The following sarcastic comment reminded me of some of the scientific evidence on intelligence and religiosity:
My response was as follows:
Given what I said, I wanted to go over some evidence in support of my claim that "there is data showing that, on average, non-religious people tend to score better on metrics of intelligence than do religious people, and that non-religious people tend to be more analytic thinkers than are religious people." The following meta-analysis goes over a number of scientific papers supporting said claim:
And some more recent work on how analytic thinking promotes religious non-belief:
Originally posted by Darth Ovious
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Given what I said, I wanted to go over some evidence in support of my claim that "there is data showing that, on average, non-religious people tend to score better on metrics of intelligence than do religious people, and that non-religious people tend to be more analytic thinkers than are religious people." The following meta-analysis goes over a number of scientific papers supporting said claim:
"The Relation Between Intelligence and Religiosity: A Meta-Analysis and Some Proposed Explanations"
http://diyhpl.us/~nmz787/pdf/The_Rel...planations.pdf
http://diyhpl.us/~nmz787/pdf/The_Rel...planations.pdf
"A meta-analysis of 63 studies showed a significant negative association between intelligence and religiosity. The association was stronger for college students and the general population than for participants younger than college age; it was also stronger for religious beliefs than religious behavior. For college students and the general population, means of weighted and unweighted correlations between intelligence and the strength of religious beliefs ranged from −.20 to −.25 (mean r = −.24). 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."
And some more recent work on how analytic thinking promotes religious non-belief:
"Cognitive style and religiosity: The role of conflict detection"
http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~dkoehl...eligiosity.pdf
http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~dkoehl...eligiosity.pdf
"Recent research has indicated a negative relation between the propensity for analytic reasoning and religious beliefs and practices. Here, we propose conflict detection as a mechanism underlying this relation, on the basis of the hypothesis that more-analytic people are less religious, in part, because they are more sensitive to conflicts between immaterial religious beliefs and beliefs about the material world. To examine cognitive conflict sensitivity, we presented problems containing stereotypes that conflicted with base-rate probabilities in a task with no religious content. In three studies, we found evidence that religiosity is negatively related to conflict detection during reasoning. Independent measures of analytic cognitive style also positively predicted conflict detection. The present findings provide evidence for a mechanism potentially contributing to the negative association between analytic thinking and religiosity, and more generally, they illustrate the insights to be gained from integrating individual-difference factors and contextual factors to investigate analytic reasoning."
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