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The % of intellectuals that are atheist/agnostic is higher than the % of others that are atheist/agnostic. Why so?


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154 members have voted

  1. 1. Do you agree that in general (from your experience) , there are more intellectuals that tend to be atheists/agnostic than others?

    • Yes
      117
    • No
      37


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So I started full-on reading, and then skimmed the last half.

From my limited experience, I'd have to say I see more religious students in higher level courses than nonreligious. Butttttt I live in a religious area. If half the population was aethist/agnostic, it might actually mean something. Anyways, I don't think there is any one factor. Correlation does not necessarily indicate causation. It's the power of the individual over the group. For every argument that can be made, there's a counterargument. What it comes down to is determination and availability of resources [in the form of time, money, people, or other].

I should also add that, from the point of view of many other countries and populations (although not all, obviously!), the US has poor separation of church and state.

Haha heck yesss. I don't even notice it half the time, but it's pretty much percolated into everything.

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From my limited experience, I'd have to say I see more religious students in higher level courses than nonreligious. Butttttt I live in a religious area. If half the population was aethist/agnostic, it might actually mean something. Anyways, I don't think there is any one factor. Correlation does not necessarily indicate causation. It's the power of the individual over the group. For every argument that can be made, there's a counterargument. What it comes down to is determination and availability of resources [in the form of time, money, people, or other].

I think it's definitely to do with where you live (well not definitely, but likely). Out of my yeargroup, which was 25 people, only 6 people bothered with religion (different ones), and technically speaking I attended a religious school with religious assemblies, prayers and ethos every day.

IMO a lot of it is to do with your parents. If your parents aren't religious, on the whole, you're not religious. It's not a hard and fast rule (none of these things ever are, people are so different), but it's certainly something I've noticed. So being born in a religious area or to a religious culture would definitely have a lot to do with it. In England and Wales we haven't really had a deeply-ingrained religious culture since Henry VIII decided religion was throw-away enough to dump the Pope. Since then, religion, whilst still written into our society, has become too multifaceted to be truly the underpinning of what goes on. When you reveal something like religion as being optional, or something where you can switch from one sort of the other, it takes away from the unity of religion and becomes a divisive thing (hence why people say the only truly peaceful world will be one without religion, I suppose). It's the same with a lot of Europe thanks to the warring Protestants vs Catholics and so on. The places which remain more religious are places where they never really had big problems with different religious cults, such as Italy and Spain where they're still extremely religious (on the whole, and especially relatively speaking) to this day.

Seeing as when we think of intellectuals we tend to think of well-published people (who by default tend to be 'Western', so N. American, N. European, S. African, Australian etc.), we may well be missing out on a whole host of intellectuals who suffer from underexposure in other, more heavily religious (thanks to historically having religion ingrained in their society) parts of the world. Who knows, there may be a whole load of coincidence in that ^_^

We have a lot to credit Henry VIII with :D

It's a strange coincidence, though, that the least religious parts of the world are simultaneously the same parts of the world where the greatest amount of innovation, invention and progress occurred. Hrm! Who knows on that count.

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I agree, and I think it's to do with mindset. Intellectual people tend to be very critical of things and therefore very poor at accepting things on faith once they've found out something questionable relating to what they previously believed.

Similarly I find a lot of intellectual people come from backgrounds of fellow intellectual people, and there tends to be a low religion 'drive' amongst families, even if they do have religion. As a consequence kids aren't taught to be religious and so turn out sans religion.

I should also add that, from the point of view of many other countries and populations (although not all, obviously!), the US has poor separation of church and state.

Very well noted. In fact, there are 3 (three!) churches next to my (newly) former PUBLIC high school, and a majority of my classmates, even in a public high school, are religious. Religion and politics tend to mix very much in the US. In fact, in a discussion about the 2008 election, one of my teachers (I think my TOK teacher) predicted that there will NEVER be a non-Christian President of the United States. In addition, since education in the US is controlled at the state level, some religious states such as Texas routinely try to insert creationism into science textbooks. So, at least in this case, the stereotype matches well with the truth.

Which brings me to this question: do you think the negative correlation between intellectualism and religious faith is diminished or even eliminated in more religious countries such as the US? If that's the case, maybe the root of this link lies in cultural memes, rather than an inherent conflict between reason and faith.

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Which brings me to this question: do you think the negative correlation between intellectualism and religious faith is diminished or even eliminated in more religious countries such as the US? If that's the case, maybe the root of this link lies in cultural memes, rather than an inherent conflict between reason and faith.

That's an interesting question! O:

I would actually initially be inclined to say no. I think intellectuals do tend to have relatively lower levels of religious faith no matter where you are. However I do agree with your 'diminished' part.

As for whether it's cultural memes versus reason and faith, I'm not sure that's a conflict you'd ever want to set up, as it's really more than that - a combination of the two, shall we say. Culturally religion or lack of it is definitely passed down, that's an almost unavoidable conclusion. Whether that then leads to the reason vs faith conflict is less clear, though, as I think a lot of it is down to individuals. For instance I know people who have faith who have chosen to compromise the two, either letting go of faith when it comes to science and reasoning etc. and pretending the faith doesn't have to play a part in it, or bending science and reasoning to somehow fit in together. For instance, and this is rather an obvious one, dropping the Christian old testament as blatantly not true (given that the earth is at least a hundred times older than it suggests and so on), and treating it as more of a moral story sort of thing, rather than as a history. This may seem obvious to us, but a couple of hundreds of years ago, it wasn't. There are a lot of people who would rather try to compromise faith and reason together than drop one. In my personal opinion, there's no way you can really do that in clear conscience and feel it makes sense, but then for a lot of people they say that faith and reason are like trying to compare a Picasso with a rock. They're just in two totally separate categories from each other and you can never examine faith using reason.

For other intellectuals, they try to examine faith with reason, and usually it is found wanting.

I really genuinely have yet to meet a very religious 'intellectual' sort of person who hasn't made a compromise in several areas. It's just not in an 'intellectual' sort of person's make-up to be able to believe two totally conflicting ideas simultaneously, so there has to be either rejection or compromise of some sort, be it temporarily ignoring one so as to not equate the two together, or making allowances to allow some sort of truth which agrees with them both.

So, what I'm really trying to say is that I think it's to do with both your culture, parents, upbringing etc. but that it IS also intrinsically to do with reason versus faith. It depends on what sort of an individual you are as to how you try and deal with it. Compromise is extremely common.

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  • 6 months later...

I think yes because atheistic/agnostic people don't neccessarily belief everything that they're being told and want to find out the truth, research etc. "Believers" on the other hand often think "this is because God made it that way" etc etc and just leave it that way...

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  • 5 months later...

I remember Bill Maher saying in his religiously criticizing movie "Religulous" that 92% of doctors/scientists/engineers are either atheist or agnostic. Just throwing that out there for you to add to your argument, as to answer your question yes, I notice that that happens. I believe it's hard to believe in an invisible person once one has studied the history of the church or biology.

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I've attended christian private schools my entire life until this year, when I moved to my city's best public college so I could do the IB. I must add, then, that it is very interesting to see the conflicting interests around even those who grow up in a religious culture.

Indeed, at St. Edmund's, a lot of my year still consider themselves Roman Catholic though many are starting to lose sight on the actual church. However, It was the smarter kids that I was friends with, the higher-level students, who, rather then questioning the Christian foundation, actually questioned and thus doubted the existence of God itself. Most of these people, it should be said, come from orthodox Christian backgrounds.

I think the relation between agnosticism and general intelligence (I understand that this is a very open-ended term, but bare with me) is a very real one. In general, the public is questioning the importance of the Catholic church more and more, at least, and this is very clear. However, it is the clever ones, the curious learners, the doubters and the philosophers that begin to question the existence of a god itself. They are the ones that notice the flaws in religious doctrines, the alternatives to 'faith' and the lack of a need for God in the modern age.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I went to a camp that my friends and I accurately dubbed "Nerd Camp." Almost every single one of us was agnostic or athiest... It's kind of ironic, no? In the past, those who were religious made a lot of the major discoveries, but now... Not so much. I think pushing religion aside gives us more room to explore without feeling like we are betraying our beliefs

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I think this is an unnecessary debate (no offence). Anecdotal evidence in a wide-ranging topic like this seems to me essentially meaningless... can you be sure that religious smart people and non-religious smart people are equally likely to discuss their beliefs or non-beliefs, or are equally easy to perceive as intellectuals? I think the only thing that has any importance in terms of this topic is unbiased scientific research.

Here is an article that is founded on some sort of a study: Why People who Believe in God 'are more likely to have a lower IQ'

The use of individual examples is kind of stupid (Bush is religious but not very smart; "Church leaders dismissed the study as absurd and simplistic. They pointed out that many of the greatest brains in history believed in God."), and of course you can come up with all sorts of things about IQ and how important it really is and what it means and stuff, but I think the general correlation is undeniable.

Some other statistics: IQ vs. Religiosity

Also there's lots of data on education and religion, i.e. the higher the standard of education reached the higher the probability of not being religious. It would be interesting to compare data on how many people who are born into religion leave it and how many people who are born out of it join it with standards for measuring so-called 'intellectualism' i.e. education, income, IQ, etc.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Well it seems higher (as in post-secondary) education in the sciences influences religous beleif (considerable drop)

surveyed "greater" scientists (defined as those belonging to the National Academy of Sciences). It found that 65% of biological scientists expressed a "disbelief in a personal God", and 79% of physical scientists. Most of the others were agnostics. Only 7% expressed a "belief in a personal God."

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I think there are two types of religious people. One is religious out of habit/to follow the crowd. The other is religious for the religion. I think lack of intelligence certainly correlates to the former, but not the latter.

Edit: OR

lawlawlawl religion is for dumb-dumbs. Lawalawlawl

Edited by Grumps
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  • 1 month later...

I noticed a correlation between intelligence (generally speaking) and religious beliefs as well. I've had a lot of time to think about life and analyze civilizations and their religious beliefs, and compare them to the type of thing we're experiencing today.

What I've privately concluded is that western civilization has been on this religious high for centuries, and maybe we're finally starting to come down. And who is going to first question the existence of a supreme being if not the intellectuals, if not the people who are dedicated to finding the reason for our existence, rather than just attributing it to some divine power that hasn't had any significant physical influence in their lives?

I am an atheist and have an extreme love of knowledge, and I believe strongly that religion is deterring our intellectual progress as a whole. It causes more problems than it solves in an age where scientific research is looming over it. It is people like me that will make progress in the world, without "God" to hold us back. I'm not saying that there are not smart religious people; some of my best friends (also in the IB) are religious. The guy who led the team that mapped the human genome is extremely religious.

Eventually, I don't think that intellectualism and religion will be able to coexist.

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I noticed a correlation between intelligence (generally speaking) and religious beliefs as well. I've had a lot of time to think about life and analyze civilizations and their religious beliefs, and compare them to the type of thing we're experiencing today.

What I've privately concluded is that western civilization has been on this religious high for centuries, and maybe we're finally starting to come down. And who is going to first question the existence of a supreme being if not the intellectuals, if not the people who are dedicated to finding the reason for our existence, rather than just attributing it to some divine power that hasn't had any significant physical influence in their lives?

I am an atheist and have an extreme love of knowledge, and I believe strongly that religion is deterring our intellectual progress as a whole. It causes more problems than it solves in an age where scientific research is looming over it. It is people like me that will make progress in the world, without "God" to hold us back. I'm not saying that there are not smart religious people; some of my best friends (also in the IB) are religious. The guy who led the team that mapped the human genome is extremely religious.

Eventually, I don't think that intellectualism and religion will be able to coexist.

That's an interesting idea. I don't think religion and intellectualism are mutually exclusive, unless considered dogmatically. It seems perfectly sustainable to be spiritual, to believe in some higher order of being, when there seems precious little meaning on earth. The real problem, in my opinion, is where religion is not tempered by rationalism: when you have people refusing to question their beliefs, or refusing to accept scientific explanations, when the two clash. That they still teach Creationism in some American schools is testimony to the utter failure of our 'civilized' and 'technologically advanced' world.

The real significance of this statistic, I suppose, is that it suggests religion does not stand up to intelligent questioning. Which in turn implies it will die out, eventually. The scary reverse of the coin, then, is that even today religion is an enormously influential factor in, for example, politics.

Edited by Daedalus
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  • 2 months later...

Hmmmm, that's a hard one. I was about to vote yes, but I do know of very intelligent intellectuals who are dedicated to their religion. Also it is sometimes hard to tell whether or not someone is atheist or has a religion; because that's not the easiest topic to handle, I kind of avoid bringing it up in everyday conversation.

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  • 1 month later...

I voted yes. I think it's because so-called intellectual people think and reason critically and tend to be more rational rather than 'instinctive'. And faith is based on emotions rather than reasoning. At least in my opinion. Intellectuals probably need "evidence" before believing there is a God. And even so, they'll question the evidence presented to them. For every piece of evidence that God exists, based on your intepretation, there will be a way/a few ways to disprove it. Hence no 'hardcore evidence'. But if you believe in God, you'll have to accept that there'll always be scientific or other kinds of rationale reasoning that will disprove religious experiences etc, it's just a matter of whether the faith you have surpasses the knowledge of all that.

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In Canada, our national broadcaster is the CBC, and the TV Channel aired a show called Test the Nation last January (although it featured another time before that.) The show is essentially a televised IQ quiz. The concept originated in Europe somewhere, and many countries have aired their own versions of the show. However, what intrigued me about this particular episode on CBC was the fact that the show's in-studio test group was split into three pairs of teams, and in one pairing was Athiests vs. Religious people. Ultimately in the end, the Athiests were the group that scored the highest out of all the six; this result correlated with online test results obtained from average Canadian citizens who self-identified with one of the six selected groups.

I don't want to say that I'm going to base my argument solely on this TV show, but nevertheless it's pretty strong evidence. Factoring in the various other statistics that are floating out there, and I don't see how one can even make the argument that religious individuals are, on average, more intelligent than athiests. I think all empirical evidence would point to the contrary.

I also don't think that Intellectualism and Religion are polarizing forces. There are philosophers that have incorporated God into their writings and arguments; I think Bernard-Henri Lévy for example believes in God, to a certain extent. There are things that Science can't explain, isn't even close to explaining, and I don't think ever will be able to explain. But no one's ever learned nuclear fission from reading Leviticus either.

I dislike organized religion, because the stacks of tradition and orthodoxy doesn't, for me, seem compatible with even the concept of spirituality. I loathe the way how individuals will use Religion as a proxy to advance other, unrelated things. What I hate most of all are individuals who advance Religion itself, and push what they personally believe is spirituality onto others (actually, push wouldn't even be all that bad, in comparison to the few who shove it down others' throats.)

I do believe presenting society as Intellectualism vs. Religion is a false dichotomy though. Intellectuals don't necessarily reject religion, and certainly religious individuals/figures have qualified as intellectuals. Maybe organized religion will disappear, as Daedalus somewhat predicted. But I think it would take an incredible lurch of the collective human race to completely eradicate faith and spirituality, equal in difficulty to eradicating intellectualism in our species. In fact, it would be a fundamental altering of what it means to be human. If it's possible at all. So no, society is not a war between intellectualism and religion, but rather individuals' struggles to consolidate both, to various degrees.

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  • 4 weeks later...

I think the more you know about religion, the less likely you are to have strong beliefs. So I think it is smarter to be agnostic than religious or atheist. However, in my school at least 90% of the older students are atheist or agnostic, so if you are religious here you are part of a minority, so then you are less of a sheep than everybody else. Being less conformist in my opinion shows that you think for yourself and therefore are smarter. So where I live, I would say that the religious people are a bit smarter on average. I do not think that being religious is smarter than being atheist, on the contrary, but in my opinion the people who dare to have a different view than everybody else are generally smarter. However, in the rest of the world the majority is religious, so the atheists are smarter. So it is not a question of what you believe, it is a question of whether you think the same as the majority or do you dare to think for yourself.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I'd think it obvious that people who don't think much have an easier time being religious. Religion requires a sense of faith and passive acceptance that many intellectuals, who try to understand their reality and tend to critically evaluate their institutions more often, find difficult to adopt.

The definition of intellectualism contradicts religionism in many regards.

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