Religion correlates with lower IQ among American teenagers?

_{Denyse O'Leary

July 26, 2011

Atheism, Religion, Science}

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From “Does religion rot teenagers’ brains?” (MercatorNet, 25 July 2011):

Recently, we looked at a claim, published in a serious science journal, Intelligence, that belief in God correlates worldwide with lower IQ. From the same journal in the same year, we learned that religion correlates with lower IQ among American teenagers.

[ …]

If half of the Catholics and Baptist teens are sporadically observant and doctrinally indifferent (no unusual state of affairs), religious orthodoxy collapses as a predictor of IQ. So it is not clear just what Nyborg is measuring. Social class is a possibility.

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Comments

Oh brother. again they try to define truth by how smart or dumb the holders of some truth are. first the most intelligent people in mankinds history, if I may say so, are the British Protestant people. i say this because of the puritan/Evangelical motivation. Of coarse also Gods blessing of the true faith as logically expected. The world speaks English because of the mayflower and its home port. Today religion is tied to demographics that are about other segregating factors of identity. I expect the minority of atheists to be educated and so have a higher iq because it takes a thinking person to come to such a conviction. Otherwise a vague disinterested compliance to ones circles is the norm save for true believers. The atheist is just a part of the thinking population and only reveals this. Thinking people should be the real test. in fact i'm sure a great deal more people would be atheist if they thought about. just as more would be believers if they thought about it. this is about profound ideas and conclusions and smarter people know they need to make conclusions. Atheism and intelligence should be expected. not because its right but because its about complicated ideas in conflict. likewise the differences between the faiths.Robert Byers_{July 26, 2011
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To be an atheist is American society requires conscious skeptical contrarian decision, this would probably bias the sample of atheists towards a higher IQ. The proper comparison among the religious should probably be a sample with a similar seriousness and assertiveness, rather than randomly from the masses of nominal Christians. Both samples should be controlled for education level, and knowledge of the apologia for their positions.africangenesis_{July 26, 2011
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Damn! Ever since I got religion and figured out that Darwinism is junk pseudoscience I've obviously lost at least 20 points of IQ. Just think of what I could have done in aerospace R&D software engineering if I had just remained an atheist and bowed at Darwin's altar!GilDodgen_{July 26, 2011
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I think I read somewhere that religion correlates with belief in God. Anyone have a reference to that paper?Mung_{July 26, 2011
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It's amazing that DoC and UCC were grouped together as being "Dogmatic". I went to a DoC seminary. I'd be pretty surprised if more than half of the professors there even believed in the resurrection. Note that Jeremiah Wright's church was UCC. Even more so for the Baptists. Unless it was specifically the "Souther Baptist Convention", Baptists are all over the map. Now of course, someone who doesn't know anything about Christianity and theology might not be aware of the distinction between Southern Baptists and other Baptist denominations. I could imagine regular Joes off the street easily conflating the two, but a regular Joe off the street doesn't attempt to publish their ideas in journals. If someone knows this little about theology, they certainly shouldn't have their results published in journals. Who on earth peer-reviewed this?johnnyb_{July 26, 2011
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Whut WOOL, dem uz be muh specs!kairosfocus_{July 26, 2011
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Perhaps what the "study" is telling us is that 'atheists' are generally smart enough to be sheeple, but not quite smart enough to recognize the wool being pulled over their eyes?Ilion_{July 26, 2011
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AND, even if the study *were* validly done, such that it told us something true, such a result result would still be mostly meaningless. FOR, if atheism is the truth about the nature of reality, then it mattern not in the least whether one's "brain rots" or not. 'Atheists' -- 2300 years of proudly assuming the conclusions of "theism", while denying the fundamental truths of "theism."Ilion_{July 26, 2011
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Also, Let's not forget that, as you pointed out recently, the 'science' questions on the IQ test will be biased to the atheistic-materialistic worldview; But putting that fact aside, here is a little embarrassing fact about IQ tests that atheists don't want you to know: The following video is far more direct in establishing the 'spiritual' link to man's ability to learn new information, in that it shows that the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) scores for students showed a steady decline, for seventeen years from the top spot or near the top spot in the world, after the removal of prayer from the public classroom by the Supreme Court in 1963. Whereas the SAT scores for private Christian schools have consistently remained at the top, or near the top, spot in the world: The Real Reason American Education Has Slipped – David Barton – video Excerpt: Figure 1 shows how drastically the actual knowledge of high school students began to drop at an accelerating rate after 1962. Barton notes in his report that the upturn in SAT scores since 1981 is due to the increase in private Christian educational facilities which began to flourish at that time. Statistics have proven that students from private Christian schools showed higher academic achievement and higher test scores. http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4318930 for example: Aliso Viejo Christian School - SAT 10 Comparison Report http://www.alisoviejochristianschool.org/sat_10.html Printable pdf of SAT comparisons http://www.alisoviejochristianschool.org/images/pdf/2009-2010satscores.pdf ============= The Christian Founders Of Science - Henry F. Schaefer III - video http://www.vimeo.com/16523153 Also of note: The I.Q. tests, that have shown supposed large differences in the intelligence between races of humans, are all shown to be biased by overlooked environmental factors: Myth: The black/white IQ gap is largely genetically caused. Fact: Almost all studies show the black/white IQ gap is environmental. (i.e. children from an enriched learning environment always perform equally well on I.Q. tests, no matter what their race may be.) http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-IQgapgenetic.htm Darwin’s mistake: Explaining the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds: Excerpt: There is a profound functional discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds. We argue that this discontinuity pervades nearly every domain of cognition and runs much deeper than even the spectacular scaffolding provided by language or culture can explain. We hypothesize that the cognitive discontinuity between human and nonhuman animals is largely due to the degree to which human and nonhuman minds are able to approximate the higher-order, systematic, relational capabilities of a physical symbol system. http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Penn-01062006/Referees/Penn-01062006_bbs-preprint.htm ================= Unto The King Eternal - music video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLPYRhOQcCUbornagain77_{July 26, 2011
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