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It's true that, statistically speaking, atheists have been measured with a slightly higher IQ than theists. BUT, the difference is so small that it means very little.
I've taken a few IQ tests, and have read a little about them (although that was many years ago). Reputable IQ tests often show results with a 5 point range. This is because there are many reasons that a person's score may vary. Maybe he/she was worried about something on test day. Maybe he/she didn't sleep well the night before the test was administered. Maybe he/she was a little sick that day.
What those statistics show is that, generally speaking over a large sampling size, atheists tend to be slightly better at reasoning and problem solving than theists are. Slightly.
That's really all it shows.
While you're correct that the difference doesn't look like much, the implications are enormous.
Here's another factoid:
"In fact, strength of religious conviction correlated with poorer cognitive performance. However, while the religious respondents performed worse overall on tasks that required reasoning, there were only very small differences in working memory."
We're only looking for trends here since there can be a thousand different variables here. One reason why Christians tend to score lower than atheists can be found here:
"For more than a millennium, scholars have noticed a curious correlation: Atheists tend to be more intelligent than religious people.
It's unclear why this trend persists, but researchers of a new study have an idea: Religion is an instinct, they say, and people who can rise above instincts are more intelligent than those who rely on them."
I can cite a hundred different websites that will all say the same thing so we have to accept the logic that atheists tend to be more intelligent than theists. Part of this I believe is that Christians tend to be fiercely dogmatic. They're raised in the faith and from the cradle their addled little brains are blasted with Christian propaganda. This propaganda is imprinted/branded/emblazoned on their subconscious. Any info that threatens that propaganda is immediately cut off from their consciousness. The security that religion offers them scares them away from any attempts to educate themselves father than what their religious dogma will allow them to believe. This is why when I encourage Christians in here to just explore the Christ myth literature that has been published by dozens of credentialed scholars their typical response is, "I don't need to read about that stuff. Jesus is my savior and I know he is real because when I think of him and pray to him I get this warm fuzzy feeling of love in my tummy. That proves to be that the Holy Spirit is revealing to me that Jesus is real and he loves me."
I mean seriously, mensa, what are you going to do with this kind of mentality????????
This is why Christians with the potential to break away from religion's iron grip--like myself, mordant and a few others have the capacity to be more intelligent than their dogmatic, "I-will-never-believe-anything-except-what-the church-teaches-me" counterparts.
The brainwashing starts from before Christians can crawl.
I think you're being ridiculously harsh to call it 'brainwashing'. Parents teach their children all sorts of things that they themselves grew up with. While than may have negatives, it is not exactly evil.
I think you're being ridiculously harsh to call it 'brainwashing'. Parents teach their children all sorts of things that they themselves grew up with. While than may have negatives, it is not exactly evil.
Call a spade a spade. It's religious brainwashing.
It's true that, statistically speaking, atheists have been measured with a slightly higher IQ than theists. BUT, the difference is so small that it means very little.
I've taken a few IQ tests, and have read a little about them (although that was many years ago). Reputable IQ tests often show results with a 5 point range. This is because there are many reasons that a person's score may vary. Maybe he/she was worried about something on test day. Maybe he/she didn't sleep well the night before the test was administered. Maybe he/she was a little sick that day.
What those statistics show is that, generally speaking over a large sampling size, atheists tend to be slightly better at reasoning and problem solving than theists are. Slightly.
That's really all it shows.
That's probably true about intelligence. But what about specifically religious knowledge? If Atheists score 18 of 32 correct answers on religion and Christians only get 14 correct, do you consider that 'only slightly better'? 56% vs 44%?
There's an entire Wikipedia page outlining all the studies around religiosity and intelligence.
Viewed objectively, the jury seems to be out. There are as many claims as there are disputed claims because you have to also take into account so many other factors such as poverty and environment and culture.
If you are going to claim that religious people are less intelligent, you have to back it up with scientific study.
I think it's more relevant to this thread to focus on knowledge, not intelligence. Intelligence is obviously difficult to measure. But you either know something or you don't.
So when the data shows that Atheists know more about religion than the religious - I find that very significant.
Yeah, brainwashing is too strong a term. Maybe acculturation? You don't really need brainwashing when everyone around you believes the same thing, since there are no alternatives offering a competing vision.
Acculturation is profound enough that brainwashing isn't necessary.
My family converted from what might be described as cultural / mostly non-practicing denominational Christianity to evangelicalism when I was 5 years old. For all practical purposes, it's all I ever knew. It was my world. I had loving parents who I assumed knew what the heck they were on about. Apart from the public schools I had no socialization at all outside of church circles. When I came of age I had no idea what to do with myself and just naturally gravitated toward some sort of church role as at least a well trained lay person. In fact that was the idea behind the first year of bible institute.
It took a really bad marriage ("just marry a good Christian girl and everything will work out", they said, and that was the full extent of my mate-selection skills) and some other things to get me to begin to understand that what I had been taught was, at best, a leaky abstraction. It took another 20 years or so for me to feel comfortable not holding on to some portion of that old evangelical identity.
The vast majority of the time, people are whatever faith they are because they were born into it, it's all they know, and even the ways in which it's not working well for them don't seem evident to them, or they assume their private doubts are sinful, etc.
That's probably true about intelligence. But what about specifically religious knowledge? If Atheists score 18 of 32 correct answers on religion and Christians only get 14 correct, do you consider that 'only slightly better'? 56% vs 44%?
Knowledge of any particular subject area is not a function of intelligence. My comment only dealt with intelligence.
By a very small, virtually insignificant amount, atheists are tested as having a slightly higher IQ than theists. IQ has absolutely nothing to do with whether a person knows anything about religion.
Anecdotally, many of the atheists who post here will tell you that they were once Christians and that, as doubts about religion formed in their minds, careful reading of the Bible caused them to toss their beliefs aside. The knowledge gained from that Bible reading did not make them more intelligent. Their IQs did not change as a result of their reading.
Knowledge of any particular subject area is not a function of intelligence. My comment only dealt with intelligence.
By a very small, virtually insignificant amount, atheists are tested as having a slightly higher IQ than theists. IQ has absolutely nothing to do with whether a person knows anything about religion.
Anecdotally, many of the atheists who post here will tell you that they were once Christians and that, as doubts about religion formed in their minds, careful reading of the Bible caused them to toss their beliefs aside. The knowledge gained from that Bible reading did not make them more intelligent. Their IQs did not change as a result of their reading.
I think this sums it up best. It's definitely not knowledge in and of itself, though the capacity to absorb knowledge is certainly part of the package.
I would be willing to gamble that a kid in an extremely religious family who knows at the age of 12 he's atheist--doesn't buy any of the woo, will test higher on the IQ than his ultra-fanatical Christian siblings.
I’m 34. I’ve been “officially” atheist since my very early 20s, but I was never more than loosey goosey agnostic before then. Nor was it a great epiphany. It was simply a subtle realization. As such, my personal philosophy and worldview didn’t really change as a result. Obviously, other people’s mileage can and will vary considerably.
Yeah, same thing here, basically. My parents never pushed religion down my throat, thankfully. We only occasionally went to church, and they only made me and my brother go to Sunday school for like one year. They raised me in regular good old fashioned decent goodness and love, and no dogma or brainwashing BS. My dad is more of a Unitarian or something equivalent to that, and maybe believes something, but has stated that he doesn't believe Jesus was the son of God. My mom grew up in the Greek Orthodox community and she's still Christian, but it's always been more of a community and social/cultural type of thing for her, rather than bible-focused. And to her credit, she left that church and switched to non-denomination over her disagreement with women not being allowed to be priests in the faith she grew up in.
I was agnostic-ish in my teen years, maybe wanted to believe something, but it was more like I wanted there to be goodness and innocence and all that, and me associating wearing a cross on a chain, with that notion.
Then a lot of internet time happened by my early 20's, and some very interesting discussions and rational and logical arguments from smart people (and my own in depth thinking around it), convinced and informed me into a more conscious atheism.
Atheism is something that shouldn't probably exist, or at least that we shouldn't need an active word for. Because, it's simply the absence of having a belief in obvious myths and disprovable nonsense and such. And, in concepts which even if not terrible, simply have no supporting evidence which would justify lending credence to the claim.
So, I was a young atheist, now I'm a middle aged atheist, and I don't see how I could ever not be an atheist- because I am an atheist for so many different kinds of reasons, from history to sociology to science to logic, etc.
And I guess I'm also an agnostic, in a sense, because those concepts are not exclusive. Most atheists are agnostics. Actually a lot of theists are agnostics as well. Agnosticism is not knowing if there is a creator/god. It's a different question than a faith-based belief in the existence of one, which is the difference between a theist and atheist. And everyone is one of those 2, with atheism simply being the default position.
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