Please note that I am not lauding atheism as a guarantee of superior intelligence. Let's be clear on one thing - I am as dumb as a post. It took me over 40 years to fully appreciate just what a load of crap organized religion is. David Hume completed his A Treatise on Human Nature when he was only 26. In fact, I consider the second biggest tragedy of my life (the first being how quickly my children are growing up) to be the fact that my intellectual capacity is insufficient to understand what I consider to be some of the most fascinating puzzles being investigated by science. Just imagine: who wouldn't love to sit down and discuss evolutionary biology, peer to peer, with Jerry Coyne? Or how about sitting down with Ed Witten and discussing superstring theory? In Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works, he puts forward the proposition that the only difference between Einstein's brain and an average brain is practice but I don't buy it. I wish I was smarter more than I wish I could golf like Tiger Woods. However, my point remains that the more intelligent you are, the more likely you are to disbelieve in the existence of God. This is a simple equation and you don't need to be a logician or mathematician to understand it: theism = "not likely to be that bright".
I don't know if I'd correlate skepticism with intelligence, bro. I think it might have more to do with how 'needy' someone is psychologically.
ReplyDeleteThere are some really intelligent folks who are also religious (take that Ken Miller, the cell biologist who was the star witness in Kitzmiller v Dover, for instance... Or that Isaac Newton), and there are some simpletons who are not religious in the least.
I think people grab onto a religion more because of some irrational comfort it provides them. A sense of security is pretty darn comforting even when it is just a false one.... And smart folks aren't immune to insecurity. After all, we're just an insignificant bunch of puny short-lived species among the many other species on a tiny little planet in this very vast universe. Fooling oneself into believing that a big force is looking after us can be a very inviting delusion worth indulging in even at the cost of behaving like a hypocritical idiot... imho. ;oP
My point remains that I believe there is strong evidence of the correlation and I would love to see the issue studied further.
ReplyDeleteI agree wholeheartedly with the remainder of your post.