Some of you questioned my so-called fact that religious faith is correlated with lower education and intelligence. It’s appropriate to question those sorts of statistics since it’s entirely possible that the studies were done by atheist-leaning weasels. I would go so far as to say probable.
My reasoning is that even if the Global Association of God Believers funded the studies and found (hypothetically) that only morons believed in God, it’s unlikely that you would ever see those studies published. The only way a study showing low IQ to be correlated with religion is ever going to get published is if there is a good load of atheists all the way from the researchers to the publisher.
In fact, I would expect religious organizations to publish exactly the opposite conclusions, as some of the Mormons who posted here have pointed out. Apparently some research shows that the more educated a Mormon gets, the more Mormonish he gets.
And so it is with those cautions that I give you this link, first suggested by a helpful commenter to this blog. I can’t vouch for any of these studies that show a correlation between low IQ and faith, but I will note that there are a lot of them.
http://www.answers.com/topic/religiosity-and-intelligence
Second, it’s fair to wonder whether the low IQ/faith correlation – if real – is based on direct causation or something else. According to your comments, here are some of the top contenders for the “something else.”
1. Smart people tend to have more resources. Therefore, God’s quiet whisper to their soul is drowned out by the sound of their home theaters and BMW engines.
2. College professors are a bunch of atheists who consciously or unconsciously brainwash students to disavow their faith. So the more college you get, the more brainwashing you get.
3. Higher education teaches a rational way of looking at the world that is well suited for worldly decision-making but cripples the student for recognizing the subtlety of the divine.
4. And my favorite: People with high IQs are notoriously stupid when it comes to real world questions.
My next blog will be on Occam’s Razor. Stay tuned.