Are believers less intelligent than Atheists? Discuss

I used to subscribe to Science Daily's newsletter on several topics, including on spirituality.
I eventually cancelled the subscription because the studies mentioned didn't seem much to have to do with spirituality or religion, even though nominally, they have claimed to measure it. Those studies tend to have as much to do with religion and spirituality as talking merely about the color of a car has to do with cars as such.


One such study, for example, was on narcissism and religiosity -
Narcissism Impairs Ethical Judgment Even Among the Highly Religious, Study Finds.

Apparently, those researchers were working out of the assumption that a person can be "highly religious" and still be narcisstistic. How they have come to that conclusion is unclear.

Further, they only worked with groups of Christians, yet they published their findings as "Narcissism Impairs Ethical Judgment Even Among the Highly Religious" - as if their findings would be true for all religious denominations!

Furthermore, they studied undergraduate marketing students - hardly a representative sample of the human population.


Once one looks into the population sample and the criteria they were studied with, few, if any, studies on religion and spirituality, are scientific or pertinent.

 

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Not just tinkering with the chronology, but also with geography.

For example -
In the context of surviving in a slum, who is more intelligent - the street thug with an IQ of 90 on the standard IQ test, or a white upper class person with an IQ of 120 on that same test?
Of the two, the thug is the one who is more likely to survive in a slum. Shouldn't being able to survive count as the mark of greater intelligence?

"Intelligence," "intellectual quotient" are such relative concepts.

 

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If you want to take it back to the original interpretation then you could have atheist theists... since the term was used to describe people who lived their life as though the Gods did not exist... it was an insult, used for those who had turned their backs on the many Gods of the time. "Without God" meant that you lived your life without the protection of the Gods that you had turned your back on.
It didn't mean you now thought they didn't exist, only that you lived your life as though they didn't. It was a practical position rather than ontological.

These days atheism is a binary position: if you are not theist you are atheist - but only some of those who don't hold a belief in God also believe in the non-existence of God. Yet they would all be atheist.

And yes, meanings do change from their original usage. It's the way of language.

 

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The source thread (link in OP) was talking about intelligence as measured by IQ tests? I have mentioned that this is not necessarily definitive enough to describe intelligence as inventiveness etc. is also a factor. We are talking about a measure of the ability of the human mind to achieve certain tasks, solve certain problems. But of course the exact definition is what the thread is kind of seeking?

Can't remember without reading back through every post; I would say yes, but if it hasn't then it should be; so thanks!

If you follow my facebook link and read the whole thing I think I spoke of nurture as a strong factor, which of course would include quality of schooling from a young age.

 

ahh It reminds me of the famous wisdom:

"It is not what I know that is important for I already know it, it is what I don't know that is most important"
just another version of the same yes?


Humility and wisdom are essential to an effective intelligence..IMO
and it is often necessary to remind ourselves that often confidence is mistaken as arrogance and vise versa....

 

So would I.

My agnosticism isn't about whether or not I believe in "God". Though in real life, how I answer that question would depend on how the word 'God' is defined. The Biblical 'Yahweh' and the Quranic 'Allah' seem inherently unlikely to me, while some unknown philosophical 'ground of being' may indeed exist. So I'm inclined to effectively deny the existence of Yahweh and Allah, but I'm more non-committal about initial origins and ultimate grounds of being. Those are views about ontology.

But that isn't where the agnosticism comes from. That's based on my doubts about whether human beings have epistemological access to knowledge of transcendent things, assuming that any transcendent things exist. That's a view about epistemology.

It seems to me that there are countless things that I don't know. The unknown is an unbounded set, simply by its nature, since we have no way of knowing what its far boundaries might be. Having said that, it just seems vanishingly unlikely to me that whatever ultimate unknowns might exist will turn out to be identical to a character taken from Hebrew, Islamic or whatever mythology. It's like my entering a room alongside a schizophrenic and not knowing what lies beyond one of the room's far walls. It's conceivable that the schizophrenic is right when he tells me that there really are CIA agents over there, swarming around a... machine... devoted to beaming crazy thoughts into the schizophrenic's head. I have no way of conclusively eliminating that possibility, since I don't know what's beyond the wall. But I'd feel very confident in disregarding that possibility in practice.

So I'm effectively an atheist in believing that it's highly unlikely that the ultimate mysteries of being are accurately described by Hebrew (or any other) mythology. This despite the fact that I have no way of actually knowing what the answers to the mysteries are.

 

Yazata,

The answer to that is simple.

God is the Supreme Absolute Truth (The Greatest)
God is one without a second.
Everything emanates from God.

jan.

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Gibberish

 

Why?

jan.

 

Makes no sense whatsoever. It doesn't really tell you anything about it.

 

Position on the existence or not a god is just a particular case.
The problem should be analyzed more generally.
Are you a believer in general, or just your position on the existence of a God is a belief?

Belief-Wikipedia

I believe that intelligence can relate to correct decisions.
The problem is how to take this decision, way of making these decisions.

Decision making

I advocate pragmatism. Pragmatism-Wikipedia

Central pragmatist tenets

 

Thanks for the backup Yazata

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So are you saying god is unlikely? I take from this you are saying the gods as described by theology (atavistic, entrenched theologies) are unlikely? and they are where they claim literal truths which can be contested successfully by empirical data. But to say, the kind of god I can envisage as possible, is unlikely, is a different matter. Science could say that, if all possible configurations of universe are out there somewhere in infinity then there has be, statistically, one that has been manipulated or even possibly designed by a creator. And if that is possible then are we (our universe) statistically more likely to be the product of spontaneous creation or considered creation? Forget whether this god is a god of all existence, one god need only create one universe, and if that is possible, within the infinite recesses of infinity, then it is possible for our existence? If a creative force can incept a universe isn't this force likely to do it again and again? So what is more likely, spontaneity or intentionality?

 

It explains precisely the categorical difference between yourself and god ..... which, for most of us, is a fine beginning in understanding what it is about

 

And yet when it comes to matters on the topic of "God," we ordinary people have to unconditionally trust theists.
Ie. we ordinary people have to trust people who have done this kind of things to those they deemed didn't have a proper understanding of God:

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I know that you will probably, again, just ignore this. As is so typical for theists.

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It is also the categorical difference between the entire universe and parts of it.

 

Agreed. Empty words the poster himself couldn't explain if pressed to.

Save the platitudes for the pulpit.

 

I'm only ignoring it because "unconditional trust" is technically impossible (at least as far as conditioned life goes) .... what to speak of being hard pressed to open a scripture at random and find a passage that doesn't deal specifically with the qualities of who or what should be trusted and how to identify it ... and as far as my own spiritual career goes, I can't say that I have ran into people performing these sorts of acts in their cellars or whatever ... and judging by the approximate era of your reference material, neither has anyone else

:shrug:

 

precisely

Hence the definition explains the inherent futility of limited, metonymic methodologies like empiricism in approaching the subject.

 

Since the empirically confirmable physical universe also fits that description, how does it explain that empiricism is futile?

 

I wasn't aware that cosmogony was famous for being an empirically confirmable discipline ....