Many scientific studies have been done on the subject and the overriding conclusion is that the lower the IQ the more likely a person is to be religious and the higher the less.
Are these studies as straight forward as they seem or are there other factors that need to be taken into account?
And why should religious belief be linked with intelligence? Is it because the more intelligent you are, the less likely you are to simply believe what is told to you and the more you want to reason things out yourself?
Is this why most young children believe in Father Christmas but most adults don't?
Or is this too simplistic?
This graph from
http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics...vs_iq.html
Shows a worldwide snapshot of religion and IQ.
I would so fail that test. Religion is more important than anything to me since I spend so much of my time criticizing it. If it suddenly went away I would be bored to tears...
Oh, and my I.Q is estimated 155 according to the preliminary Mensa test. I'm taking the final one later this year.
Good look with the Mensa test. I did the test like you and nearly joined until I realised how much it would cost. Mind you, I was a penny less teenager at the time and as I'd already paid them £10 for the test I thought that was enough.
And don't worry, I don't think religion is about to vanish overnight, unless there is a nearby comet that I'm unaware of..
Scientific studies which are linking IQ to religious believe .even if there is some link,are to my opinion irrelevant.Isaac Newton was a religious man,so was Darwin ,Galileo despite his clash with the Pope was religious,Einstein though not a practicant believer thought about Mother Nature as a sort of God.
A definite majority of Nobel Prize winners are known to be in various extents as believers.
How is this phenomenon possible?What could be the explanation?
We have to understand that our mind ,our way of thinking is not forcible uniform.We are currently rational in some matters and utterly irrational in others.
That's why you can find a scientist,let's say in geology who knows about the existence of rocks for hundreds of millions of years and in the main time he can believe in the Scripture which professes the biblical creationist theory.Will that scientist be less valuable fot the society? Of course not.
For atheism the link between religion and IQ does not have any importance ,on the contrary it may put in shadow more stringent problems
Had Darwin, Galileo, Isaac Newton, Copernicus and the like been born today and born in a society where religion wasn't automatically considered to be the ultimate truth and atheism deeply frowned upon to say the least, then I would be staggered if they where not atheists.
When one asks the question, "Do you believe in God" then the answer should be "It depend what you mean by God"?
Einstein was indeed an atheist, but his view of God was the embodiment of the laws of the universe and not the biblical god that the term normally refers to.
'Einstein was indeed an atheist, but his view of God was the embodiment of the laws of the universe and not the biblical god that the term normally refers to. '
Why, when God is mentioned, does everyone think of Yhwh-I belive that is the ancient Hebrew spelling. What is so hard to bilieve in a being of energy which has powers that make it as close to a god as you can posssibly get? After all, we are made of energy-although it is biological-so a being of a slightly diffrent energy is not so hard a notion.
There's nothing wrong with a being entirely made from energy, although again, it depends what you mean by energy. Perhaps consciousness is all there is and everything else is imagined.
Perhaps we are all living in a giant simulation, or this universe is a product of an alien experiment from an even stranger universe.
Perhaps there is only one being in the history of reality and he/she/it is constantly reincarnating himself into every life-form to experience every possible aspect of existence in which case we are all the same person.
Anything is possible.
Einstein was more of a deist than anything. He did believe in a God, just not one that ruled the universe.
There's nothing wrong with a being entirely made from energy, although again, it depends what you mean by energy. Perhaps consciousness is all there is and everything else is imagined.
Perhaps we are all living in a giant simulation, or this universe is a product of an alien experiment from an even stranger universe.
Perhaps there is only one being in the history of reality and he/she/it is constantly reincarnating himself into every life-form to experience every possible aspect of existence in which case we are all the same person.
Anything is possible.
Those are really intresting theories, and I've never been able to think of a way to disprove them.
And I've never been able to think of a way to prove them
