religion, demographyAccording to Wikipedia, there is weak evidence for a correlation between both the lack of religious belief and the presence of religious behaviour with above average intelligence. Are there any in depth, detailed, studies of this correlation, available in a peer reviewed publication?
An interesting and nonscientific look at reading & writing skills amongst people of different beliefs (atheists score highest): http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-real-stuff-white-people-like/
Yes but they are bullshit. Says even the most die-hard atheist on the planet.
In a more measured tone (but go read the above links!), it’s really, really hard to pinpoint such subtle differences and there isn’t a good, general and absolute measure of intelligence to begin with.
But even if we assumed that the IQ were such a measure (which it isn’t), explaining a mere 6 points of difference by a single factor – belief in god – is a statistical stunt, nothing more.
Why am I using words such as “bullshit”? Because studies that perpetrate such bad science (or the media that misrepresent it) give science a bad name in public.
An study by Virgil Griffith dubed "Booksthatmakeyoudumb" presents a chart that correlates books read by students (they voluntary and publicly accepted they regularly read them or it's their favorite book) with SAT results (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT).
In the chart (http://booksthatmakeyoudumb.virgil.gr/books.php) you can see that [The Holy Bible] And [The Purpose Driven Life] rate below the control variable: "I don't Read".
Although [The Book Of Mormon] and [Mere Christianity] are above average, this suggest that we shouldn't put all the religious trend on the same bucket. You can find detailed data on the books on the page.
Note: This study is about correlation not causation, which means either not smart people like to read this books, or this books makes people less smart or there is an unknown cause that makes people both less smart and like these books.
Please note this is subtle to the measurement of intelligence.
Satoshi Kanazawa has a paper titled “Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent” on Social Psychology Quarterly; I am not sure if you can find the full version online for free, but here is a short summary.
I found: “Relation of intelligence and religiosity to depressive disorders in offspring of depressed and nondepressed mothers” ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12707562 )
But probably with some smarter queries you can get some more by searching on pubmed
While it is not a detailed study of correlation of intelligence and religiousness, you may find this article relevant:
In US in 1998 only about 7% of scientist were believers in any form of God. Other studies show also that the more eminent are scientists, less believers are among them.
Conversely, I found an article in Creighton's Journal of Religion and Society that I found interesting: link text
Article suggests a correlation between religiosity and societal dysfunction. I know affirming the consequent doesn't answer your question specifically, but the results are still very interesting.
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