on :

quote:
Originally posted by SvitlanaV2:

Secularisation has penetrated the whole of British society so deeply that you don't really need to be particularly 'intelligent' to be an atheist. Interestingly, though, British churchgoers tend to have a higher level of education than the general population.

Interestingly in the US you will find that members of mainline Protestant denominations - i.e. those that originated largely in the British Isles (e.g. Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Methodist) have higher rates of education than evangelicals and compared to national averages.

Pew Research - Education by Religious Tradition

Posted by Cedd (# 8436) on :

I have worked for City law firms and with lots of clergy. On the whole the clergy have more degrees per capita than the lawyers...

Posted by Zach82 (# 3208) on :

The article does not say "There are no religious people who are intelligent."

Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :

I managed to download the journal article through the University's subscription. Here's some highlights.

quote:
Following Gottfredson (1997), we define intelligence as the “ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience” (p. 13).

In practice this included (just reading off the table of results, remember this is a meta-analysis): UEE, Mensa membership, Otis Test of Mental Ability, WAIS III block design and Vocabulary, Thurston Primary Mental Abilities Scale, Groninger Intelligence Test, GPA, Thomdike Intelligence Test, Iowa Comprehensive Test, Wonderlic Personal Test, Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, Verbal synonyms, Stanford-Binet, Shipley Vocabulary Test, WAIS III Matrix Reasoning Test, Scientific Literary Scale from General Social Survey, Shipley Design for Living Scale, Immediate free recall, Syllogisms, IQ from school records, Raven Progressive Matrices

quote:
Religiosity can be defined as the degree of involvement in some or all facets of religion. According to Atran and Norenzayan (2004), such facets include beliefs in supernatural agents, costly commitment to these agents (e.g., offering of property), using beliefs in those agents to lower existential anxieties such as anxiety over death, and communal rituals that validate and affirm religious beliefs.

The entries in the table were: Attendance, Beliefs, Mixed, Membership

-----

I only half understand the statistics speak, but the correlation between intelligence and religiosity, when the GPA-based tests are thrown out, is for precollege, college, and non-college persons -.06, -.14, and -.23 respectively (unweighted) and -.07, -.15, and -.15 (weighted). The p value was (for these numbers) in all cases less than .05.

Interestingly when they broke out religious belief and religious behavior, belief had a significantly higher negative correlation with intelligence than religious behavior, for non-college it was -.04 for behavior and -.20 for belief (weighted).

I couldn't with a brief overview figure out what the weighting was based on.

PM me for more.

Posted by S. Bacchus (# 17778) on :

quote:
Originally posted by seekingsister:
Interestingly in the US you will find that members of mainline Protestant denominations - i.e. those that originated largely in the British Isles (e.g. Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Methodist) have higher rates of education than evangelicals and compared to national averages.

Pew Research - Education by Religious Tradition

Those figures are really interesting.

Unsurprisingly, American Protestants have, when taken as a single group, an educational profile very close to that of the general population (but with slightly fewer having post-grad degrees). 'Mainline' Protestants are more likely better educated than the general population, Evangelicals are less likely to be so.

Roman Catholics have a wider spread, with similar numbers holding bachelors of graduate degrees to Protestants, but also with more members who left school with no qualifications. The divide is presumably between middle class Roman Catholics, and working class RC communities (often, but not always, recent immigrants).

Members of historically African American churches have lower levels of education than their counterparts of European descent, although the gap narrows in the fields of those with BAs and higher degrees (the largest discrepancy is in the number who did not finish school). This again almost certainly divides on class lines.

Unitarians are better educated than more orthodox Christians, which is no surprise, as every Unitarian I've met has been quite middle class.

Jews are, unsurprisingly, much better educated than Christians or the population at large. Amongst Reform Jews, only 1% have not finished school, and fully 35% have advanced degrees. Strangely, though, there is no subcategory for Orthodox Jews. Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox) and Hasidic Jews presumably have relatively low levels of secular education, although very high levels of religious education.

Two groups surprised me, though:

I would have expected Hindus to be better educated than the general population, but not nearly to the extent that they in fact are. With nearly half having postgraduate degrees, and three quarters being university graduates, Hindus are by far the most educated religious group in America. Buddhists are also quite well educated, although it's hard to tell to what extent this is the result of well-educated middle class converts.

The second surprising group is the Orthodox, whom I would have expected to have a similar educational profile to Roman Catholics, but are in fact the most educated sub-branch of Christians listed.

The conclusion seems to be that minority immigrant groups with a clear ethnic identity (Jews, Greeks, Hindu Indians) tend to do quite well educationally in America. I'm sure there's formal sociological studies on this.

I wonder what the figures are for the UK. I haven't been able to find an exact equivalent, but there seems to be some evidence to suggest that, whilst atheists tend to be better educated than theists, the opposite is true for 'converts' in each direction, i.e. religious people who become atheists are disproportionately poorly educated, whilst non-religious people who find religion are disproportionately well-educated (WARNING: this article if from the 'Guardian's' 'Comment is Free' section, so don't read the comments below the line if you value your sanity).

Posted by Spiffy (# 5267) on :

The biggest red flag for me is the wide variety of intelligence tests used in the 62 studies, because all intelligence tests are not created equal. In fact, most are heavily weighted towards the majority culture and therefore people who are not of that culture who may be remarkably intelligent do poorly on the tests.

The second is the major section on atheism is framed as a lack of belief-- but this is the social scientist in me getting in an arm wrestling match with the psychologist because atheism in social science is just another facet of belief.

The third is stated in the Limitations section and not the major sections which is SUPER irksome because they say, and I quote:

quote:
The available data did not allow adequate consideration of the role of religion type and of culture. [...]Of the 41 studies in the college and no-college groups (the populations on which we base most of our conclusions), 33 were conducted in the United States;[...] Clearly, the present results are limited to Western societies.

33 of the 62 studies were performed in the US. Yeah. That's not going to skew the results at all.

Posted by Albertus (# 13356) on :

But this is the kind of story the Indy loves. So all in all it's about as reliable as one in the Mail on, say, crime and migration.

Posted by ken (# 2460) on :

quote:
Originally posted by S. Bacchus:
I would have expected Hindus to be better educated than the general population, but not nearly to the extent that they in fact are. With nearly half having postgraduate degrees, and three quarters being university graduates, Hindus are by far the most educated religious group in America. Buddhists are also quite well educated, although it's hard to tell to what extent this is the result of well-educated middle class converts.

The second surprising group is the Orthodox, whom I would have expected to have a similar educational profile to Roman Catholics, but are in fact the most educated sub-branch of Christians listed.

The conclusion seems to be that minority immigrant groups with a clear ethnic identity (Jews, Greeks, Hindu Indians) tend to do quite well educationally in America. I'm sure there's formal sociological studies on this.

Or maybe the conclusion is that well-educated or wealthy Indians and Arabs and Eastern Europeans find it much easier to get into the United States than others do? I'd imagine taht many Hindus (and maybe Orthodox) will be first-generation immigrants and have got their education outside the USA.

Posted by Gramps49 (# 16378) on :

My reaction: "Hogwash!"

My apologies to the hogs.

Posted by S. Bacchus (# 17778) on :

quote:
Originally posted by ken:

quote:
Originally posted by S. Bacchus:
I would have expected Hindus to be better educated than the general population, but not nearly to the extent that they in fact are. With nearly half having postgraduate degrees, and three quarters being university graduates, Hindus are by far the most educated religious group in America. Buddhists are also quite well educated, although it's hard to tell to what extent this is the result of well-educated middle class converts.

The second surprising group is the Orthodox, whom I would have expected to have a similar educational profile to Roman Catholics, but are in fact the most educated sub-branch of Christians listed.

The conclusion seems to be that minority immigrant groups with a clear ethnic identity (Jews, Greeks, Hindu Indians) tend to do quite well educationally in America. I'm sure there's formal sociological studies on this.
Or maybe the conclusion is that well-educated or wealthy Indians and Arabs and Eastern Europeans find it much easier to get into the United States than others do? I'd imagine taht many Hindus (and maybe Orthodox) will be first-generation immigrants and have got their education outside the USA.

Yes, that's certainly very possible. Although note that American Muslims are not, on average, very well educated. Of religious groups that one would expect to be formed largely of first or second generation migrants, Muslims are the only ones not better educated than the general population (Muslims have the similar rates of university and postgraduate education as Protestants and Americans at large, but are much less likely to have finished school).

That's less of an objection to your point about Arabs than it might seem, though, as about two thirds of American Arabs are Christians (mostly Marionite or Melkite Catholic, with a substantial number of Orthodox). The demographics of American Arabs would seem to have less to do with Arab demography more broadly, and more to do with the very real desire/need for many Arab Christians to leave their homeland.

However, based totally on extrapolation from the UK, I would have thought that a substantial number of American Muslims would be of Indian or Pakistani extraction and from similar social backgrounds as American Hindus. My impression has also been that Americans of North African, Middle Eastern and Iranian extraction tend to be relatively well-educated and middle class.

ETA: One possible explanation, of course, is that in some Muslim families, education for daughters will be discouraged or at least not a priority. That's a delicate issue, and is certainly not true of all Muslim families or even of all religiously conservative ones. But it might be one possible explanation (or partial explanation) of the discrepancy.

[ 13. August 2013, 16:09: Message edited by: S. Bacchus ]

Posted by Anyuta (# 14692) on :

quote:
Originally posted by ken:

quote:
Originally posted by S. Bacchus:
I would have expected Hindus to be better educated than the general population, but not nearly to the extent that they in fact are. With nearly half having postgraduate degrees, and three quarters being university graduates, Hindus are by far the most educated religious group in America. Buddhists are also quite well educated, although it's hard to tell to what extent this is the result of well-educated middle class converts.

The second surprising group is the Orthodox, whom I would have expected to have a similar educational profile to Roman Catholics, but are in fact the most educated sub-branch of Christians listed.

The conclusion seems to be that minority immigrant groups with a clear ethnic identity (Jews, Greeks, Hindu Indians) tend to do quite well educationally in America. I'm sure there's formal sociological studies on this.
Or maybe the conclusion is that well-educated or wealthy Indians and Arabs and Eastern Europeans find it much easier to get into the United States than others do? I'd imagine taht many Hindus (and maybe Orthodox) will be first-generation immigrants and have got their education outside the USA.

This was exactly my thought when I saw the numbers. At least as far as Hindus and Budhists. Not so much Orthodox, because a great many (perhaps most)recent immigrants from historically Orthodox countries such as Russia were in fact raised Atheist. at least half of Orthodox in the US today (even after the recent influx post 1991) are, I believe, born and educated here, even if they belong to ethnic communities (children, grandchildren, great grandchildren of immigrants). So, while it's probably true that it's easier for a well educated Russian to come to the US than a poorly educated Russian (and take into account the education levels in Russia in general are higher than in the US) it's not particularly likely that these well educated Russians are Orthodox. I focus on Russians because this is the group with which I'm most familiar. I know that it's true that most Greeks in the US were born and raised here, but can't speak to other historically Orthodox nationalities, and can only assume it's similar.

Posted by Jengie Jon (# 273) on :

Another possibility and one that will upset people is that the fact is that the atheist among the less intelligent are not showing as atheists. A number of mechanism by which this could be the case.

Right there is a high correlations between intelligence, education and social class. This is important because two different mechanism could be in play.

First Grace Davie notes in Believing but Not Belonging that the poorer people tended more often to believe without active belonging at least in the UK. That is they maintain a low level religious status, while people who are higher up the social income tend to also belong if religious. So being religious for a middle class person is more expensive than for a working class person.

Second is the claim I have seen that children have to be taught to be atheist, they are not naturally. I do not think that they are naturally Christian but some sort of animism is probable. Now if that is the case, and people who are intelligent spend longer in education then there is more chance that they will be taught to be atheist.

If atheist think that is bad, how about the suggestion that atheism is only really interested in the intelligentsia and not in average kind of Joe. In other words there are few people of lower intelligent who are atheist because atheist do not see these people as worth bothering about.

I suppose this post boils down to the old statistical statement. Correlation does not imply causation.

Jengie

Posted by Porridge (# 15405) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Spiffy:
The biggest red flag for me is the wide variety of intelligence tests used in the 62 studies, because all intelligence tests are not created equal. In fact, most are heavily weighted towards the majority culture and therefore people who are not of that culture who may be remarkably intelligent do poorly on the tests.

Bingo. Not only are IQ tests not created equal, I'm skeptical that "intelligence" is what they measure.

Most such tests are paper-&-pencil instruments in which speed of response affects the scoring. Even before the test starts, an advantage goes to testees more fluent in written language, and to testees with quicker eye-hand reflexes. Are these traits which consistently accompany high intelligence? Only if that's one of the ways in which you define high intelligence.

Forgive me if I've told this story before, but it gripes me to this day.

While working for a protection and advocacy agency some years back, I had a client referred to me from a sheltered workshop (a facility where people labeled "unemployable" because of significant disabilities are allowed to do piece-work for pennies-a-whack at tedious repetitive tasks). Typical week's wages: 62 cents.

The complaint was that he -- let's call him Jim --was inappropriately placed in the sheltered workshop. On investigation, I found an adult in his 30s with severe cerebral palsy plus limited hearing. After several sessions (it took time to get accustomed to Jim's Sign language and for me, a non-native Signer, to read it, since it was affected by his cerebral palsy), I discovered a man who, despite extraordinary limitations in his education, was bright, had an acerbic wit, an impressive vocabulary, and a lot to say about his situation with a certain gallows humor.

All Jim's co-workers had significant cognitive deficits (and frankly some of the staff weren't a whole lot better off). Only one part-time staffer had any Sign, and this was pretty much limited to things like "bathroom," "coffee," "break time," etc. To make matters worse, the "work" at this Sweatshop of Disabled Slavery consisted of setting up cardboard boxes -- a task at which Jim was frankly hopeless due to his having only partial use of his hands (cerebral palsy).

The icing on the cake? The sweatshop sucked at being a sweatshop and had had no active contracts for months. So at the end of each "workday," the staff collapsed all the boxes the clients had set up under the noses of the clients while they awaited their transport home so the clients would have something to do next day: set the @#$! back up again.

Jim was going mad. He was bored out of his skull, he was frustrated beyond imagining, he had nobody to talk to all day, and on and on.

So I ordered that he have his IQ tested, as a first step to demonstrating that Jim was indeed inappropriately placed at this workshop. Big mistake.

I informed the psychologist of Jim's situation -- he was nearly deaf, he used a wheelchair, he communicated through Sign, his cerebral palsy affected his communication, etc. etc., assuming that the psych would come equipped with instruments designed for testees with special needs.

The shrink arrived, slapped something like a standard Wechsler on Jim's tray table with a pencil, and asked Jim if he was ready.

Jim started his answer, which I began interpreting to the shrink: "R-e-a-d-y f-o-r w-h--?" and the shrink interrupted and said, "Begin . . . NOW!" and started his timer.

When we finally wormed a report out of this a**hole some weeks later, he diagnosed Jim as "profoundly retarded."

Posted by Leorning Cniht (# 17564) on :

quote:
Originally posted by S. Bacchus:
Yes, that's certainly very possible. Although note that American Muslims are not, on average, very well educated. Of religious groups that one would expect to be formed largely of first or second generation migrants, Muslims are the only ones not better educated than the general population (Muslims have the similar rates of university and postgraduate education as Protestants and Americans at large, but are much less likely to have finished school).

A fair number of US Muslims are black men who have converted to Islam in prison. Prisoners are rather more likely than average to have not finished high school.

[ 13. August 2013, 17:56: Message edited by: Leorning Cniht ]

Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :

Here's a statistician's view: Briggs. Basically, there's a lot of nonsense going on in this paper with the author's mixing data sets from way back in time (all the way to 1928), from very different places, with different gender compositions, very different sample sizes etc.: "Data of every flavor was observed, data that should not be mixed without an idea of how to combine the uncertainty inherent in each study and in how, say, kinds of IQ measurements maps to other kinds of IQ measurements. In other words, data which should not be mixed, because nobody has any idea how to make these corrections."

This appears to be a basic stats fail, best to be simply ignored.

Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :

As far as Hindus, I don's know how numerically significant they are, but a lot of people come here from the subcontinent as computer programmers on work visas.

Posted by SvitlanaV2 (# 16967) on :

Googling leads me to think there has been some research on the religiosity of British undergraduates and postgraduates. For example, one study sees an early decline in religiosity, but finds this to be uneven across different disciplines:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2044-8260.1963.tb00372.x/abstract

A growing number of science and medical students are creationists:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/feb/21/religion.highereducation

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00219266.2000.9655704#.UgqIFNLVDng

A book will be published next month on Christianity and British university students:
Mathew Guest, Kristin Aune, Sonya Sharma, Rob Warner, 'Christianity and the University Experience: Understanding Student Faith'. There are some articles and abstracts online, e.g.:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13537903.2013.783326#.UgqJJ9LVDng

Posted by Belle Ringer (# 13379) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Curiosity killed ...:

[*]First, intelligent people are less likely to conform and, thus, are more likely to resist religious dogma.

I don't personally know any believers who agree with everything their church teaches. Where do these pro-atheists get the idea believers avoid thinking and pretend to be robots? Gosh, imagine a church with no politics, no music wars, no churches splitting over theological disagreements, no etc. Not gonna happen because believers do NOT just mindlessly believe whatever they are told! [Smile]

quote:
[*]Second, intelligent people tend to adopt an analytic (as opposed to intuitive) thinking style, which has been shown to undermine religious beliefs.

Believers can't be analytical? Read any theology books lately? (Besides, a lot of creative thinkers in any field, including business and yes science, use intuitive as well as analytical processes in making innovative discoveries.)

quote:
[*]Third, several functions of religiosity, including compensatory control, self-regulation, self-enhancement, and secure attachment, are also conferred by intelligence. Intelligent people may therefore have less need for religious beliefs and practices.

Ah, yes, ye old "religion is a crutch for weak people" argument. I'm not sure just what "self-enhancement" etc refers to, but do intelligent atheists scorn marriage because their intelligence gives them all the "secure attachment" they could possibly want?

I belonged to Mensa for a while, got awfully bored listening to people (who were holding jobs like taxi diver or receptionist) talk about their superior intelligence. Seemed like feeling smarter than anyone else made them feel good about themselves because they had nothing else to feel good about. I went and got a job where people use their intelligence productively (and didn't bother belonging to Mensa) instead of just talking about it.

Posted by Palimpsest (# 16772) on :

Count me as an atheist who thinks that intelligence tests are dubious predictors.

My 7th grade math teacher left to work with inner city youth who were trying to get into the construction unions apprentice program. It had been changed by court order from admission of youths suggested by current (all white) union members to a merit based admission based on intelligence tests.

My teacher and his friends created what they called "the six week program to raise your IQ score by 40 points." It was successful in getting the youth in despite their horrible educations.

So when you show me an atheists do well on intelligence test I suspect there's a heavy class correlation which becomes... atheists are more likely to be middle or upper class

As pointed out above, this is from the United States and my story is 40 years old. It might be different in a country with working class atheists I remain unconvinced of the predictive value of intelligence tests.
(Including the marshmallow test... [Big Grin]

)

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Belle Ringer:
I belonged to Mensa for a while, got awfully bored listening to people (who were holding jobs like taxi diver or receptionist) talk about their superior intelligence. Seemed like feeling smarter than anyone else made them feel good about themselves because they had nothing else to feel good about. I went and got a job where people use their intelligence productively (and didn't bother belonging to Mensa) instead of just talking about it.

Belle Ringer has just added to my, admittedly small, sample of people known to have passed the entrance IQ test for Mensa. I was going to post yesterday about my observations based on this sample. The sample divides into two, those who stayed in and those who left.

Those who left appeared to me to be better company and more capable of discussing things in an interesting way.

Oddly, those I have personally known who stayed in (I exclude public figures) included two who both had religious leanings. One, seeking ordination, believed that it was possible to develop a sort of religious quotient test for people's morality - his was a bit dubious in a number of ways. The other, generous to himself with his understanding of plagiarism from others, became converted to Orthodoxy, and boasted of it in the same way he publicised his membership of Mensa.

The consequence of these observations (augmented by readings of their magazines and BR's message) is that I don't trust their IQ tests to be as rigorous as others.

I also suspect that there may be a considerable intersection in the Venn diagram of Mensa members and adherents of certain aspects of religion (not what for want of a better word I'm calling spirituality) when it comes to character. Belonging to a group which regards itself as somehow better than non-members comes to mind.

Posted by argona (# 14037) on :

A goodfrom article from Frank Furedi.

Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Penny S:
Belle Ringer has just added to my, admittedly small, sample of people known to have passed the entrance IQ test for Mensa.

Well, you can add yours truly. I joined as a young teenager and got out a few years later. I would not agree that most people in Mensa are there because they want to feel superior to others. They may well feel superior, but most didn't really need Mensa for that... Frankly, it had more a feel of "Alcoholics Anonymous" for me, a group of people that often struggle with life in a specific way meeting for mutual support and company. It really is a kind of "nerds & geeks only" club. As I was starting to find my own feet in many ways in regular society, Mensa meetings began to feel fairly pointless, so I left that behind. But no hard feelings, and I really don't see any hurt in Mensa.

Posted by Pottage (# 9529) on :

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
I would not agree that most people in Mensa are there because they want to feel superior to others. They may well feel superior, but most didn't really need Mensa for that... Frankly, it had more a feel of "Alcoholics Anonymous" for me, a group of people that often struggle with life in a specific way meeting for mutual support and company. It really is a kind of "nerds & geeks only" club. As I was starting to find my own feet in many ways in regular society, Mensa meetings began to feel fairly pointless, so I left that behind. But no hard feelings, and I really don't see any hurt in Mensa.

That's also my impression. I still am a member, although I couldn't tell you the last time I went to a meeting. I tend just to read the magazine. To judge from the existence of Mensa special interest groups for people of faith, and from the letters in the magazine when faith issues are aired, UK Mensa's population isn't very different from the UK's wider population in the size of its religious minority.

Posted by chris stiles (# 12641) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Palimpsest:
Count me as an atheist who thinks that intelligence tests are dubious predictors.

The current thoughts are that IQ measures some component 'q' which is loosely correlated with intelligence amongst other things.

So there is probably also a correlation with social class, background etc. Primarily because these tend to be proxies for other things. There's also the rather peculiar fact that 'q' has tended to drift upwards over time - without people becoming noticeably more intelligent.

Mensa didn't seem to me to be too different from any other cross section of Britain - the social awkwardness was no more than what you would expect in any other gathering of slightly studious youths. I imagine it would have been different amongst older age groups. The more selective societies seemed to consist of groups of people who were superficially very intelligent, but were often very frustrated that they obviously weren't as brilliant as they had been taught to believe.

Posted by Caissa (# 16710) on :

All a test score measures, when push comes to shove, is how well you performed on the test on a given day in a given set of circumstances. We often try to infer other things from the results.

Posted by BWSmith (# 2981) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Curiosity killed ...:
Is it true analysis undermines religious beliefs? And is it true that more intelligent people have less need for religion?

What is being undermined is the credibility of scientific studies in general.

"Studies show that [people who are not like me] tend to exhibit [negative characteristic]." Bleh. As long as one chooses their study wording and subject pool very carefully, one can 'scientifically' prove anything, and slandering one's enemies in print through this process can be very profitable.

Intelligent people don't have "less need for religion", but less need for media spin posing as "scientific fact".

Posted by que sais-je (# 17185) on :

quote:
Originally posted by BWSmith:
What is being undermined is the credibility of scientific studies in general.

"Studies show that [people who are not like me] tend to exhibit [negative characteristic]." Bleh. As long as one chooses their study wording and subject pool very carefully, one can 'scientifically' prove anything, and slandering one's enemies in print through this process can be very profitable.

In general scientific studies are publicly available. You can look up the study, read what it claims, check out the statistics. A citation index (like Google Scholar) will tell you a bit more about it. Some scientists have an axe to grind, read the paper and find it. And so on.

It is rare for a scientific paper to claim to have 'proved' something - rather it offers part of the evidence.

Newspapers and TV on the other hand, seize on such things and make whatever they think appropriate of it: usually leaving out all the technical details. It is true that scientific credibility is undermined but in this case maybe you should blame the messenger.

The paper cited by th OP sounds nonsense. But then, I trust SoF posters a lot more than newspapers and haven't read the original article.

Posted by EtymologicalEvangelical (# 15091) on :

I actually think that it is undoubtedly true that, on average, atheists are more 'intelligent' (in the sense of academically successful) than those of us who believe in God. In fact, I would be rather shocked if it were not true. The poor, the downtrodden, the disadvantaged and the desperate turn to the living God in their need, and, of course, among the ranks of such people are millions who have not benefited from a great education or any education at all.

What's the point of this study? Given that such a conclusion does not actually tell us anything about the truth or falsehood of religion or atheism, then so what?

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :

IngoB and Pottage, thank you for adding to my collection. Having met men who I would run a mile from rather than join something they belonged to has rather given a bias to my impressions. I'm glad to lose it - though you do both seem to belong now to the group that isn't in (even Pottage).

On another tack - my education theory final exam posed the question "We cannot define intelligence, but we can measure it. Discuss." I was probably supposed to discuss tests. I discussed how you cannot measure things longer than a 12 inch ruler accurately if that's all you have. The act of measuring imposes a definition. I am pleased to see the posts making similar points.

And yet another tack - there was a scheme to call atheists "brights" to distinguish them from the dull religious at some point. Haven't heard much about that recently.

[ 14. August 2013, 18:26: Message edited by: Penny S ]

Posted by BWSmith (# 2981) on :

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
What's the point of this study?

It's a message of ego reinforcement to atheists who might be in danger of "succumbing to temptation" and believing in God again.

The point is to reinforce the cliche' Enlightenment stereotype that intelligent thought, nurtured properly, ALWAYS leads to rejection of religion (phrased "religiosity" to provoke revulsion).

They can't argue this directly, so they stoop to arguing it implicitly. They claim the ability to define and measure intelligence. They apply that power to prove that the "religious" scored lower than the skeptics. They imply that intelligence is the only variable to explain this disparity.

(The laughable "three possible interpretations" in the OP read like a lapsed altar boy's rant against the tyranny of the nuns. "I don't conform?" Check. "I'm an analytical thinker?" Check. "I'm self-controlled?" Check. I must be an atheist!)

The message is clear: Skeptics, take pride in your skepticism, as it is a badge of honor for the truly intelligent. Do not ever consider religion - to do so is to reject your intelligence and embrace stupidity. Continue to treat religious people with the same disdain you would treat the most backward, ignorant elements of society.

Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :

quote:
Originally posted by BWSmith:

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
What's the point of this study?
It's a message of ego reinforcement to atheists who might be in danger of "succumbing to temptation" and believing in God again.

Or maybe it's a wake-up call to a church that has made education and learning into a bogeyman, and preaches that critical thinking is inimical to faith and part of the devil's toolkit. We sow the wind and reap the whirlwind. Lewis said on a different subject, "We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst." Today the church can say, "We mock thinking and are shocked to find imbeciles in our midst."

Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :

You can add me too. Shows don't it.

Posted by HughWillRidmee (# 15614) on :

quote:
Originally posted by BWSmith:

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
What's the point of this study?
It's a message of ego reinforcement to atheists who might be in danger of "succumbing to temptation" and believing in God again.

The point is to reinforce the cliche' Enlightenment stereotype that intelligent thought, nurtured properly, ALWAYS leads to rejection of religion (phrased "religiosity" to provoke revulsion).

They can't argue this directly, so they stoop to arguing it implicitly. They claim the ability to define and measure intelligence. They apply that power to prove that the "religious" scored lower than the skeptics. They imply that intelligence is the only variable to explain this disparity.

(The laughable "three possible interpretations" in the OP read like a lapsed altar boy's rant against the tyranny of the nuns. "I don't conform?" Check. "I'm an analytical thinker?" Check. "I'm self-controlled?" Check. I must be an atheist!)

The message is clear: Skeptics, take pride in your skepticism, as it is a badge of honor for the truly intelligent. Do not ever consider religion - to do so is to reject your intelligence and embrace stupidity. Continue to treat religious people with the same disdain you would treat the most backward, ignorant elements of society.

Do you know many atheists who might be in danger of "succumbing to temptation" and believing in God again. ? No, I don’t either.

Being one of the (apparently) minority simpleton atheists and easily confused when in the presence of towering intellect I get a bemused sort of feeling that perhaps you don't agree with what you seem to be intent upon confirming.

Posted by BWSmith (# 2981) on :

quote:
Originally posted by HughWillRidmee:
Do you know many atheists who might be in danger of "succumbing to temptation" and believing in God again. ? No, I don’t either.

It happens.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_converts_to_Christianity_from_nontheism

[ 14. August 2013, 23:15: Message edited by: BWSmith ]

Posted by Palimpsest (# 16772) on :

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
I actually think that it is undoubtedly true that, on average, atheists are more 'intelligent' (in the sense of academically successful) than those of us who believe in God. In fact, I would be rather shocked if it were not true. The poor, the downtrodden, the disadvantaged and the desperate turn to the living God in their need, and, of course, among the ranks of such people are millions who have not benefited from a great education or any education at all.

What's the point of this study? Given that such a conclusion does not actually tell us anything about the truth or falsehood of religion or atheism, then so what?

You could also say that those in an academic environment are more likely to feel safe saying they are atheists then the poor, downtrodden.. etc. This is especially true in the US for oppressed minority groups which used the church to organize group protection; e.g. Blacks, Irish, Italians, Jews, Mormons....

There's no requirement that a study address the falsehood of religion or atheism, but it is pretty pointless if it's as bogus as this one.

Posted by BWSmith (# 2981) on :

quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
maybe it's a wake-up call to a church that has made education and learning into a bogeyman, and preaches that critical thinking is inimical to faith and part of the devil's toolkit...Today the church can say, "We mock thinking and are shocked to find imbeciles in our midst."

Christian churches have never opposed "education, learning, or critical thinking".

The problem is that critical skepticism can become a weapon not only against evil and falsehood, but good and truth as well.

When Occam's Razors get in the hands of "serial slashers", it's the church's responsibility to call them on it.

Posted by Anglo Catholic Relict (# 17213) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Raptor Eye:
My reaction to the op, without reading the links, leaves me wondering not only how intelligence and religiosity are being narrowed down, but also whether to be religious is to conform, and why some suggest that religion is a need.

I think this is a good point; in an increasingly secular world, I think it is religious people who are not conforming to the norm around them.

I do not think the atheist or humanist pov offers an adequate alternative to what I would regard as a human cultural universal; to have faith.

[ 15. August 2013, 12:52: Message edited by: Anglo Catholic Relict ]

Posted by Anglo Catholic Relict (# 17213) on :

quote:
Originally posted by HughWillRidmee:

Being one of the (apparently) minority simpleton atheists and easily confused when in the presence of towering intellect I get a bemused sort of feeling that perhaps you don't agree with what you seem to be intent upon confirming.

Irony is a wonderful thing.

Questioning the validity of the conclusions of a particular study irt religious people =/= calling all atheists dim.

[ 15. August 2013, 13:02: Message edited by: Anglo Catholic Relict ]

Posted by Anyuta (# 14692) on :

quote:
Originally posted by BWSmith:

quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
maybe it's a wake-up call to a church that has made education and learning into a bogeyman, and preaches that critical thinking is inimical to faith and part of the devil's toolkit...Today the church can say, "We mock thinking and are shocked to find imbeciles in our midst."
Christian churches have never opposed "education, learning, or critical thinking".

The problem is that critical skepticism can become a weapon not only against evil and falsehood, but good and truth as well.

When Occam's Razors get in the hands of "serial slashers", it's the church's responsibility to call them on it.

Perhaps where you are they don't. But around here I know far too many who do. I don't know if it's the Church following the lead of the people, or the people following the lead of some churches, but there is a very definite anti-intellectual bias in many of the christian groups where I live (the US bible belt).

No, certainly, not all christian churches espouse this, and worldwide I'm sure it's not even a majority. But sadly, in parts of the US, it is in fact the dominant (or at least most vocal and influential) viewpoint. "too much booklarnin'"

Posted by Marvin the Martian (# 4360) on :

quote:
Originally posted by BWSmith:
Christian churches have never opposed "education, learning, or critical thinking".

Galileo? Evolution?

Posted by BWSmith (# 2981) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Anyuta:
But around here I know far too many who do. I don't know if it's the Church following the lead of the people, or the people following the lead of some churches, but there is a very definite anti-intellectual bias in many of the christian groups where I live (the US bible belt).

Fair point (although "Bible Belt" is an insult to us in NC).

I won't deny it - when I go to church, I often feel that the congregation is jaded from a long-running fear of being theologically "burned" by intellectuals who have run off to seminary and come back trying to deconstruct all the values they hold dear. I have to be careful in Sunday School to spin my "scholarship" in a direction that gives hope and support to conservative values.

So to be more precise, I still believe that Christian churches are always in favor of education, higher learning, and critical thinking (in principle), but that comes with the expectation that intellectuals will use that to reinforce traditional beliefs (or at least make an effort to lead the congregation to a better place).

quote:
Originally posted by Anyuta:
But sadly, in parts of the US, it is in fact the dominant (or at least most vocal and influential) viewpoint. "too much booklarnin'"

I appreciate your point, although mocking southern accents doesn't help your case...

Posted by BWSmith (# 2981) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Marvin the Martian:
Galileo? Evolution?

Galileo and Evolution are interesting, but separate cases.

Note that the attack on Galileo was not an attack on education or critical thinking itself, (because the church was happy to utilize critical thinking that underwrote its own theologies, like the elaborate geocentric Ptolemaic system and all its epicycles). It was an attack on the perception of heresy, because it so radically undermined a cosmology that they assumed to be absolute truth. Galileo was always about the vanity of the church in its own infallibility, and hopefully the Protestant Reformation underscored the dangers of that.

Evolution is a different animal altogether. While I believe that it is true, it strikes at the heart of the Biblical claims of God's involvement in the world. To integrate evolution consistently into Christianity (without short-cutting into theological liberalism) is a huge task, and most non-scientists are unwilling to take steps down that road without assurance that the endpoint will be something resembling traditional views.

The existence of the "creationist" movement is testimony to the desire for evangelicals to have it both ways - to imagine that a minority of scientists, who are supporting the Biblical account of history, are the only ones practicing "real science".

This bolsters my point that the church wants education and critical thinking "in principle", but is finding it hard to discern whether critical thinking actually "disproves traditional beliefs", or if that is just an illusion designed to destroy their faith.

(I am reminded of "The King and I", where the king wants his kingdom to become "scientific" without realizing that to do so would destroy his way of life.)

[ 15. August 2013, 14:11: Message edited by: BWSmith ]

Posted by Marvin the Martian (# 4360) on :

Critical thinking that is only allowed to reach one predefined answer is not critical thinking. Ergo, many churches are not in favour of critical thinking.

Posted by Anyuta (# 14692) on :

quote:
Originally posted by BWSmith:
I appreciate your point, although mocking southern accents doesn't help your case...

Sorry. I myself am from Virginia, and have what could be called a southern accent. I wasn't actually trying to mock southern accent per se, but that of the less educated subset of southerners, and heck, not just southerners.. I've heard the term "booklarnin'" used by country folk pretty far north of the Mason Dixon line.

Posted by leo (# 1458) on :

quote:
Originally posted by BWSmith:

quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
maybe it's a wake-up call to a church that has made education and learning into a bogeyman, and preaches that critical thinking is inimical to faith and part of the devil's toolkit...Today the church can say, "We mock thinking and are shocked to find imbeciles in our midst."
Christian churches have never opposed "education, learning, or critical thinking".

Several clergy told me not to do theology at uni because it would destroy my faith and then i would go on to destroy the faith of others.

Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Marvin the Martian:
Critical thinking that is only allowed to reach one predefined answer is not critical thinking. Ergo, many churches are not in favour of critical thinking.

You'd think this would be so obvious it wouldn't need saying. But the idea that all churches value thinking and education is risible.

It even infects political parties.

Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :

quote:
Originally posted by BWSmith:
Galileo was always about the vanity of the church in its own infallibility, and hopefully the Protestant Reformation underscored the dangers of that.

Naw, the Galileo case was about the relative status of bold scientific speculation (then available data on parallax shifts taken at face value proved heliocentricity wrong, and this was known!) vs. literalistic scripture interpretation, and about what happens if you insult publicly a renaissance prince who happens to be pope. And it is basically certain that the Protestant Reformation aggravated the case, because it had lead to the RCC coming down like a ton of bricks on laypeople messing about with bible interpretation.

quote:
Originally posted by BWSmith:
Evolution is a different animal altogether. While I believe that it is true, it strikes at the heart of the Biblical claims of God's involvement in the world. To integrate evolution consistently into Christianity (without short-cutting into theological liberalism) is a huge task, and most non-scientists are unwilling to take steps down that road without assurance that the endpoint will be something resembling traditional views.

Evolution never has been considered as a major problem in the RCC. The only significant issue to sort out there is that of human genesis, both historical (Adam and Eve) and immediate (infusion of the human soul). But that's not particularly hard, since what science can say on these matters leaves plenty of room for Catholic ideas. However, the general concept of randomness and natural selection is no problem at all, because in Catholic theology it makes perfect sense to say that God determined that a die should randomly fall to show for example six. Randomness is a factor of the created world (the lack of causal predictability in terms of the world), not of God. All is exactly as God wills, including those events that are nor predictably (and instrumentally) caused by other events in a physical sense. So evolution is simply a theory about how God created the natural world that we encounter.

quote:
Originally posted by Marvin the Martian:
Critical thinking that is only allowed to reach one predefined answer is not critical thinking. Ergo, many churches are not in favour of critical thinking.

This is too simplistic. Divine revelation is not comparable to a scientific theory, but to data. And natural science - nowadays considered to be the example of critical thinking - ultimately has to bow to data. There can be limited suspicion about some particular set of data in science, but in the end what cures this is more and better data, not something else than data. Scientific theory is ultimately only allowed to reach one answer, namely that compatible with observed data. If it doesn't, then it is simply false, proven wrong by data.

Likewise, thinking in religion (theology) cannot in the end but bow to Divine revelation. What is revealed ultimately cannot be questioned, but only believed (or not - but then one is not faithful to that religion any longer). Hence it is entirely appropriate to set apart certain - Divinely revealed - truths from critical thinking. They are the axioms, not the subject, of critical thought. You may of course criticise some church for setting apart too much, overdoing the designation of Divinely revealed truth. But what you cannot do is to claim that one must be able to question all. This is not the case for science, this is not the case for religion, and indeed this is not the case for any type of human inquiry. There always must be some solid ground to start from. In religion, that ground is provided by faith in certain revelations. To be critical about everything means to be catatonic.

Posted by EtymologicalEvangelical (# 15091) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Marvin the Martian
Critical thinking that is only allowed to reach one predefined answer is not critical thinking.

I couldn't agree more!

But try getting that concept into the skulls of many atheists, who seem to assume that Ernest Hemingway's cute little saying ("All thinking men are atheists") is a self-evident truth.

Critical thinking has led me away from atheism. If someone could show me how critical thinking could possibly lead to atheism, I would be most interested (I seem to remember our very own Grokesx had to redefine logic, in order to defend atheism - hence his foray into "paraconsistent logic", which is just a fancy name for non-logic).

[ 15. August 2013, 19:08: Message edited by: EtymologicalEvangelical ]

Posted by SvitlanaV2 (# 16967) on :

quote:
Originally posted by leo:

quote:
Originally posted by BWSmith:

quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
maybe it's a wake-up call to a church that has made education and learning into a bogeyman, and preaches that critical thinking is inimical to faith and part of the devil's toolkit...Today the church can say, "We mock thinking and are shocked to find imbeciles in our midst."
Christian churches have never opposed "education, learning, or critical thinking".
Several clergy told me not to do theology at uni because it would destroy my faith and then i would go on to destroy the faith of others.

I've heard of this sort of sentiment before. Maybe the feeling is that university theology departments are run by atheists for whom the default position is that religion is fascinating, but ultimately an exercise in error. I can understand why religious groups would find this attitude problematic at the very least. It doesn't indicate that religious groups disapprove of all book learning, though; I'm sure that few of them would disapprove of medicine or engineering as academic courses of study.

Anti-intellectualism is probably most prevalent among low-status religious groups where few of their young people have the means to benefit from academic study anyway. It's easy to criticise something that mostly unobtainable.

Posted by Chorister (# 473) on :

I have heard several Christian leaders (and even a vicar who was educated at Cambridge, strangely enough) assert that Jesus' disciples were an uneducated bunch, so we today shouldn't be led by the educated. To those people, 'Theology' was a dirty word. I think their reasoning was that God can speak more powerfully through people who haven't had their heads filled with clever ideas.

To me, some of the wilder ideas that Christianity has come up with over the years need to be checked and tempered by Theological understanding. Not to do so would be rather foolhardy.

Posted by no prophet (# 15560) on :

Re the OP and the topic.

A meta-analysis is a summation of the information from a series of studies, not a piece of new research. The authors went through 63 studies and derived summary data from each which they put together in a manner such that journal editors and blind (anonymous) reviewers thought the data actually mean something.

The mean (average) difference between groups of religious and non-religious people say nothing about a particular individual. Further, we don't know anything about the variance between the two groups.

For comparison, I have become rather annoyed in Canada when it was said often in the past that First Nations peoples (North American Indians) were on average less intelligent that their European (white) counterparts. Problem 1: there are many different cultural, language and ethnicities within the group summed up as Indian. Problem 2: the tests of intelligence are biased toward particular types of information and leave out relevant aspects of life and experience important to some people. Problem 3: the people carrying out the research are usually interested in justifying some preconceived notion which at least unconsciously, if not consciously influences them. Problem 4: the variance of the denigrated group is usually larger than more uniform superior comparison group. -- Can we apply an understanding of just this cursory listing of troubles with such types of research to this religious=stupid research? I think probably.

The people who research and write such articles usually want to show a progressiveness such that further intellectually evolved people will give up superstitions, accept science and scepticism. And they at least unconsciously steer their ideas in this direction. This meta-analysis is burdened with this within what they review, I have no doubt.

One additional comment. There is certainly an anti-intellectual streak within some of the reactionary contemporary religion. The thinking and sceptical Christian is someone who has not been fully converted, which makes me ask the sample of people who are not religious in these studies, have they been driven away by those who have seen the light and have all of the answers? That is, the stupid may be all that current trends in religious life have left us? (if we accept that there is anything correct within these studies summed by this article)

[ 16. August 2013, 02:48: Message edited by: no prophet ]

Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :

Your blind irony always amuses EE.

Posted by EtymologicalEvangelical (# 15091) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC...
Your blind irony always amuses EE.

Posted by SvitlanaV2 (# 16967) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Chorister:
I have heard several Christian leaders (and even a vicar who was educated at Cambridge, strangely enough) assert that Jesus' disciples were an uneducated bunch, so we today shouldn't be led by the educated. To those people, 'Theology' was a dirty word. I think their reasoning was that God can speak more powerfully through people who haven't had their heads filled with clever ideas.

Maybe this kind of talk from bookish clergymen is aimed more at controlling the laity than at underplaying their own intellectual achievements.

Posted by EtymologicalEvangelical (# 15091) on :

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB
Likewise, thinking in religion (theology) cannot in the end but bow to Divine revelation. What is revealed ultimately cannot be questioned, but only believed (or not - but then one is not faithful to that religion any longer). Hence it is entirely appropriate to set apart certain - Divinely revealed - truths from critical thinking. They are the axioms, not the subject, of critical thought.

I would agree that when we come to the position of acknowledging certain truths as being "of God', then they cannot be questioned. But that is a conclusion arrived at by logical critical thinking, namely, that God, being perfect, and possessing a perfect mind in which there cannot exist any contradiction, cannot be shown to be wrong.

However, what is the process by which we come to acknowledge that certain ideas are consistent with the will of God? Experience? Church authority? (If so, which church, and why?) Blind faith?

My concern is that some Christians may be tempted to invoke the incontrovertibility of divine truth to undermine the proper process of understanding and interpreting those truths - and especially if the agenda is to try to enforce conformity to some religious institution. For example, someone may ask a legitimate question as to why God damns people to eternal hell. The lazy approach is just to say "God can't be wrong. We just have to accept it and submit to it." The (in my view, biblical) approach is to say, "Yes, I am aware that the Bible teaches about hell, but what is the proper interpretation of this? How can I understand it? How can I truly appreciate the nature of God's justice?" In fact, in Isaiah 5:3-4 God invites us to understand and appreciate His justice, and that He has good reason to judge His 'vineyard'.

We should always seek to understand God's Word - Proverbs 4:7. This is a clear command of God. And it involves critical thinking.

Posted by S. Bacchus (# 17778) on :

quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:

quote:
Originally posted by BWSmith:

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
What's the point of this study?
It's a message of ego reinforcement to atheists who might be in danger of "succumbing to temptation" and believing in God again.
Or maybe it's a wake-up call to a church that has made education and learning into a bogeyman, and preaches that critical thinking is inimical to faith and part of the devil's toolkit. We sow the wind and reap the whirlwind. Lewis said on a different subject, "We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst." Today the church can say, "We mock thinking and are shocked to find imbeciles in our midst."

Anti-intellectualism is a problem. At the risk of starting sounding Anti-American, there is a substantial body of literature from over the past 60 years (most of it by Americans) that suggests that it's particularly a problem in the USA. I don't know if that's true (we have plenty of willfully ignorant people in the UK).

I'm not sure how much we can lay this on the church, though. Rowan Williams, Benedict XVI, and Patriarch Bartholomew are not exactly unlearned men (each has a doctorate, speaks a vast number of languages, and worked as a university lecturer). Indeed, Rowan and Benedict were both criticized for being TOO academic by many within and without their churches. Notably, they have been replaced by men whose experience has been less academic and less cloistered (although Francis was a school teacher and a member of an order that places a very high emphasis on academic training). These are the most visible leaders of the Christian Church, and I don't think one could fairly say of any one of them that he 'has made education and learning into a bogeyman'.

A few signs from churches in provincial America cannot erase the fact that the Christian faith nurtured the minds of Jerome and Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas, Erasmus and Luther, Barth and von Balthasar. And, for that matter, Kepler, Mendel, and Georges Lemaître. To say nothing of the poets, composers, and painters.

Some people feel threatened by critical thinking, and by critical thinkers. Others turn ideas into false Gods to which they will sacrifice anything or anyone to that idea. The Church and secular society have known both types of people. Often, they are one and the same.

Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :

quote:
Originally posted by S. Bacchus:
A few signs from churches in provincial America cannot erase the fact that the Christian faith nurtured the minds of Jerome and Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas, Erasmus and Luther, Barth and von Balthasar. And, for that matter, Kepler, Mendel, and Georges Lemaître. To say nothing of the poets, composers, and painters.

I'm not talking about the past, for I do not live there. I'm talking about the present. I am not saying the Christian Church has for all history been full of anti-intellectual imbeciles. I am saying that right now, in the United States, there is a strong vein of anti-educationalism in conservative Christian circles. That anybody should deny this speaks, to me, of a vast and resounding ignorance of American popular Christian culture.

Posted by S. Bacchus (# 17778) on :

quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:

quote:
Originally posted by S. Bacchus:
A few signs from churches in provincial America cannot erase the fact that the Christian faith nurtured the minds of Jerome and Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas, Erasmus and Luther, Barth and von Balthasar. And, for that matter, Kepler, Mendel, and Georges Lemaître. To say nothing of the poets, composers, and painters.
I'm not talking about the past, for I do not live there. I'm talking about the present. I am not saying the Christian Church has for all history been full of anti-intellectual imbeciles. I am saying that right now, in the United States, there is a strong vein of anti-educationalism in conservative Christian circles. That anybody should deny this speaks, to me, of a vast and resounding ignorance of American popular Christian culture.

I must say that I find it surprising, even bizarre, for anybody (let alone an Orthodox Christian) to speak of 'the church' in one breath and then to speak of 'American popular Christian culture' as though that were the same thing. American Evangelicals are small minority of Christians. Surely the Church is either broad enough to include other varieties, or else narrow enough to exclude them (the latter, as I understand it, being very much the official view of your own confession).

Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :

quote:
Originally posted by S. Bacchus:
I must say that I find it surprising, even bizarre, for anybody (let alone an Orthodox Christian) to speak of 'the church' in one breath and then to speak of 'American popular Christian culture' as though that were the same thing.

I certainly wasn't trying to equate them. I am trying to counter the idea that there are no Christians who are anti-intellectual. I don't know why you want to defend this idea, but that is what you are doing.

quote:
American Evangelicals are small minority of Christians.

In this country they have enormous clout. You don't see Catholics or ELCA Lutherans (let alone the Orthodox) being able to dumb down the contents of Texas schoolbooks.

quote:
Surely the Church is either broad enough to include other varieties, or else narrow enough to exclude them (the latter, as I understand it, being very much the official view of your own confession).

I don't know what this sentence has to do with anything. What does the broadness or the narrowness of the church have to do with the existence of imbecile Christian thinking-haters?

Posted by argona (# 14037) on :

quote:
Originally posted by leo:

quote:
Originally posted by BWSmith:

quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
maybe it's a wake-up call to a church that has made education and learning into a bogeyman, and preaches that critical thinking is inimical to faith and part of the devil's toolkit...Today the church can say, "We mock thinking and are shocked to find imbeciles in our midst."
Christian churches have never opposed "education, learning, or critical thinking".
Several clergy told me not to do theology at uni because it would destroy my faith and then i would go on to destroy the faith of others.

I know a theology graduate who was told that. It didn't. Depends perhaps on the nature of one's faith. If it's challenging and critical, theology will be grist to the mill.

Posted by HCH (# 14313) on :

I believe that if you discuss "intelligence" with appropriate psychological professionals, you will find that there are a number of different kinds of intelligence. If you claim that members of group A are, on the average, more intelligent than members of group B, then you need to be more specific. Are we speaking of the ability to follow a chain of reasoning, or of the ability to create such a chain, or of the accuracy and reliability of short-term memory, or of long-term memory? Or perhaps perfect pitch, or the ability to estimate distance/area/elapsed time/weight? Or kinesthetic ability? Or the ability to do mental arithmetic, or perhaps visualize complex shapes in multiple dimensions?

Some of the comments on this thread are rather revealing. Some people want to count degrees; do they mean to suggest that anyone illiterate is necessarily not intelligent? Others point out various highly intelligent individuals and apparently want to draw conclusions about large groups of people. As for IQ tests, these were invented as measures of the development of children, and they are usually tied to language and culture. Presumably there are highly intelligent people of various cultures, mother tongues and educations.

By the way, if you want to speak of "religious" people, do you mean people who self-identify as such, or people who attend a mainstream church, or people exposed to such as children? Are you including all religions or just theistic ones or just Christianity? Or do you want to include those who are expressing superstition and faith in any fashion at all, such as buying lottery tickets?

Posted by Andromeda (# 11304) on :

quote:
Originally posted by BWSmith:
Christian churches have never opposed "education, learning, or critical thinking".

This wasn't my experience in the evangelical church (UK) I encountered much black and white thinking and was subjected to numerous hocus pocus sermons from YEC types. It was one of the reasons I left. The majority view always seemed to be 'agree with what they say at the front.' I think anti-intellectualism is rife (but intellectualism/critical thinking not non-existent) in the evo church. Mousethief makes a good point.

quote:
Originally posted by SvitlanaV2:

Anti-intellectualism is probably most prevalent among low-status religious groups where few of their young people have the means to benefit from academic study anyway. It's easy to criticise something that mostly unobtainable.

Again, not my experience, my church was full of the university educated and middle class professionals.

Posted by Albertus (# 13356) on :

Indeed. It was always a puzzle to me how many well educated evangelicals I met were able to shut off and indeed oppose any sense of intellectual inquiry when it came to their faith. But then a lot of them were natural scientists and mathematicians wedded to a very narrowly black and white positivist epistemology, and when I realised this it became a bit less puzzling.

Posted by Andromeda (# 11304) on :

Hmm - you kind of lost me with positivist epistemology.

Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :

In other words their method of acquiring faith is completely disconnected from their profession. So one can have a PhD in geology and be a YEC.

Posted by kankucho (# 14318) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Curiosity killed ...:

quote:
Three possible interpretations were discussed.
<snip>
Second, intelligent people tend to adopt an analytic (as opposed to intuitive) thinking style, which has been shown to undermine religious beliefs.
<snip>

The assumption there that the One True Intelligence is analytical is erroneous. It's often claimed that intelligence tests make no room for intuition but, when I took the Mensa test*, it was presented in two parts - a pass in either of which would qualify you. The second part was entirely spatial and conducted at a speed that precluded analysis. If you couldn't 'sense' the answers instantly you stood no chance of figuring them out.

*Yes, they let me in though I didn't stick around for long - that Woody Allen thing about not wanting to be in any club that would accept me as a member, I suppose. But biometric tests have shown me to be substantially 'right-brained'. So I have two pieces of paper that together prove** that I'm both intelligent and intuitive.

(**Yeah yeah, I know)

Posted by SvitlanaV2 (# 16967) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Andromeda:

quote:
Originally posted by SvitlanaV2:

Anti-intellectualism is probably most prevalent among low-status religious groups where few of their young people have the means to benefit from academic study anyway. It's easy to criticise something that mostly unobtainable.
Again, not my experience, my church was full of the university educated and middle class professionals.

However, if you look at the origins of these congregations or denominations, they could be quite working class. Maybe it's an example of the Protestant work ethic gradually taking over and turning working class congregations into middle class ones.

This website has long prompted me to ask why middle class non-evangelicals attend middle class evangelical churches. (It seems like a recipe for theological frustration to me!) One answer must be that they want to be among people who resemble them demographically. Alternatively, maybe the class of the church doesn't matter, and they just want to experience a church that resembles them psychologically, because it promotes an image of dynamism and success, rather than respectable decline, as many mainstream churches seem to do. If enough middle class people, evangelical or not, join a successful working class church then the culture of that church will eventually change.

[ 24. August 2013, 01:25: Message edited by: SvitlanaV2 ]

Posted by Albertus (# 13356) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Andromeda:
Hmm - you kind of lost me with positivist epistemology.

Sorry. What I meant by that- and I may be using the term inaccurately, but I was posting in a hurry- is an understanding of knowledge which is very much 'what you see is what you get': this is distinguishable from a view which, for instance, stresses the importance of the interpretation and understandings that the observer brings to the process of observation. Now, AIUI basically the natural sciences are grounded on a view that what you see is indeed what you get- although good natural scientists will tell you that it may well be more nuanced than less good natural scientists think. This, in the case off the people that i am referring to, leads to a very literal approach to understanding the Bible, in particular: and indeed there's a book called The Scandal of The Evangelical Mind, I think, by a US Evangelical whose name someone will no doubt remind me of, which argues that US Biblical fundamentalism arose from attempts in the late C19 and early C20 to 'beat science at its own game' by applying this kind of positivist approach to Scripture.

Posted by Andromeda (# 11304) on :

Ah Ok I understand. Thanks for the clarification Albertus. That does sound plausible.

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
So one can have a PhD in geology and be a YEC.

I know a YEC who is a geneticist. I've never understood how he combines those things in his mind.

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