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[FairyQueen]

Interesting read in The Huffington Post, UK...

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/08/13/religious-people-less-intelligent-atheists-_n_3747511.html?utm_hp_ref=uk

Thoughts?

[NowhereMan]

I can't really say much, as I'm unable to read the paper without paying for it, but the article from HP just seems to be another puff-piece. It doesn't detail any of the studies reviewed, their methodologies, or their actual findings beyond 'these studies say religious people are dumb'. I'd like to know what kind of tests were done to get these results. Was it just a question of what's your IQ and do you believe in God? Was their a scale for religiosity, or was everyone blanketed as religious? Was their an intelligence spectrum test given during any of the studies to test for high intelligence in non-IQ areas? Did the professor who performed the study look at counter-examples and dissenting studies? We don't know. So, to me, its not actually saying anything, and as an EE major it's stuff like this that really makes me mad because it doesn't actually represent anything scientific to the reader, but purports a conclusion, while their is only a correlation - however slight. The journalistic community only lives to entertain the reader and to make a buck, not to educate them.

[BronwynWolf]

Actually, Nowhere Man, if you read the piece (and by following FairyQueen's link, you should be able to.) some of the questions and criteria ARE listed. I personally still think it's a load of stuff.  This was a review of 63 different  studies ranging back as far as 1928. From the looks of things, by a very hostile reviewer. I can think of any number of people I would consider religious who also fit his definition of "Intelligent".

The study defined intelligence as the “ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience.”

With the jobs some people around here hold/have held, the idea of religious/spiritual people NOT being intelligent gets blown out of the water.

Religiosity is defined as involvement in some (or all) facets of religion, which includes belief in the supernatural, offering gifts to this supernatural, and performing rituals affirming their beliefs.

And with newer equipment, and understanding of what "supernatural" is... the existence thereof is being proven even to the satisfaction of a great number of skeptics. Besides which.... FAITH is independent of KNOWLEDGE. That's why it is called FAITH

[NowhereMan]

Actually, Nowhere Man, if you read the piece (and by following FairyQueen's link, you should be able to.) some of the questions and criteria ARE listed. I personally still think it's a load of stuff.  This was a review of 63 different  studies ranging back as far as 1928. From the looks of things, by a very hostile reviewer. I can think of any number of people I would consider religious who also fit his definition of "Intelligent".

You misunderstood what I was saying. Yes, Professor Zuckerman provides his operative definition of religiosity and the like, but (from my reading of the article) since he performed no actual studies of his own on the correlation between religiosity and intelligence, and instead performed an analysis of 63 studies performed by other individuals, I wanted to know, among other things, what criteria those studies used to define religiosity and intelligence. It could be that they used different criteria, but without being able to read the entirety of Zuckerman's paper, I can't know.

[dragonspring]

I saw that in my news feed yesterday and didn't even waste my time reading the article.  It is obviously BS.  Actually, there are very few "studies" around that aren't just as biased as the media reporting them.  Nowadays, I believe what I see and I know a lot of religious people whose intelligence is greater than the population at large.

[Claude]

Nothing in any branch of the Huffington post is ever worth reading or seriously considering. There are just as many studies in neurotheology that would suggest religion has a positive correlation to health, intelligence and success. At the same time, there are just as many neurotheological studies that would say the contrary. The bottom line is that it doesn't matter what a study or some puffed up pompous newspaper has to say on the subject.

[Summerhawk]

I wonder what Aristotle, Socrates, or maybe Dionysius would have had to say about the article. Or Iamblichus, or maybe Proclus, who all insisted that any "knowledge" of the human mind was pretty much worthless.

[anubisa]

I agree with NowhereMan and BronwynWolf. It is a piece of crap.