“Intelligence” and “Religion” have no corrilation. I’ve met some really smart religious people, and some really dumb athiest/agnostic/passive religious people.
There may be a corrilation between super science intelligence and religion though.
I don’t know how much intelligence plays into belief or faith in God, or how much it needs to. But to use such a yardstick to validate either side of the argument seems to be a specious argument to me. I think the original question is interesting in that it asks, to paraphrase, “if God wants to be worshiped, why not make Himself manifestly evident and wipe out all doubt?”
The only answer I can give to that is because He respects the free will He created us with. If I understand this theological point correctly, He created angels who worship Him and do His bidding all the time. But they don’t have a choice. Man was created with intelligence and free will, and can therefore choose to worship God or not. Perhaps not a satisfying answer, and no doubt full of loopholes for those who seek them, but my study of such things is limited.
As to whether intelligence or lack of same = belief in God, as I said, I think arguments, both pro and con, are specious. Pointing out that the bulk of the scientific community does not believe in God means nothing. They may not own Subarus either. What’s the significance, if I choose to own a Subaru? Their choice does not negate mine.
Also, this does not mean that ALL intelligent people do not believe in God. History shows us that many great thinkers did and do believe in God, e.g. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis, to name just two.
I agree that religion is often a bastion of support and comfort among less intelligent people, because it’s always been easier to be spoon-fed answers. However, there are plenty of people who accept what science, or the medical community, or any other authoritative group says, without doing any research or thinking on their own.
Nice post; I think I understand your position more now.
I waver between being an atheist and an agnostic; I was a pretty hard-core atheist when I was a teenager (long time ago). Of my friends who are very religious and refused to entertain even a question about their beliefs, I sometimes think that has more to do with how they were raised.
Were they allowed to question, were they were encouraged to use their minds for other things rather than just to regurgitate information that had been given to them or forced down their throats? How early in their lives was the information they believe in engrained in them?
I also have intelligent friends who joined a cult type of religion. These people had lives of such turmoil and torment, that I think they wanted to believe in something so badly. They won’t even entertain a possibility of this cult being wrong, because at one point it was the only thing holding their lives together. Again, this could have come from a very turbulent upbringing.
I believe these kinds of upbringings do not encourage the kind of deductive reasoning that would help a person to do well on an intelligence test. So the correlations do show an interesting trend in statistics, but all may not be as it seems.
That doesn’t disprove the possibility that atheists may be smarter than very religious people, but gives another slant from which to view it.
(I like your smilies; I think I will figure out how to use them also.)
This is not to say that I believe all religious people have had turbulent ubringings and use religion as a crutch, or that all religious people don’t do well on I.Q. tests; it’s just some anectdotal evidence I have seen in my own life. 
I’m afraid you have your cart pulling your horse. God is not rejecting the intelligent. In fact, He rejects no one. Any rejection is on behalf of the person to whom the gift is given. And not all people who are intelligent reject God. I am intelligent, and I do not reject Him.
You had asserted in this post that, “In olden times, pretty much everyone, brilliant or not, was religious.”
The following are vague: (1) olden times, (2) pretty much everyone, (3) brilliant or not, (4) religious. By “olden times”, you might have meant anything from 100,000 B.C. (or before) to the 1970s or 1980s, depending on your arbitrary assignment of “olden”. By “pretty much everyone”, you might have meant anything between ninety percent and ninety-nine percent (or something else) of either all people or some arbitrary group of people that you did not indentify. By “brilliant or not”, you might have meant IQs of some arbitrary range, or else some other arbitrary scale that you did not name. By “religious”, you might have meant people with faith in God, religion politicians who have faith in nothing more than their own power and wealth, or else something else altogether.
Inasmuch as you provided no cite or supporting argument for your assertion, even if its meaning were clear, your assertion was gratuitous. It can be reasonably argued that many of the Greek thinkers did not believe in the anthropomorphic gods. Of course, that might not be what you meant by “religious”, but who knows?
I don’t believe I have ever seen so many inductive fallacies packed into so few words.
A man trained in linguistics, with a vast comprehensive intelligence in the theory of his field might not be able to make sense of quantum mechanics. Likewise, a particle physicist might not be able to make sense of a Dead Sea Scroll. Whether something makes sense to you depends on more factors than abstract intelligence.
Well, a cow is a bovine, but a bovine is not necessarily a cow.
Well, never mind what the pot is calling the kettle there, but there could be any number of explanations for that, including that you have investigated only the weak arguments and that you are not sufficiently skilled in logic to make valid discernments.
You appear to be affirming the consequent.
Well, you’re right about that, but it hardly helps the emperor’s case when even a child can see that he is naked.
I’m saving it.
I could get used to these smilies.
Your original comment was “Even if there are different types of intelligence, as long as they are independent, then high intelligence in one area implies a high overall intelligence.” I gave a counter-example to the general implication you stated. If someone is good at Math, it doesn’t mean they’re not good at English, but it doesn’t imply that they have a “high overall intelligence”, either.
Granted. But you also implied that C. S. Lewis’s brilliance in other areas than theology won’t qualify him as “brilliant” overall, which contradicts your statement above.
Who’s nitpicking now? Sweet_Lotus asked how his/her beliefs conflicted with his/her rationality. You didn’t seem to leave room for the possibility that they didn’t.
Sorry, but belief that “Christians are less intelligent than atheists” is not “faith.” My reading, based on the context of the discussion, is that Quicksilver used the term “faith” to mean “religious faith.” S/he can correct me if I’m wrong.
The highly intelligent people are a minority in the general population, let’s say 5%. If all people have an equal distribution of love (sheesh, I love logic), and God reveals Himself to those who show love, then the intelligent will make up 5% of the believers. So, you’ll have the negative correlation between intelligence and belief in God, although the intelligent love just about the same as the rest.
Not by any means.
Spider Woman
Here is another fallacy site, equally as good. 
Lambda
Well done.
I saw this as I was rereading some posts, so thought I’d take time to respond to this.
Back in the late sixties or early seventies (I think), there was a guy named Jensen (I think)(help me out if anyone remembers this) who did a study correlating race and I.Q. scores and started a really big controversy.
The study showed correlation between lower I.Q. scores and blacks, and higher I.Q. scores and whites. This was taken to mean that whites are smarter than blacks (drawing a cause from a correlational study) by many people who read the results, not taking into account that many blacks were raised in poverty and had not had the same educational advantages as whites. It also failed to take into account difffernces in lahguage structure, etc.
The guy who originated the study in the first place was from some prominent Southern University, and his motives were called into question (he, of course, was white).
It does make you wonder why people start such studies in the first place, and that was maybe what Ptahlis was getting at in his comment.
But if God is not involved in this decision, then how does what God value have any relevance?
Yes, these were vague. But they were in direct response to a similarly vague statement of Satan’s, and were meant to refer to what Satan was referring to, whatever that may be. If you have a problem with the vagueness of these terms, you should take it up with Satan, not me.
No, the phrase “brilliant or not” is definitely not vague. It refers to a set and its complement, and thus refers to everyone.
The fact that I did not support it does not make it gratuitous.
As for your “rebuttal” of my reasons for believing that atheists are more intelligent than others, you clearly did not understand what I meant when I said that they are reasons not proof. Not only were you unable to comprehend my disclaimer, you apperently were not able to ask for a clarification before launching into your completely inappropiate attack on these reasons.
I already mentioned that counter examples are useless when dealing with claims about populations. They prove/disprove nothing.
A person that is good at Math is more likely to have a high overall intelligence than someone who isn’t.
Which one? And how?
You are.
If Sweet_Lotus was starting with the premise that his or her beliefs conflict with rationality, how is it my fault that no room was made for the possibility that they don’t? Suppose someone were to ask me how a couch could have ended up in their living room. I mention a way that it could have. You then come along and complain that I didn’t leave room for the possibility that there isn’t a couch in this person’s living room. I would that to be a rather silly thing to say.
It’s not possible to have faith in intelligence level of others? I know of people that claim that all atheists are fools, and quote the Bible to prove it. Do these people not have faith (and religious faith, at that) that atheists are fools?
So if someone believes in oppressing blacks is good just because he’s anm asshole, we can think less of him, but if his religious faith tells him to oppress blacks, we shouldn’t be judgemental about that? This still seems like a ridiculous position.
Libertarian:
Clearly, neither of you have any idea of what the term “correlation” means. What makes you think that you can debate an issue when you don’t even know what the central term means?
TheRyan
If X is the IQ, and Y is the likelyhood to be a believer, then isn’t there a negative correlation between X and Y? In the general population, when X goes up, Y goes down.
I admit to not being trained in statistics. Please explain to me where I’m wrong (I’m not being facetious.)
The Rayn
A gratuitous assertion is an assertion that is unsupported by argument or evidence, or else an irrelevant or vague assertion. For example, “Atheists, for the most part, historically have shown very little compassion for the poor.” “In olden times, pretty much everyone, brilliant or not, was religious,” is another. Anybody can just go around spouting assertions.
“Blue-eyed people are smarter than green-eyed people.”
“Cavemen had more leisure time than modern man.”
Oh, I think I know what a correlation is, and I wager that Lambda does too. Unfortunately, correlations are often gratuitously drawn into questionable causes.
I don’t understand what you mean. In your example, the percentage of people that are intelligent in both the believer category and the nonbeliever category was 5%. How is this a correlation?
Libertarian:
Hmm, I don’t see any support for this. Does that make it a gratuitous assertion?
Then why are you using it incorrectly?
Are all these links that you’re throwing out supposed to make you look smarter? They seem rather, well, gratuitous, to me.
TheRyan
You are right. The correct conclusion should have been “there is no correlation between intelligence and belief in God”, since I started from the assumption that intelligence and disponibility for love are not correlated, and I equated disponibility for love with belief in God (for the purpose of the argument.)
I am forced to admit that my argument was invalid. If believers are to be found more likely among the less intelligent than among the more intelligent, and if love is what leads one to believing in God, then your original statement is valid: the logical implication is that the more intelligent are less inclined to love. Otherwise, they would be as likely as the others to end up believing.
The only thing I could prove with my argument, would be that the intelligent are a minority among the believers, as a result of them being a minority in the general population. While this may be true, it is probably irrelevant in the context of this thread, because the premise in the OP was the converse: the believers among the intelligent are rare compared to the general population.
Libertarian, I think I constructed nothing more than a seductive fallacy
Back to the original post. The studies cited in the OP show a negative correlation between intelligence and religiosity. It’s quite plausible that this is because the less intelligent may be more prone to take things “on faith” (I think this is a misuse of the term, but it’s common, so I’ll go with it) than the sharper individuals. But they might also be prone to believe false mathematical theorems; that wouldn’t throw any light on the believability of mathematics.
There are many other factors that may contribute to this situation, pointed out by other posters. None of them, I believe, shed any light on the rationality of someone who believes in God.
I submit that belief in God can be a perfectly rational position to have, regardless of one’s intelligence. When you believe something based of evidence that is available to you, that is a rational thing to do, even if it can’t be conveyed to others, because of the intensely personal nature of the decision. As Libertarian pointed out in another post:
Lambda
As I recall, the survey was not about belief among intelligent people. Wasn’t it about belief among scientists? It stands to reason that not all intelligent people are scientists (some are artists, etc.) , and it also stands to reason that not all scientists are intelligent (some are in it for the politics, etc.). By the way, do the scientists include psychologists, sociologists, and enonomists? For that matter, do they include mathematicians and metaphysicists?
I think your original criticism was on target. Loving God is independent of apprehending Him.
In addition to studies of scientists, there were many conducted on students, and some on very-high IQ groups. Some found negative correlations, some no correlation. I don’t know how conclusive they are, since I have no direct access to those studies, and even if I did, I would have to learn some more about methodology and statistics before I can form an opinion of my own.
I agree completely with your last statement. Love of God and awareness of God are independent.
Libertarian I just realized you said “apprehension”, not “awareness”, but I actually do believe both statements to be true.
My synapses are firing out of order today
Well, they can’t be completely independent! How many people do you know who love God, but are not aware of his existence? It seems to me that one would have to be aware of God in order to love him, but not vice versa.