Re: Atheism Intelligence Correlations - The Strongest Argument for Atheism
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As to the second point, I questioned the breadth of the data. His saying (falaciously) that 99.9% of the general population is nominally religeous
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In Europe in 1600. When the penalty for heresy is death, people tend to say they're religious. I don't think there exist any actual statistical data so 99.99% is obviously speculative (as is 1%). The goal was to have something appropriate for the era and with the same ratio as today.
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is NOT a refutation, it is just a false statement. And making up data that "very smart people" are 100 times more likely to be atheists isn't either-- though if it were true it would have a lot more persuasive value and I would agree.
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Dude, less than .5% of the general population in the US are atheists. But almost 50% of the scientists (considerably more of the top scientists) are. This is based on adherents.org and the Larson/Witham study discussed in this thread.
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1) Excluding scientific knowledge, are the "geniuses" of today posess any greater reasoning capacity than the "geniuses" of prior eras. (I would say negligbly if any).
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I think people are much, much smarter today than they have ever been in the past.
As for the rest, I don't much care.
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