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Why Are Atheists Generally Smarter Than Religious People?

#1
C C Offline
http://www.realclearscience.com/articles...eople.html

EXCERPT: [...] In classical Greece and Rome, it was widely remarked that "fools" tended to be religious, while the "wise" were often skeptics, Dutton and his co-author, Dimitri Van der Linden, an assistant professor of psychology at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands, wrote in the study. The ancients weren't the only ones to notice this association. Scientists ran a meta-analysis of 63 studies and found that religious people tend to be less intelligent than nonreligious people. The association was stronger among college students and the general public than for those younger than college age, they found. The association was also stronger for religious beliefs, rather than religious behavior, according to the meta-analysis, published in 2013 [...]

But why does this association exist? Dutton set out to find answer, thinking that perhaps it was because nonreligious people were more rational than their religious brethren, and thus better able to reason that there was no God, he wrote. But "more recently, I started to wonder if I'd got it wrong, actually," Dutton told Live Science. "I found evidence that intelligence is positively associated with certain kinds of bias."

[...] This so-called "bias blind spot" happens when people cannot detect bias, or flaws, within their own thinking. "If anything, a larger bias blind spot was associated with higher cognitive ability," the researchers of the 2012 study wrote in the abstract. If intelligent people are less likely to perceive their own bias, that means they're less rational in some respects, Dutton said. So why is intelligence associated with atheism? The answer, he and his colleague suggest, is that religion is an instinct, and it takes intelligence to overcome an instinct, Dutton said....

MORE: http://www.realclearscience.com/articles...eople.html
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#2
RainbowUnicorn Offline
(Jun 6, 2017 03:57 AM)C C Wrote: http://www.realclearscience.com/articles...eople.html

EXCERPT: [...] In classical Greece and Rome, it was widely remarked that "fools" tended to be religious, while the "wise" were often skeptics, Dutton and his co-author, Dimitri Van der Linden, an assistant professor of psychology at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands, wrote in the study. The ancients weren't the only ones to notice this association. Scientists ran a meta-analysis of 63 studies and found that religious people tend to be less intelligent than nonreligious people. The association was stronger among college students and the general public than for those younger than college age, they found. The association was also stronger for religious beliefs, rather than religious behavior, according to the meta-analysis, published in 2013 [...]

But why does this association exist? Dutton set out to find answer, thinking that perhaps it was because nonreligious people were more rational than their religious brethren, and thus better able to reason that there was no God, he wrote. But "more recently, I started to wonder if I'd got it wrong, actually," Dutton told Live Science. "I found evidence that intelligence is positively associated with certain kinds of bias."

[...] This so-called "bias blind spot" happens when people cannot detect bias, or flaws, within their own thinking. "If anything, a larger bias blind spot was associated with higher cognitive ability," the researchers of the 2012 study wrote in the abstract. If intelligent people are less likely to perceive their own bias, that means they're less rational in some respects, Dutton said. So why is intelligence associated with atheism? The answer, he and his colleague suggest, is that religion is an instinct, and it takes intelligence to overcome an instinct, Dutton said....

MORE: http://www.realclearscience.com/articles...eople.html


Quote:But why does this association exist?


Quote:So why is intelligence associated with atheism?



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealClearPolitics

Quote:Though their own political views are strongly conservative,[7][8][4][9]
CC im not intending to troll your posts.
i just noticed something in the way it was written that set off my "religous brainwashing thought process alarm" so i had a look to see who the publishers/writers are and what they would want to achieve with the article.
Total propoganda to create subconscious affirmations that athiests are arrogant thus "pride filled" etc etc...
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#3
Secular Sanity Offline
Conservapedia...
Conservapedia is an English-language wiki encyclopedia project written from an American conservative point of view. The website was started in 2006 by American homeschool teacher and attorney Andrew Schlafly, son of conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, to counter what he perceived as a liberal bias present in Wikipedia. It uses editorials and a wiki-based system to generate content.

Examples of Conservapedia's ideology include its accusations against and strong criticism of U.S. President Barack Obama, the Democratic Party, evolution, and Wikipedia's alleged liberal bias, as well as views of the theory of relativity as promoting moral relativism, claims of a proven link between abortion and breast cancer, praise for a number of Republican politicians, support of celebrities and artistic works that it views as promoting moral standards in line with Christian family values, and acceptance of fundamentalist Christian doctrines such as Young Earth creationism. Conservapedia's "Conservative Bible Project" is a crowd-sourced version of the Bible which Conservapedia claims will be "free of corruption by liberal untruths".

The site has received negative reactions from the mainstream media, as well as from notable political figures, including commentators and journalists, and has historically been criticized for bias and inaccuracies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservapedia
Is there any validity in their criticism regarding our lack of creativity and inspiration? 


Atheism and Inspiration

Atheist Music
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#4
C C Offline
(Jun 6, 2017 11:03 AM)RainbowUnicorn Wrote: CC im not intending to troll your posts. i just noticed something in the way it was written that set off my "religous brainwashing thought process alarm" so i had a look to see who the publishers/writers are and what they would want to achieve with the article.
Total propoganda to create subconscious affirmations that athiests are arrogant thus "pride filled" etc etc...


That article originally came from Live Science, which is affiliated with Space Dot Com. In turn, both with Purch. The original paper stemming from the field of "Evolutionary Psychology" is here. RCS is a news aggregator that occasionally (for whatever reason) will store / present some story from elsewhere on their own turf. Which is to say, even if any agenda of owner RCP intruded into sub-outlets like RCS, the latter's news is still dependent upon other sources to produce it. (Why Are Atheists Generally Smarter Than Religious People? - Live Science)

Circa all non-aggregator (free) science sites are also owned by some company or corporation with applicable business interests (the paid ones as well). So we could easily go mad constantly fixating on the resulting conspiracy / paranoia resonances that such an unavoidable circumstance invites.

It's potentially a worse situation to directly select news from open-access (free) science journals, since they are infested with hundreds of predatory publishers ultimately located in places like India, Nigeria, China, etc -- which will literally accept any research paper upon payment, no matter how bad.

Paid-access science journals (and those distributors requiring sign-up and membership procedures to access papers on the site) are fraught with their own problems these days in accepting work that is often never successfully replicated by other researchers (not the least due to lack of specific details as to how the experiment, survey, analysis, etc was set-up or conducted).

It should be taken for granted on many forums (especially a "casual science" one) that most members and guest lurkers are not able to access anything reliably but the free sources (whether pop-sci or the questionable free journals). So a major part of there being any reason at all to post and discuss developments in science is to also to bring-up the good / bad quality of the science, the mediating writing, the peer-review itself or lack of such if taken directly from a journal or ultimate source, etc.

In fact, given the dismal status of things today, criticism of science publishing and the work of scientists it reports may be the primary activity on a forum -- rather than say, some bygone enjoying of / fascination with the "progress" of knowledge. In the latter respect, criticism of science news, practices, and results is very applicable but should not be treated as if it is surprising to need to do so (under the circumstances). Which is to say, it's a rather trivial thing to focus upon in terms of itself alone -- kind of like remarking that the participants are "really messy looking" during a mud-wrestling tournament. Or like a patrol police person complaining everyday about the all eccentric and unstable characters s/he runs into in the course of the job (as if s/he anticipated encountering the cream of humanity on the beat, instead).

- - - Later add-on Edit---

Quote:RealClearPolitics (RCP) [...] Though their own political views are strongly conservative, the site's founders say their goal is to give readers "ideological diversity" in its commentary section. [...] Forbes Media LLC bought a 51% equity interest in the site in 2007. On May 19, 2015, it was announced that RealClearInvestors and Crest Media bought out Forbes's stake for an undisclosed amount. RealClearInvestors and Crest Media own RealClearPolitics.

Fiscal conservatism should not be conflated with social conservatism. "Radicals for capitalism" (like in the Ayn Rand type camps) and even the pseudo-Alt-Right (mask for the libertarian computer nerds pretending to be cavemen during their disruptive trolling of online social sites) can often be atheists, if/when it's not an outright attribute demanded by their ideological views.

Al-Monitor was founded by an Arab-American and either partners with or is owned by Crest Media. So not necessarily a takeover by a Middle Eastern media empire, even though it functions and serves therein.
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#5
C C Offline
(Jun 6, 2017 02:14 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote: Conservapedia... The site has received negative reactions from the mainstream media, as well as from notable political figures, including commentators and journalists, and has historically been criticized for bias and inaccuracies.


Yeah, it's surely taken for granted (by anyone but its followers) that Conservapedia is no more credible than Ken Ham's AiG. The very name is an instant giveaway to ideological bias.
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#6
Secular Sanity Offline
(Jun 6, 2017 06:16 PM)C C Wrote: Yeah, it's surely taken for granted (by anyone but its followers) that Conservapedia is no more credible than Ken Ham's AiG. The very name is an instant giveaway to ideological bias.

Of course, but it is constructive criticism, C C.  Atheism does lack inspiration and creativity.

The pious always taught us that we were less than—born in sin.  That we should strive to be more than we are—godly, perhaps.   We may have killed the concept of God, but not the concept of heaven, or that is to say heaven on earth.  Here in the states, happiness is the new sought after commodity—the highest good, but if we’re not happy, there are no longer any gods to blame.  Failure; while still subjected to random events, now weigh heavily on our shoulders, but the failures, the losses, the tragedies themselves are easier to handle than the judgement attached to them—the ridicule, humiliation, epicaricacy, etc. I think the Greeks were right to celebrate tragedy.  Even Kant sought to distance happiness from morality.  

Is it true that in England you can be miserable and nobody minds?

FROM THE ENLIGHTENMENT TO THE ROMANTIC REVOLUTION
For a time the rationality of the Enlightenment seemed to hail the final triumph of human reason. Soon the laws that operated behind the universe would all be known and humankind would be able to create the future it wanted. At least that is how it seemed for a while.

If Copernicus is the most easily identifiable figure to mark the start of the Enlightenment then it is the German philosopher Immanuel Kant who can most readily be identified as the start of the Romantic Revolution. Romanticism was born out of a sense of disillusionment with the Enlightenment.

One source of disillusionment was that the Enlightenment thinkers through the pursuit of reason had backed themselves in a corner. In the end it was the philosopher David Hume that took reason to its ultimate skeptical end. Hume showed that ultimately we can know nothing. All we have are the perceptions of the senses and there is no way to know if those perceptions correspond to any outside world, whether it be the physical world of time and space or any transcendent realm of spirit. In fact, there was no way to know if there was any reality outside of our sense perceptions. Hume fell into such despair over this profoundly skeptical trap that he was known to frequent public backgammon games in order to take his mind off of humanities predicament.

A second short fall of the Enlightenment was the French Revolution. What started as a revolt against tyranny with the aim to put in place a government created according to the highest principles of enlightened thought turned into a blood bath demonstrating the lowest side of human character? What did it mean? What had gone wrong?

The Romantic thinkers began to feel that the Enlightenment was suffocating them and squeezing the spirit, passion and morality out of existence. Kant in response created a new vision of reality. He rejected the universe of the universal laws that could be discovered and instead envisioned a growing universe that was created in part by human choices and human will.

The Enlightenment saw a universe that was mechanical and run by fixed laws. The Romantics saw a universe that was organic and grew in accord with acts of will. Human will and freedom were for them sacred, where the Enlightenment had held human reason and rationality in the highest regard.

The Romantics were skeptical of science. Frankenstein, the great Romantic novel by Mary Shelly, is the well-known story of how a scientist creates life only to discover that his creation is beyond his control and destroys him and those around him. The Romantics felt that the Enlightenment notion that the universe was knowable and controllable was naive. The universe was infinite, mysterious and ultimately unknowable. Yet we are a part of it and therefore if we give ourselves to our deepest yearnings we will be part of the creative part of the universe. For the Romantics the highest human value was not rationality, it was authenticity, moral integrity and passion. The Romantics were the first to value these things for their own sake regardless of what they were aimed at. A Christian in the middle ages would never admire the zeal a Pagan showed for a heathen faith. The Christian would simply see the zealous Pagan as more dangerous. The Enlightened thinker didn’t admire the passion of the monk’s love of God, instead the monk seemed all the more foolish. The Romantic admires even the passion of her enemies. To die for ones ideals is the highest good and it is good no matter what the ideal.

If the Enlightenment thinkers had felt shackled by the superstition of the middle ages, the Romantic thinkers felt that the natural laws of the Enlightenment were a strait jacket. The Romantics loved to break rules, to snub laws and live as utterly unconventionally as possible. They were unconventional in dress, in lifestyle, and in thinking. As poets, playwrights and novelists they broke literary styles and their great musical composers, perhaps Beethoven the greatest of all, were notorious for breaking musical convention.

In Germany the writings of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Goethe set the stage for a Romantic Revolution. This revolution would simultaneously erupt in the English poets Byron, Shelly, Blake, Coleridge and Wordsworth.  All of these writers had a tremendous impact on the developing thought of America at the start of the 19th century and have become a deep part of the consciousness of America. The Transcendentalists of Concord represent the American Romantic Revolution. And they were reading all of the Romantic philosophy, literature and poetry coming out of Europe. I wonder if you can understand the American mind without understanding Romanticism.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/B_Aa1h6QEis

I don’t think that humans are starved for deeper meaning or significance like Jason Silva suggested in his video.  I think that our social structures thwart belongingness, add to our perceived burdensomeness, and unworthiness.  Even the chronic or terminally ill that say they are ready to die, do so, not because they've found some final peace or transcendence, but because they feel like a burden, cutoff, isolated, or unwanted.

"Not to be onto something is to be in despair."  I disagree.  Not to belong to something is to be in despair.  

What do you think?
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#7
Yazata Offline
(Jun 6, 2017 03:57 AM)C C Wrote: Why Are Atheists Generally Smarter Than Religious People?

I don't think that I accept the premise of this thread. I've never been impressed by the intellectual prowess of the self-styled atheists that I've met. Most just assumed they were smarter than other people because they were atheists (and hence not followers of "superstition" as they would put it) and because of some fanciful association between atheism and science. They were on the side of 'science', science is smart, so they must be smart too.

I'm not even convinced that there is good data on intelligence and religion. (How are those things defined and measured?)

It's easier to use education levels as a (very crude) proxy for intelligence. And when we do that we find that people with no religious adherence have a slight edge over religious adherents as a group. In the United States, the 2008 ARIS surveys found that 31% of 'nones' (those with no formal religious adherence) are university graduates, while 27% of religious adherents were. That's a slight (4% points) edge to the 'nones'.

But 'religious adherents' takes in a lot of territory. If we separate out different religious traditions and denominations, we find much larger differences within the religious adherents than between the adherents and the nones. The least likely to have graduated from a university are the Christian Pentecostals (13%). Of course that might have something to do with the ethnic/class makeup of this group. Baptists didn't do much better (18%) perhaps for similar reasons. The more upper middle class 'mainline Protestants' (Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran) come in at 35% university graduates, beating the 'none's by 4%. And a whopping 59% of adherents of 'Eastern religions' (mostly Buddhists and Hindus) are university graduates (a 28% point margin over the 'nones'). That's probably associated with the already-selected nature of the Asian immigrant population (it's the Asian intellectuals who are more apt to come here for graduate school or tech jobs) along with the many white converts to these religions who are disproportionately highly educated and probably rather smart.
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#8
C C Offline
(Jun 7, 2017 11:05 AM)Secular Sanity Wrote: I don’t think that humans are starved for deeper meaning or significance like Jason Silva suggested in his video.  I think that our social structures thwart belongingness, add to our perceived burdensomeness, and unworthiness.  Even the chronic or terminally ill that say they are ready to die, do so, not because they've found some final peace or transcendence, but because they feel like a burden, cutoff, isolated, or unwanted.

"Not to be onto something is to be in despair."  I disagree.  Not to belong to something is to be in despair.  

What do you think?


It's contended that even people with AvPD nevertheless have "a strong desire to be close to others", to feel membership in the human sphere or some club or movement of it. But is that innately the case or just something programmed into them / others / us by society (that we're supposed to feel unhappy if minus interactions and companionship)?

In the past (and still heavily in some sub-cultures), bachelors and bachelorettes were stereotyped as lacking an unfulfilled life because they weren't married. Similar with parents pressing still adolescent-faced newlyweds to start producing grandchildren for them, that a childless couple would be slated for unhappiness.

As this blogger opines:

In my past, when I had no friends because I was working so hard, I felt very lonely and very depressed. But it wasn’t because I had no friends. I felt that way because I was conditioned to. Every poem or story I read, every movie I saw, every person I talked to would tell me that I had to have friends…. more so, I had to have love. Not one person or piece of entertainment told me that it was ok to be alone. In the movies, the hermits would eventually find a family or a place to live and “finally be happy” with others. The others would either eventually commit suicide or “remain alone for the rest of their days”... --Humans are social beings. So if you’re not social, what are you?

There's a reversing trend of not viewing humans as social creatures in the strong sense. While it can still surely be said that the majority of people do have a modest to fierce ranging need to socialize, belong to a group, community, etc... There could be those who don't inherently have the need, and may only feel depressed because of the surrounding conditioning as well as accompanying punishments / stigma ("treated as either a beast or a god") that they should feel so.

But there are pragmatic reasons for why a "recluse" or "madwoman in the attic" would experience degrees of stress which slid into melancholy. Being alone can be a vulnerable state in a variety of ways, depending upon location, skills level, resources (monetary or otherwise), and contingent events ("Is this Howard Hughes the penthouse hermit or Nellie the dilapidated shack dweller?").

Although the mental disposition can fall out those of incidental needs, evolution might over time have instilled universal, psychological presets for this "swim with a school of fish" security impulse, which would provoke uncomfortable feelings if not accommodated. But that actually just takes us right back to the assorted reasons for how the supposed "majority" might have acquired their social presets in the first place (perhaps now deemed mitigated in strength). Any minority lacking them as native / genetic compulsions would thus, again, have the "desire for being part of a herd" arising more from actual, contingent practical needs rather than wiring.

- - -

(Jun 7, 2017 04:57 PM)Yazata Wrote:
(Jun 6, 2017 03:57 AM)C C Wrote: Why Are Atheists Generally Smarter Than Religious People?

I don't think that I accept the premise of this thread. I've never been impressed by the intellectual prowess of the self-styled atheists that I've met. Most just assumed they were smarter than other people because they were atheists (and hence not followers of "superstition" as they would put it) and because of some fanciful association between atheism and science. They were on the side of 'science', science is smart, so they must be smart too.

I'm not even convinced that there is good data on intelligence and religion. (How are those things defined and measured?)

It's easier to use education levels as a (very crude) proxy for intelligence. And when we do that we find that people with no religious adherence have a slight edge over religious adherents as a group. In the United States, the 2008 ARIS surveys found that 31% of 'nones' (those with no formal religious adherence) are university graduates, while 27% of religious adherents were. That's a slight (4% points) edge to the 'nones'.

But 'religious adherents' takes in a lot of territory. If we separate out different religious traditions and denominations, we find much larger differences within the religious adherents than between the adherents and the nones. The least likely to have graduated from a university are the Christian Pentecostals (13%). Of course that might have something to do with the ethnic/class makeup of this group. Baptists didn't do much better (18%) perhaps for similar reasons. The more upper middle class 'mainline Protestants' (Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran) come in at 35% university graduates, beating the 'none's by 4%. And a whopping 59% of adherents of 'Eastern religions' (mostly Buddhists and Hindus) are university graduates (a 28% point margin over the 'nones'). That's probably associated with the already-selected nature of the Asian immigrant population (it's the Asian intellectuals who are more apt to come here for graduate school or tech jobs) along with the many white converts to these religions who are disproportionately highly educated and probably rather smart.


Since the ancient era, history is unavoidably littered with influential scholars, scientists, philosophers, and inventors who belonged to some Abrahamic religion. One would seem to have to make the claim that the Newton types were atheists in disguise or bite the bullet.
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#9
Secular Sanity Offline
(Jun 7, 2017 06:15 PM)C C Wrote: It's contended that even people with AvPD nevertheless have "a strong desire to be close to others", to feel membership in the human sphere or some club or movement of it. But is that innately the case or just something programmed into them / others / us by society (that we're supposed to feel unhappy if minus interactions and companionship)?

In the past (and still heavily in some sub-cultures), bachelors and bachelorettes were stereotyped as lacking an unfulfilled life because they weren't married. Similar with parents pressing still adolescent-faced newlyweds to start producing grandchildren for them, that a childless couple would be slated for unhappiness.  

As this blogger opines:

In my past, when I had no friends because I was working so hard, I felt very lonely and very depressed. But it wasn’t because I had no friends. I felt that way because I was conditioned to. Every poem or story I read, every movie I saw, every person I talked to would tell me that I had to have friends…. more so, I had to have love. Not one person or piece of entertainment told me that it was ok to be alone. In the movies, the hermits would eventually find a family or a place to live and “finally be happy” with others. The others would either eventually commit suicide or “remain alone for the rest of their days”... --Humans are social beings. So if you’re not social, what are you?

There's a reversing trend of not viewing humans as social creatures in the strong sense. While it can still surely be said that the majority of people do have a modest to fierce ranging need to socialize, belong to a group, community, etc... There could be those who don't inherently have the need, and may only feel depressed because of the surrounding conditioning as well as accompanying punishments / stigma ("treated as either a beast or a god") that they should feel so.

But there are pragmatic reasons for why a "recluse" or "madwoman in the attic" would experience degrees of stress which slid into melancholy. Being alone can be a vulnerable state in a variety of ways, depending upon location, skills level, resources (monetary or otherwise), and contingent events ("Is this Howard Hughes the penthouse hermit or Nellie the dilapidated shack dweller?").

Although the mental disposition can fall out those of incidental needs, evolution might over time have instilled universal, psychological presets for this "swim with a school of fish" security impulse, which would provoke uncomfortable feelings if not accommodated. But that actually just takes us right back to the assorted reasons for how the supposed "majority" might have acquired their social presets in the first place (perhaps now deemed mitigated in strength). Any minority lacking them as native / genetic compulsions would thus, again, have the "desire for being part of a herd" arising more from actual, contingent practical needs rather than wiring.

Hmm, I never thought about it that way.

Humans Are By Nature Social Animals
For reinforcing a perilous social psychological imperialism toward other behavioral sciences and for suggesting that humans are naturally oriented toward others, the strong interpretation of Aristotle's famous aphorism needs to be retired. Certainly sociality is a dominant force that shapes thought, behavior, physiology, and neural activity. However, enthusiasm over the social brain, social hormones, and social cognition must be tempered with evidence that being social is far from easy, automatic, or infinite. This is because our (social) brains, (social) hormones, and (social) cognition on which social processes rely must first be triggered before they do anything for us…

Because our social capacities are largely non-automatic, ingroup-focused, and finite, we can retire the strong version of Aristotle's statement. At the same time, the concept of humans as "social by nature" has lent credibility to numerous significant ideas: that humans need other humans to survive, that humans tend to be perpetually ready for social interaction, and that studying specifically the social features of human functioning is profoundly important.

Thanks, C C!

- - -

(Jun 7, 2017 04:57 PM)Yazata Wrote:
(Jun 6, 2017 03:57 AM)C C Wrote: Why Are Atheists Generally Smarter Than Religious People?

I don't think that I accept the premise of this thread. I've never been impressed by the intellectual prowess of the self-styled atheists that I've met. Most just assumed they were smarter than other people because they were atheists (and hence not followers of "superstition" as they would put it) and because of some fanciful association between atheism and science. They were on the side of 'science', science is smart, so they must be smart too.

I'm not even convinced that there is good data on intelligence and religion. (How are those things defined and measured?)  

It's easier to use education levels as a (very crude) proxy for intelligence. And when we do that we find that people with no religious adherence have a slight edge over religious adherents as a group. In the United States, the 2008 ARIS surveys found that 31% of 'nones' (those with no formal religious adherence) are university graduates, while 27% of religious adherents were. That's a slight (4% points) edge to the 'nones'.

But 'religious adherents' takes in a lot of territory. If we separate out different religious traditions and denominations, we find much larger differences within the religious adherents than between the adherents and the nones. The least likely to have graduated from a university are the Christian Pentecostals (13%). Of course that might have something to do with the ethnic/class makeup of this group. Baptists didn't do much better (18%) perhaps for similar reasons. The more upper middle class 'mainline Protestants' (Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran) come in at 35% university graduates, beating the 'none's by 4%. And a whopping 59% of adherents of 'Eastern religions' (mostly Buddhists and Hindus) are university graduates (a 28% point margin over the 'nones'). That's probably associated with the already-selected nature of the Asian immigrant population (it's the Asian intellectuals who are more apt to come here for graduate school or tech jobs) along with the many white converts to these religions who are disproportionately highly educated and probably rather smart.

C C Wrote:Since the ancient era, history is unavoidably littered with influential scholars, scientists, philosophers, and inventors who belonged to some Abrahamic religion. One would seem to have to make the claim that the Newton types were atheists in disguise or bite the bullet.

Yes, but...

The Perimeter of Ignorance
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