Sunday, February 28, 2010

Atheism And IQ

A recent survey conducted at the London School of Economics and Political Science found that people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs. It also found that high-IQ men were more likely to be sexually exclusive than lower IQ men, although this same correlation was not found in women.

4 comments:

yuri said...

Thank you for the reference - a very interesting piece of research. I wonder how IQ levels affect more rational and more mystical interpretations of Buddhism.

Ben said...

The questions is: Are people more intelligent because they are atheist, or are they atheists because they are intelligent?

aah-haa said...

To answer Ben's question one has to know the meaning of intelligence and atheism. Intelligence is somewhat inborn and acquired - nature and nurture.
Atheism like any other form of 'belief' is either you just simply believe (by faith) or by reality or there is reason to believe.
As an example: you are looking for halal food. You go to a joint which states 'no pork or lard'. Your belief that the food is halal could be by faith or by reality check (where you asked to see halal certification).
It is most likely that one is an atheist by some reasoning or reality check and not by faith. To perform reasoning (fairly complex) would require intelligence.
Therefore, people are atheists because they are intelligent. If it is the other way round, we would have an intelligent society by simply asking people to believe in ‘athesim’!

Newton Moses said...

It makes sense to me why people who identify themselves as atheists or liberals have a high IQ. These are the people who have the guts to question just about everything and I believe this is one of the reasons why they tend to have a higher IQ as compared to the rest. Original Qualitative Project Help