Atheism Intelligence Correlations - The Strongest Argument for Atheism

[Splendour]

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The Claim:


I think the strongest single argument for atheism (yes I know the burden of proof is on the theists, that's not relevant) is the fact that there is a high correlation between atheism and intelligence.

Can anyone give a single example of a case in the course of all of human history where there was a high correlation between intelligence and a belief when the belief was wrong? Specifically, I mean a belief not held by everyone where there were 2 or more possible sets of belief, where the correct one was held by a group of lesser average intelligence.

If there is such a case, I think it is likely a fluke where the lesser intelligent people believed the right thing for the wrong reason.


The Evidence:


Wiki entry on Religiosity and Intelligence :

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The study concludes that, of the most intelligent respondents, a disproportionately high percentage did not believe in God or did not believe that it was possible to know whether or not God existed. Similarly, a disproportionately high percentage of the most intelligent surveyed considered that the bible was not the “inspired word of God.”

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I also recall a study where 20% of community college professors (obviously above avg intelligence and above average %) were atheist, while 40% of Ivy League professors were atheist.

A quick Google search led me to An article that drew a similar data set containing this paragraph:

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The study found that 23.4 percent of college and university professors describe themselves as either atheists or agnostics, with the remainder reporting some level of belief in God or another higher power. The authors also made a distinction between the general professoriate and those professors who teach at elite doctoral institutions, as defined by the US News and World Report's list of the 50 best doctoral-awarding universities. In the latter category, 36.6 percent of respondents described themselves as atheists or agnostics.

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The Poll:

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How do we know that atheists are smarter? Maybe the less intelligent atheists are not making any arguments so they are never in the limelight for us to assess their intelligence? How do we know that some less intelligent atheists aren't hanging out in churches pretending to be theists because of social/family/career pressures they perceive as dictating they do that?

The Jesuits are a religious group and history consistently tells us that they were an exceptionally brilliant class of theists.

Today's culture may be subverting people into no faith or weaker manifestations of faith. Peer pressure has a lot of influence on shaping people. A perfect example of this is the the military which is famous for using peer pressure to break people down so they can rebuild them in the military mode. How do they break people? They apply peer pressure.
They say do this right or the whole group will pay. If the individual fails to do something right the whole group pays then the group applies its social condemnation of the individual putting further pressure on that individual to conform.

Today it looks like the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. For a couple of thousand years people have been striving to do right using what they perceive as God's boundaries from their religions, but along comes atheism saying "Hey, exalt yourself! Follow your urges. Nevermind your heart your intellect is enough". Now we have a society that is negatively reinforcing some of the worst urges.

Peer pressure can be used for both evil and good purposes. Evil peer pressure: see Hitler. Good peer pressure: see the Amish on the slaughter of their children.
Someone throwing off evil peer pressure: see that 5th guy in the recent rape article someone posted in a thread showing the craziness of some Pennsylvania judge's ruling. He could have followed the crowd instead he chose to get that woman out of a bad situation.

Here's an interesting slant on intelligence, belief and performance:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releas...-swb013107.php

Do non-theists focus on random chaos while theists focus on order? Is the whole world a balance between the 2?

[madnak]

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How do we know that atheists are smarter?

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The claim being made is that smart people are atheists, not that atheists are smart people. These are two very different claims.

[Splendour]

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I am not an atheist. I believe that it is highly unlikely that there exists an omnipotent god who is concerned specifically with humans. Specific religions are therefore more unlikely still.

A non omnipotent intelligent designer of some sort, who had something to do with the big bang, the laws of physics, and perhaps even the existence of consciousness, is reasonably likely in my mind. It will be less likely if conscious computers are ever made. Less likely still if the double slit experiment is ever explained better.

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This sounds like atheism to me.

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Yeah, me too. It's clearly atheism about all culturally relevant gods...so I would just go ahead and call it "atheism."

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Alexdb and Subfallen,

You don't see any impertinence in insisting David Sklansky is an atheist. You think you can judge him on his posts?

He's an individual and has his own right to claim who he is. I doubt DS has posted all his thoughts in this forum, but anyways doesn't he have an individual right to determine his own identity?

[RJT]

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No offense, but:

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He found that 58% of 1,000 randomly selected US scientists expressed disbelief or doubt in the existence of God, and that this figure rose to near 70% among the 400 "greater" scientists within his sample.

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This is a quote from the article. It is not a quote from Leuba.

The table in the article is the article’s table, it is not a table from the survey.

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I don't get your objection. You doubt the integrity of the author, assuming that he falsified the figures?

In this case you can repeat his survey and sent it to the same journal claiming that they used a misleading methodology or falisfied the data. That's the way science is done, normally scientists doesn't try to mislead each other. In a few cases when the manipulation of the data did take place, it was found quite fast by people who tried to reproduce the results.

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I don't get your objection. You doubt the integrity of the author, assuming that he falsified the figures?

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The article is written by a journalist I bet. I would be very surprised to find it was written by a scientist. He does not falsify numbers. He takes numbers and misleads the reader. For example, he suggests that a question was posed in the survey “Do you believe in the existence of God?” No such question was asked.

I don’t have a link to the actual survey (actually “surveys”, the original one and the one repeated years later.)

The survey is not misleading. The author of the article misleads the reader by not correctly capturing the results of the survey.

[Lestat]

<font color="blue">A non omnipotent intelligent designer of some sort, who had something to do with the big bang, the laws of physics, and perhaps even the existence of consciousness, is reasonably likely in my mind. </font>

Did you really mean to say reasonably likely?


*It's reasonably likely you'll get through today without being involved in a fatal car crash.

*It's NOT reasonably likely that anyone you had lunch or differ with in the past week will flop two straight flushes in a row today.

**
How do you rate a non omnipotent intelligent designer of some sort with these two possibilities?

As someone who professes (and is looked up to) for his innate sense of math and probabilities, you should really be more careful in choosing your words when it comes to what is and is not reasonably likely.

I don't think I'm being a nit here. Had you said "within reason", I'd probably have no qualms. But there is no reason whatsoever for a rationally minded person who is well versed in probabilities to think that any sort of a supreme being is reasonably likely. It is still many times more likely to not be the case than it is to be true.

[David Steele]

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It will be less likely if conscious computers are ever made. Less likely still if the double slit experiment is ever explained better.


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Why can't the conscious computers use the same design principles that the hypothetical designer used?

Either way, I put the probability that somewhere in the universe, human level consciousness will be synthesized at 99.9% certain. If it can't be done, the new theory of computability will be extremely interesting ( which architectures allow for the most capability and why only
natural biology based architectures can support consciousness )

As for the double slit experiment, it is explained precisely with quantum mechanics, tough luck that small "non-things" don't seem intuitively like macroscopic "things". On the bright side, we don't have an infinite regress of "things" that need their properties explained.

D.

[madnak]

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The article is written by a journalist I bet. I would be very surprised to find it was written by a scientist.

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"You bet." How about you actually read the damned article? It was written by Edward Larson and Larry Witham, the very people who conducted the survey. They used the model created by James Leuba in 1916. There is nothing fishy going on.

I don't think there's a free copy online, but there are plenty of reviews. I've seen this referenced before and have just run it through Google and nobody appears to have any issues with the method except that the definition of God is too narrow (see my post earlier in this thread). You are being an ass and refusing to do your own homework. The high incidence of atheism among scientists is well-documented and no amount of hand-waving is going to change that.

[bocablkr]

Zee,

You are correct. I have posted several links about this in the past (disputing RJT's claim about lack of correlation) and I will try and see if I can find them again.

When you start looking at the Super IQ geniuses it is almost univeral that they are Atheists.

[Drag]

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The article is written by a journalist I bet. I would be very surprised to find it was written by a scientist.

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In the posted link it is witten:

NATURE CORRESPONDENCE

I hope you know what it is.


Then there is a reference to the original article:

Nature, Vol. 394, No. 6691, p. 313 (1998) © Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

or THE LINK
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal.../394313a0.html

You can actually buy this article for a small fee, if you doubt that the link correctly reflects its content.

And in the end there are names of the autors:

Edward J. Larson
Department of History, University of Georgia,
Athens, Georgia 30602-6012, USA
e-mail:edlarson@uga.edu

Larry Witham
3816 Lansdale Court, Burtonsville,
Maryland 20866, USA


It seems that you don't even tried to think about it and check anything, claiming that 'this is journalist'. This shows the difference between scientists, who try to tests everything and open to new ideas and believers who choose only the right things to believe.

[luckyme]

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You don't see any impertinence in insisting David Sklansky is an atheist. You think you can judge him on his posts?

He's an individual and has his own right to claim who he is. I doubt DS has posted all his thoughts in this forum, but anyways doesn't he have an individual right to determine his own identity?

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Actually, no we don't.
"I have red eyes" can be disputed by anyone looking at your eyes.
"I'm a jolly fellow" can be disputed.
"I'm a theist" or "I'm an atheist" have objective meanings also, otherwise a person may just as well say thehathuthuchih.
Does DS believe god(theistic) exists. If he does he's a theist. If he doesn't he's an atheist. He doesn't even have to know the meaning of those words to fit into one of the categories ( it's a X-notX situation).

So, we decide by what he states his belief is and don't worry if he gets the names wrong at times.

luckyme