Atheism Intelligence Correlations - The Strongest Argument for Atheism

[Mendacious]

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I also took my statistics from adherents.com and they placed the % of non-religeous God worldwide at 16% and if you add budhism (which is not based on a supreme being) it is more like 22%. They state the population of atheists/agnostics in the US at between 3-9% (very strange range). See links below.

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Right, .com not .org.

But I'm not talking about agnostics. I'm talking about atheists. From the main ranking page on the secular/nonreligious/agnostic/atheist section:

"This is a highly disparate group and not a single religion. Although atheists are a small subset of this grouping, this category is not synonymous with atheism. People who specify atheism as their religious preference actually make up less than one-half of one percent of the population in many countries where much large numbers claim no religious preference, such as the United States."

This figure is validated in other places. The standard of self-described atheism is a bit different in practice (but not in theory) from the standard of disbelief in God (used in the scientist survey), and you might argue that as much as 2% of the population fits the "disbelief" standard. I say you're mincing words, but even if top scientists are "only" 25 times more likely to be atheists, that's something. I think your explanation is satisfactory based on what we know now, but the discrepancy is certainly huge enough to merit some investigation.

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I am willing to accept that a much larger percentage of scientists (most of whom are highly intelligent) are atheist than the general population. As to whether this is a persuasive argument that God does not exist, I don't believe it is very conclusive, but it does make interesting fodder for discussion/investigation. As I have said in other posts, I would expect this correlation with intelligence to some degree, that it is as high as it is amongst scientists either suggests HUGE bias, or merits further consideration.

[madnak]

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I am willing to accept that a much larger percentage of scientists (most of whom are highly intelligent) are atheist than the general population. As to whether this is a persuasive argument that God does not exist, I don't believe it is very conclusive, but it does make interesting fodder for discussion/investigation.

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I don't think it's much of an argument. It's certainly no more convincing to me than "most people are religious, so religion must be correct."

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As I have said in other posts, I would expect this correlation with intelligence to some degree, that it is as high as it is amongst scientists either suggests HUGE bias, or merits further consideration.

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I agree. I think it merits investigation regardless of religious persepctive. We don't understand much about how people form their beliefs, so it's possible that these anomalies can teach us something.