Today I want to shed light on a nasty little \u201cfact\u201d that regularly makes the rounds online: “Studies show that Christians are less intelligent than atheists.”<\/p>\n
This statement is proudly tossed about by atheists who want to reinforce their claims that religion is for the poor, ignorant, and unintelligent.<\/p>\n
And you know what? The statement is true: A number of studies\u00a0have<\/em>\u00a0found a negative relationship between intelligence and religiousness (the more intelligent a person, the less likely to be religious).<\/p>\n Does that mean people can legitimately say, based on these studies, that Christians are less intelligent than atheists? Absolutely not.<\/p>\n I have an MBA in marketing and statistics and have taught university-level market research, so I\u2019m a professional numbers geek \u2014 a numbers geek who dug into all these research studies to find out what they\u00a0really<\/em>\u00a0say. Today I want to set the record straight.<\/p>\n Before we get too far, however, I have to point out what is hopefully obvious: Even if we could reliably measure which group is smarter, the answer wouldn\u2019t tell us anything about the truth of Christianity. Intelligence doesn\u2019t equate to always having the right answer.<\/p>\n Theoretically, we could end all conversations on this topic by pointing that out. But if your child asks you one day why Christians aren\u2019t as smart as atheists, you don’t really just want to reply, \u201cWell, that doesn\u2019t mean Christianity isn\u2019t true.\u201d We owe it to our kids to be able to address the claim itself.<\/p>\n So here we go. Please bookmark this page as a resource you can link to next time you see someone claim that Christians are less intelligent than atheists!<\/p>\n What 63 studies on intelligence and religiousness really say<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n In 2013, researchers from the University of Rochester and Northeastern University pulled together all past studies conducted on the relationship between religiousness and intelligence at the individual (person) level<\/a>. Of the 63 studies identified:<\/p>\n In other words, only about half the 63 studies suggest that the more intelligent a person is, the less likely they are to be religious. The other half of the studies don\u2019t show that at all. The researchers\u00a0themselves<\/em>acknowledged, \u201cThe relation between intelligence and religiosity has been examined repeatedly, but so far there is no clear consensus on the direction and\/or the magnitude of this association.\u201d<\/p>\n First major takeaway<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n The common claim that studies have shown repeatedly that religious people are less intelligent is highly misleading. It ignores the results of almost half of the studies conducted. Overall, the results have been very inconclusive.<\/p>\n The goal of the researchers in 2013 was to look at these studies\u00a0as a group<\/em>\u00a0for the first time, in order to better quantify the nature and magnitude of the relationship between intelligence and religiousness. Before we even look at the results, it\u2019s important to note that combining 63 individual studies is very problematic. The studies varied extensively on:<\/p>\n Who was studied.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Some studied precollege teens, some studied college students, and some studied non-college adults (people recruited outside an academic context).<\/p>\n How many people were studied.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Sample sizes ranged from 20 to more than 14,000.<\/p>\n When the studies were conducted.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n The studies were done over an 84-year span of time (the earliest study in 1928, the most recent in 2012).<\/p>\n What the studies measured.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Some studies measured religious behavior (for example, church attendance and\/or participation in religious organizations) and some measured religious beliefs (for example, belief in God and the Bible).<\/p>\n How the studies measured.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Twenty-three different types of tests were used to measure intelligence (for example, university entrance exams, vocabulary tests, scientific literacy tests, etc.). Details weren\u2019t provided on how exactly each study measured religious behavior and beliefs, but that surely varied extensively as well.<\/p>\n Generally speaking, combining such disparate studies is a statistical disaster.<\/p>\n Cornell statistics professor William M. Briggs summarized the problem<\/a>: \u201cData of every flavor was observed, data that should not be mixed without an idea of how to combine the uncertainty inherent in each study and in how, say, kinds of IQ measurements map to other kinds of IQ measurements. In other words, they mixed data which should not be mixed, because nobody has any idea how to make these corrections.\u201d<\/p>\n Methodological concerns aside, let\u2019s pretend for a moment that it\u2019s valid to combine the results of these 63 studies. Ultimately, there were two factors researchers found to be significant in the relationship between intelligence and religiousness. The first was the life stage of who they studied (precollege, college, or non-college). The second was the measure of religiousness (behavior or belief). The results suggested:<\/p>\n Religious behavior, such as church membership, has almost no relationship with intelligence at any life stage.<\/p>\n Religious belief has almost no relationship with intelligence in the pre-college years (presumably because beliefs are more influenced by parents).<\/p>\n Religious belief has a very weak negative relationship with intelligence for college and non-college adults. (The higher the intelligence, the less likely a person is to have religious beliefs; the weak relationship is a -0.17 correlation between intelligence and religious beliefs for the college studies and a -0.20 correlation for the non-college studies.)<\/p>\n Second major takeaway<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n The results suggest a negative relationship specifically between intelligence and religious belief for adults, but the mathematical magnitude of that relationship is very small. Almost all variation in religious belief among individuals is explained by (unidentified) factors other than intelligence.<\/p>\n In review, here\u2019s what you need to know next time you see someone make this claim:<\/p>\n Over the last 80-plus years, many studies have been done on the relationship between intelligence and religiousness. In 2013, researchers pulled together all the ones that quantified that relationship. Of the 63 studies they identified, roughly half showed no relationship at all. The other half showed at least some kind of negative relationship (the more intelligent, the less likely to be religious). That said, statistically speaking, it\u2019s not very helpful to simply know there is \u201csome kind\u201d of relationship. You have to know how strong the relationship is to know if it matters. Researchers combined the results of all these individual studies to evaluate that question overall and found the strength of relationship to be very weak.<\/p>\n What do I mean by “very weak”? A -.17 or -.20 correlation is considered to be a trivial or negligible relationship by most statisticians. In other words, hardly worth mentioning.<\/p>\n Now you have the whole story. But one last note. Please do\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0share the following article when you see an atheist make claims about Christians being less intelligent:\u00a0Of 10 Highest IQ\u2019s on earth, at least 8 are Theists, at least 6 are Christians<\/a>. I regularly see Christians replying to atheists with that link, and it makes me cringe every time. It doesn\u2019t matter if the 50 or even 1,000 most intelligent people on Earth are theists or Christians\u2014that doesn\u2019t statistically mean anything about the relative intelligence of Christians as a group. Engage instead on the studies underlying the atheists\u2019 claims by sharing this analysis.<\/p>\n Any questions?<\/p>\n This post is used with permission from Christian Apologist Natasha Crain. You can access more great posts like this one by visiting her blog\u00a0ChristianMomThoughts.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Today I want to shed light on a nasty little \u201cfact\u201d that regularly makes the rounds …<\/p>\n\n