I thought there were, but I am having no luck finding any links.
bump.
Sacerdote and Glaeser (2002: http://post.economics.harvard.edu/hier/2001papers/HIER1913.pdf) find that religious attendence goes up as education goes up for individuals. In fact, they state that “education is the statistically most important factor explaining church attendance.” But they also find that belief in religious elements (e.g. miracles, heaven and hell, and adversity as retribution for sin) decreases with education.
IOW, more educated people attend church at a greater rate, but they move to less zealous denominations of their religion.
That doesn’t directly answer your question, but it seems to me that higher church attendence is probably a negative indicator of atheism. Perhaps more educated people are more likely to believe in a metaphysical God than a physical one?
There doesn’t appear to be a very strong link between the two.
http://www.objectivethought.com/atheism/iqstats.html
Here are the results of a Fall 1995 Gallup poll:
Percentage of respondents who agreed with the following statements:
Religion is Religion can
"very important "answer all or most
Respondents in their life" of today's problems"
------------------------------------------------------------
Attended college 53 percent 58 percent
No college 63 65
Here’s another cite: http://www.gallup-international.com/ContentFiles/millennium15.asp
Search for “education”. You’ll see:
[ul]
[li]Fifty-two percent of college graduates are religious as against 54 percent of people with a high school education and 70 percent of those who only complete primary school.[/li][li]Women are more committed than men (35 to 28 percent), people with just a primary level of education more so than others (33 to 25 percent)[/li][/ul]
I’ll agree with carterba. The more you learn, the more you realize that there is a logical explanation to a lot of things, but on the other hand there may be some things that can never be explained.
IIRC perhaps 3-6 years ago somebody published stats showing that physical scientists (eg physics, chemistry) were liklier to be athiests than the population at large, and Nobel prize winning physical scientists were much liklier to be athiests. Maybe I saw this in a news note in Scientific American.
This is indirect, but very likly Nobel prize winning scientists are more educated than the general population.
I think in this case “educated” is a bit misleading. I would like to see the criterea that they use to compose these polls. Do they consider somebody with an associates degree in music therapy educated? Where does a person learn to think critically and develop rational thinking skills in such a degree? Where does a person learn alternatives to the way the universe works (i.e physics or chemistry) in an associates of arts degree?
Sure, they are educated, but with a specific focus, and certainly are not any sort of expert on religion, have thought about it any more or less than a lesser educated person, and it is certainly unlikely that it was their education itself that drew them to a church or congregation (or any other group in any religion)
The most likely explanation is that they met some friends at school that invited them to church, so they went, and liked it.
Oh, just wanted to add that many extremely educated individuals are not much more intelligent or knowlegeable (outside their field), and a sample of the people on this board go above and beyond even some of the professors at my school with Ph.Ds, even my sister, whom is pretty close to getting her Ph.D herself doesn’t really pick up a book, or contemplate things any more than my buddies that work in a warehouse. (unless you count texbooks, but she HAS to pick those up)