Is there a link between Atheism and IQ?

Question

Or education?

((Please site your source.))

Answer 1

1. Thomas Howells, 1927
Study of 461 students showed religiously conservative students "are, in general, relatively inferior in intellectual ability."

2. Hilding Carlsojn, 1933
Study of 215 students showed that "there is a tendency for the more intelligent undergraduate to be sympathetic toward ... atheism."

3. Abraham Franzblau, 1934
Confirming Howells and Carlson, tested 354 Jewish children, 10-16. Negative correlation between religiosity and Terman intelligence test.

4. Thomas Symington, 1935
Tested 400 young people in colleges and church groups. He reported, "there is a constant positive relation in all the groups between liberal religious thinking and mental ability...There is also a constant positive relation between liberal scores and intelligence..."

5. Vernon Jones, 1938
Tested 381 stydents, concluding "a slight tendency for intelligence and liberal attitudes to go together."

6. A. R. Gilliland, 1940
At variance with all other studies, found "little or no relationship
between intelligence and attitude toward god."

7. Donald Gragg, 1942
Reported an inverse correlation between 100 ACE freshman test scores and Thurstone "reality of god" scores.

8. Brown and Love, 1951
At U. of Denver, tested 613 male and female students. Mean test scores of non-believers = 119, believers = 100. Percentile NBs = 80, BBs = 50. Their findings "strongly corroborate those of Howells."

9. Michael Argyle, 1958
Concluded that "although intelligent children grasp religious concepts earlier, they are also the first to doubt the truth of religion, and intelligent students are much less likely to accept orthodox beliefs."

10. Jeffrey Hadden, 1963
Found no correlation between intelligence and grades. This was an anomalous finding, since GPA corresponds closely with intelligence. Other factors may have influenced the results at the U. of Wisconsin.

11. Young, Dustin and Holtzman, 1966
Average religiosity decreased as GPA rose.

12. James Trent, 1967
Polled 1400 college seniors. Found little difference, but
high-ability students in his sample group were over-represented.

13. C. Plant and E. Minium, 1967
The more intelligent students were less religious, both before entering college and after 2 years of college.

14. Robert Wuthnow, 1978
Of 532 students, 37% of christians, 58% of apostates, and 53 percent of non-religious scored above average on SATs.

15. Hastings and Hoge, 1967, 1974
Polled 200 college students and found no significant correlations.

16. Norman Poythress, 1975
Mean SATs for strongly antireligious (1148), moderately anti-
religious (1119), slightly antireligious (1108), and religious (1022).

17. Wiebe and Fleck, 1980
Studied 158 male and female Canadian university students. The reported "nonreligious S's tended to be strongly intelligent" and "more intelligent than religious S's.

Student Body Comparisons-

1. Rose Goldsen, Student belief in a divine god, percentages 1952.
Harvard 30; UCLA 32; Dartmouth 35; Yale 36; Cornell 42; Wayne 43;
Weslyan 43; Michigan 45; Fisk 60; Texas 62; N. Carolina 68.

2. National Review Study, 1970 Students Belief in Spirit or Divine God.
Percentages:
Reed 15; Brandeis 25; Sarah Lawrence 28; Williams 36; Stanford 41;
Boston U. 41; Yale 42; Howard 47; Indiana 57; Davidson 59; S. Carolina 65;
Marquette 77.

3. Caplovitz and Sherrow, 1977
Apostasy rates rose continuously from 5% in "low" ranked schools to 17% in "high" ranked schools.

Niemi, Ross, and Alexander, 1978
In elite schools, organized religion was judged important by only 26%, compared with 44% of all students.

Studies of Very-High-IQ groups.

1. Terman, 1959
Studied group with IQ > 140. Of men, 10% held strong religious belief,
of women 18%. 62% of men and 57% if women claimed "little religious inclination" while 28% men and 23% of women claimed it was "not at all important."

2. Warren and Heist, 1960
Found no differences among National Merit Scholars. Results may have been effected by the fact that NM scholars are not selected on the basis of intelligence or grades alone, but also on "leadership" and such like.

3. Southern and Plant, 1968
42 male and 30 female members of Mensa. Mensa members were much less religious in belief than the typical American college alumnis or adult.



1. William S. Ament, 1927
C. C. Little, president U. of Michigan, checked persons listed in _Who's Who in America_: "Unitarians, Episcopalians, Congregationalists,
Universalists, and Presbyterians are ... far more numerous in _Who's Who_ than would be expercted on the basis of the population which they form. Baptists, Methodists, and Catholics are distinctly less numerous."

Ament confirmed Little's conclusion. He noted that Unitarians, the least religious, were more than 40 times as numerous in _W'sW_ as in the U.S. population.

2. Lehman and Witty, 1931
Identified 1189 scientists found in both _Who's Who_ (1927) and
_American Men of Science_ (1927). Only 25% in _AM of S_ and 50% of those listed in _W'sW_ reported their religious denomination despite thespecific requests to do so, "religious denomination (if any)." Well over 90% of the general population claims religious affiliation. The figure of 25% suggest far less religiosity among scientists.

Unitarians were 81.4 times as numerous among eminent scientists as non-Unitarians.

3. Kelley and Fisk, 1951
Found a negative (-.39) correlation between the strength of religious values and research competence. [How these were measured I have no idea.]

4. Ann Roe, 1953
Interviewed 64 "eminent scientists, nearly all members of the
prestigious National Academy of Sciences or the American Philosophical Society. She reported that, while nearly all of them had religious parents and had attended Sunday school, 'now only three of these men are seriously active in church. A few others attend upon occasion, or even give some financial support to a church which they do not attend... All the others have long since dismissed religion as any guide to them, and
the church plays no part in their lives...A few are militantly
atheistic, but most are just not interested.'"

5. Francis Bello, 1954
Questionaired or interviewed 107 young (<= 40) nonindustrial scientists judged by senior colleagues to be outstanding. 87 responded. 45% claimed to be "agnostic or atheistic" and an additional 22% claimed no religious affiliation. For 20 most eminent, "the proportion who are now a-religious is considerably higher than in the entire survey group."

6. Jack Chambers, 1964
Questionaired 740 US psychologists and chemists. He reported, "the highly creative men [jft- assume no women included] ... significantly more often show either no preference for a particular religion or little or no interest in religion." Found that the most eminent psychologists showed 40% no preference, 16% for the most eminent chemists.

7. Vaughan, Smith, and Sjoberg, 1965

Polled 850 US physicists, zoologists, chemical engineers, and geologists listed in _American Men of Science_ (1955) on church membership, and attendance patterns, and belief in afterlife. 642 replies.

38.5% did not believe in afterlife, 31.8% did. Belief in immortality was less common among major university staff than among those employed by business, government, or minor universities. The contemporaneous Gallup poll showed 2/3 of US population believed in afterlife, so scientists were far less religious than typical adult.

Answer 2

We go through this question a LOT here.... There hasnt been any real unbias testing on this. If an Atheist thinks the religious people are less intelligent, he will make sure that only intelligent Atheists and unintelligent believers are tested. The same goes for the religious. We all want to say we are smarter, does ANYONE want to admitt they're stupid?

Athiests claim that the higher the IQ, the less likely they are to believe in the unseen or what cannot be tested scientifically. The Religious claim that the higher the IQ, the more open minded they are to seek out what is unseen and what science can't test.

Intelligence is an individual thing. I know smart and stupid people from every walk of life.

Answer 3

I have seen some people state that studies show Atheists commonly have a higher I.Q. than believers. I don't know if this is true or not but in my circle of religious friends, the majority have above average intelligence.
If it is true that non-believers commonly have a higher I.Q., I would tend to believe that it is because of the type of person they are to begin with. A well educated, scientifically minded person would, in my opinion, be less likely to believe in a higher power and more likely to rely on mankind and science to answer life's questions.
I am not saying that believers are at all stupid or naive but many come to believe after life changing experiences where they no longer trust in themselves or man alone, but believe that there is more than scientific explanation for this universe.
Are some people's mindsets more prone to believe? I would not be surprised.
The real question is, does it make any difference even if believers are less intelligent? Could it be true that non-believers can not see the forest because of the trees? (I hope I got the saying right)

Answer 4

Atheists are on average a few IQ points above theists. The more conservative the theists, the greater the gap in IQ. Of course there are intelligent religious people and slightly less intelligent atheists. But the studies done averaged the IQs and then used statistical methods to determine the likelihood of the differences in the average being due to chance.

Answer 5

There is a debatable connection between atheism and IQ. Generally, atheists have higher IQs than dogmatic theists. However, there are theists who have extremely high IQs and can point out there beliefs in a higher being through scientific theories, particularly through physics, astrophysics, string theory, etc.

Answer 6

Scientists tend to be less theistic than the general public: http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/news/file002.html

It might be a stretch to correlate higher IQ with atheism, but education sure seems to have an effect.

Answer 7

Well, there is a link between atheism and science if that's what you mean. But that doesn't necessarily mean education or IQ. A christian can be very educated about his/her god. While they are not educated in science they are still educated.

-Seeker

Answer 8

Yes according to (I think ) about 38 studies the higher you IQ/Education level the less religious (more Atheists/Agnostic) you are and vice versa.

Answer 9

Yes. Here are the references, including my footnotes. I owe a lot to the wikipedia article.

"Research has revealed a positive correlation between IQ and education, as well as a negative correlation between education and religiosity. However, there is little research linking IQ with religiosity and spirituality."[1]

In 1986, an essay in the magazine Free Inquiry, which is published by Paul Kurtz's Council for Secular Humanism, summarized studies on religiosity and intelligence.[1] In it Burnham Beckwith, the author of self-published and subsidy-published books on socialism and futurism,[2] summarized studies on religiosity and its relation with attributes that he considered positively linked with intelligence: IQ, SAT scores, "success", and academic certification. Although conceding that it was easy to find fault with the studies he reviewed, "for all were imperfect," he contended that the studies he examined, taken together, provided strong evidence for an inverse correlation between intelligence and religious faith in America. Beckwith's essay in a political magazine dedicated to the promotion of atheism should not be confused with a scientific study of the topic, however. [2]

BELIEFS AMONG SCIENTISTS
According to one article in Scientific American, an American science-popularization magazine, 90% of the general population surveyed professed a distinct belief in a personal god and afterlife, while only 40% of the scientists with a BS surveyed did so, and only 10% of those considered "eminent."[3] An ongoing Templeton Foundation study that began in 2005 on Religion among Academic Scientists, whose principal researcher is Elaine Howard Ecklund, a sociologist and postdoctoral fellow at Rice University, has examined scientists' religious beliefs (counting social scientists as scientists). The study so far has concluded that 38% of the natural scientists, 24% of the doctors, and 31% of the social scientists surveyed said they do not believe in God. The study sample is comprised of 1,646 faculty at elite research universities.[4]

A 1998 survey[5] by Larson and Witham of the 517 members of the United States National Academy of Sciences showed that 72.2% of the members expressed "personal disbelief" in a personal God while 20.8% expressed "doubt or agnosticism" and only 7.0% expressed "personal belief". This was a follow-up to their own earlier 1996 study[6] which itself was a follow-up to a 1916 study by James Leuba[7]. These studies have been criticized by a number of different groups, not necessarily religious[citation needed]. This is because the study was by mail and received a return rate of 50%.

Answer 10

Yes on both counts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism

This references articles in Nature and Mensa Magazine, both compiling several studies over a period of time. Nearly all these studies indicated a link.

Answer 11

no
souce - this site
this question has been asked so many times in so many forms
there are silly statistics that claim there is
but the mix of people i have encountered both atheist and religious
shows that people of different backgrounds have both high and low IQs
and being educated does not make one intelligent
and being intelligent does not mean one is educated