intelligence and religion

"I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure." - Jesus Christ (Matt 11:25-26)

"Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him." - Paul (1 Cor 1:26-29)

A recent study established a correlation between higher intelligence as measured by IQ and the belief that there is no God. As someone who believes very strongly in God and who cares probably too deeply about intelligence, this was definitely something that I had to give some thought. Things that I think about have a strange tendency to show up on this site, so here it is.

There is one thing that I believe should be noted before I go much further. One of the sacrifices that God expects is the willingness to be considered a fool. I know of no place in Scripture where having a reputation for intelligence is portrayed as Godly. There are places where we are instructed to be wise and intelligent. The difference is that wisdom as detailed by Scripture may not have an actual correlative relationship with intelligence as it is popularly measured. This is part of why I included the Scripture passages above in this post.

There are actually two things that I should note now that I think about it. Statistically speaking, using a mean score is often a great way to skew results. For example, at the time of this writing Wolphram Alpha has the mean income for an individual in the U.S. at $43,460, but the median as $33,190. What accounts for the difference? In this case, the mean is skewed by all of the income made by billionaires and multi-millionaires, but the fact that there are relatively few of them keeps them from strongly impacting the median, so the median is more representative of the population as a whole. Likewise, I expect that the ultimate explanation for the IQ difference is simply that only a minuscule percentage of the very low IQ people are atheists and the rest of the very low IQ people drag down the mean IQ score for those who believe in a god. I would bet that a difference would exist in the median scores, but that it would be notably lower than the difference in the mean scores.

While I am sure there are more, I can think of two potential reasons that atheists and agnostics would score higher on IQ tests. The first potential reason is that the tests are imperfect and incomplete measures of intelligence and the second potential reason is that people who believe in God tend to skew less logical.

Argument #1: IQ Tests Are Imperfect

While IQ tests have correlation to intelligence, I do believe that they are imperfect gauges of intelligence. For one, there are too many types of intelligence for any one test to properly capture. One person I spoke to over the summer while Golden and I were on vacation talked about working at Sandia National Laboratories. He joked about how some of the people there with PhDs could understand Quantum Physics but lacked the practical knowledge to tie their shoes. How do you measure those different types of intelligence? Is the PhD really smarter on the important measures, whatever they may be? Just because the PhD understands abstract concepts better, does that make him or her more qualified to know whether there is a god than the average Joe or Jane?

Also, the results of all tests are colored by any number of factors. For example, I would suspect that visual learners would do better on an IQ test than an auditory learner would. If there are multiple people in the room where the test is given people who have anxiety issues or who have ADHD may score lower than they should for their intelligence level. People who prepare for the test and have a strategy would probably score higher than those who do not, even though those factors may not be strong indicators of relevant intelligence.

Finally, I do not know my own IQ, but I am sure that my score would benefit from the fact that I have always been a good test-taker. If someone is not a good test-taker, he or she will not get the score boost that I would get. This is a natural weakness for any test in properly grading someone's intelligence.

Probably the strongest argument that IQ tests are imperfect are is that there are statistical differences between how people in different ethnic groups perform on the tests. At the least, it should give us pause that a statistically significant number of people of certain ethnicities score higher than people of other ethnicities. If it is bigoted to use IQ tests to assert that one race is less intelligent than people of another (which I believe it is), then it is bigoted to use the IQ tests to assert that people of one religious persuasion are less intelligent than people of another religious persuasion (or lack thereof).

Argument #2: People Who Believe in God Skew Less Logical

Remember that I am a Christian as you read this.

There are a few reasons why people who refuse to believe in God would skew more logical. For one, more people today grew up with parents who believed in a god of some sort than grew up with parents who did not. It takes a certain baseline of logic to reject the foundational religious beliefs that you grew up with, so that means that the people at the very lowest end of the IQ spectrum are most likely to believe what their parents believed. They in turn will drag down the average IQ score for people who believe in God (remember, mean versus median).

Second, a huge reason that someone would become atheist or agnostic is because they cannot find enough empirical evidence that God exists. Scientific types, who would be expected to have higher IQs on average, want to have extensive proof for what they believe in, and the evidence for God is not empirical evidence. God is discovered spiritually or relationally rather than empirically.

Third, in many religious circles an inquisitive mind is a liability rather than an asset. High IQ people are most often inquisitive types who want to challenge things to determine truth. The natural questioning that an inquisitive person will do is rarely encouraged in religious settings unless very specific bounds are placed on the questioning. Many inquisitive people eventually determine that they don't fit in with people who believe in God as they seem more interested in maintaining the status quo than in understanding truth, and so they leave to prop up the IQs of those who do not believe.

Conclusion

In the end, I think there are a lot of little reasons for the IQ difference, but I think the biggest is an issue of self-selection. People tend to congregate with and share the beliefs of those who are like them.

While I do think this study is an indictment of the anti-intellectualism that pervades a lot of elements of the church, our wisdom is supposed to be the kind that comes from God, which often will not show up on an IQ test. God's wisdom is about trusting Him and a high IQ is about which object is the next in the sequence. They just don't always relate to each other.

Update (10/5/2010): There is one further point that I cannot believe that I missed, but could have a strong effect on the average IQ scores for those who believe in a god or the God. Religions, and Christianity in particular, actively target groups of people who are likely to have low average IQs. This is partly because those are the people most likely to be in need. This is also partly because it is easier to create a tract that targets the lowest common denominator than it is to truly tackle difficult issues.