“Why are Atheists Generally Smarter than Religious People?”

Last updated on: June 5, 2017 at 6:48 pm by Dan Peterson

“Why are Atheists Generally Smarter than Religious People?” 2017-06-05T18:48:08-06:00 Dan Peterson

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The title is just a tad misleading.

For one thing, there are plenty of highly intelligent theists, people who are every bit as intelligent, every bit as thoughtful and rational, as any atheist.

But I think it’s unarguably true — it’s certainly been my consistent impression — that the percentage of atheists among highly intelligent people is higher than it is among the population at large.

This article assumes that to be true, and outlines an attempt to understand the reasons for it:

http://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2017/06/05/why_are_atheists_generally_smarter_than_religious_people.html

The reported findings are thought-provoking, but they’re not necessarily flattering to atheists or to the highly intelligent, let alone evidence that atheism is true.

This topic is related to the observation, so beloved of a certain strain of atheists, that elite scientists are less likely to be theists than are scientists generally, and considerably less so than are non-scientists in the general population.

Critics of religious belief often take this to prove, or at least to strongly suggest, that theism is false, that it’s irrational, and perhaps even that it’s a crutch for stupid people.

Maybe.

But I think not. (And there are, in fact, elite scientists who are or have been very religious; I’ve featured a fairly sizable number of them here on this blog.) I’ve been on record for many years as believing that worldviews are seldom if ever a function of purely intellectual processes. Not here. Not anywhere.

Anyway, I can think of several other potential explanations for the fact that elite scientists tend — tend, mind you — to be non-religious. One obvious possibility is simply that the kind of personality required for someone to rise to the scientific elite — not the intellect, as such, but the supportive/attendant personality — includes elements that militate against religious sentiments in some way, or against active and committed participation in a church, mosque, or synagogue. These are possibilities that, so far as I’m aware, can’t be ruled out on the basis of any solid data.

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