pachomius2000

Does anyone know of any studies seeking to establish correlations between intelligence and religion.

My bias is that religion thrives where there is less IQ in a person or where his intelligence is inhibited by himself or by his environment.

Thanks in advance for any references.

Pachomius2000

Orefa

Google is your friend. This is from a search on "correlation between intelligence and religion":

http://www.google.com/search?num=100...nd+religion%22

Other search criteria should yield additional results.

SteveP

Those studies show little correlation between intelligence and religiosity; which I would go along with.

'Intelligence' is not the same as 'rationality'. For example, more intelligent people are just as likely as anyone else to develop schizophrenia/Bi-Polar Disorder (possibly even more so).

One of the first symptoms of this disease is that sufferers find that lampposts talk to them. What is surprising is that while at this early stage of the disease those sufferers are still relatively sane and function reasonably well in society, even so they consider this development to be little more than intriguing.
There are no alarm bells from the logical/rational mind, and they do not, as one might expect, immediately check themselves in to the asylum (Hence the expression, "If you think you're going mad, you probably aren't").

Those sufferers still feel normal, so it seems that the rational "Mr Spock" part of the mind will always be overridden by the emotional "Dr McCoy" part of the mind.

However I'm not suggesting that religious people are delusional or insane (but I know there are people on this site who would say they are! :devil3: )

BioBeing

The more intelligent the Christian, the more intelligently they can defend their belief (to paraphrase Michael Schemer). You can get tied in knots by some of the Christians around here - try getting in a debate with Long Winded Fool for example, and you'll see what I mean. Of course, it doesn't explain the underlying cognitive dissonance

walt6

My guess would be that any testing of groups with large numbers would probably result in most groups centering around or near the same norm with pretty much the same dispersion rate. While we like to think that all non-believers are wise, I think you would find we represent a cross-section of the populations we live in.

flintknapper

Please clarify. Are you implying that Bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are the same thing? Are you saying that people afflicted with Bipolar Disorder hear voices and suffer hallucinations like a schizophrenic? I beg to differ.

SteveP

Well you learn something every day. It seems that I had been labouring under the misapprehension that bipolar disorder was the new, politically correct name for schizophrenia; whereas in fact are they two different but related illnesses (and apparently often misdiagnosed for each other).

Thankyou and apologies Flintknapper, I stand corrected. Next time I shall Google first, post later.

premjan

religion is a kind of mental disorder / a primitive social mode of organization(though I doubt it can be cured with drugs).

Clivedurdle

I thought thinking was now that we have a series of intelligences, emotional, spatial, ...

I see no reason why there should be any correlation or negative correlation between high classic IQ (IQ measures IQ?) and religiosity - we are all very capable of using whatever skills we have to justify our beliefs.

whichphilosophy

Intelligence and rationality have nothing to do with each other. Hitler, Pol Pot etc are good example.