[Phil153]

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Moreover, I would be willing to wager that if it were possible to ascertain the total number of people that are 2 standard deviations from the mean (which I think is the definition of genuis) since the 1600's or so, the number of atheists would be dwarfed by the number of those who believed in some sort of God.

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What about people who are living right now?

Your stipulation "since the 1600s or so" is interesting. The thing is, prior to discovery of evolution, cells, the brain, the age of the earth, an understanding of emergence, and the universe beyond our solar system, it was almost reasonable to believe in a designer of some sort. Just like it was entirely reasonable for natives of just about every civilization to believe that the weather was caused by spirits or Gods or that sickness was caused by demons or God's displeasure (as opposed to tiny men multiplying in your bodily fluids). In the absence of a causative link, or even a plausible theory, people default to putting familiar purpose on things.

The thing is, God is the default position, and was especially in the 1600s in the West. Just like in a Muslim country, belief in Muhammed was/is default. Or in India, belief in Hinduism. People of centuries past were raised with Christianity as truth. They were indoctrinated with all kinds of strange tales such as Noah's flood, and taught them as absolute fact. Social pressures and reinforcements kept them believing (not to mention, the threat of being accused of heresy).

So to become an atheist, someone has to first see, and then be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt, that there is no God as defined by Christianity. Only recently did the knowledge of our world become sufficient that God was expelled from most of his hidey-holes, and biblical stories once presented as fact were shown to blatant falsehoods, nothing more than the tales of silly tribes wandering the desert.

Comparing the 1600s is like asking the smartest four year olds if they believe in Santa. They simply don't know enough about the world to know if Santa is possible or likely, and the Santa belief is reinforced by all those around them. Plus, presents magically appear under the tree! Even the smartest don't have the tools to find a way out of that one.

The 1900s is like asking a kid who's 10 or so - he's learnt so much about his world that he can start to make informed commentary about things he can't see.

And I'm not sure about the situation in the OP - perhaps intelligence was also correlated with atheism in the 1600s.

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I find Human's almost universal tendancy to believe in an external source for concepts of "higher" morality, and to attribute creation to a "being" to be fascinating. I am frustrated that I will never be able to undo the fact that these concepts are also very socialized, but I feel that they are innate as well. We seem wired to believe in God, and that certainly gives me reason to inquire further into understanding of why.

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Do you find the almost universal tendency to attribute the weather to God(s) interesting as well? Because it's exactly the same mechanism. People tend to humanize and add conscious purpose to things they don't understand. They used to do that with just about everything we now know to be purely indifferent mechanics. It seems that everywhere a light is shone into a dark area of human knowledge, God disappears, scuttling like a cockroach to his next hiding place.