Are Teenage Atheists Smarter?
“The higher the intelligence of [students] in junior high and high school, the less religious they grow up to be in their early adulthood.”[1] When Satoshi Kanazawa, a psychologist at the London School of Economics, put those words into a 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly, all kinds of fury erupted -- even from atheists.
Kanazawa came to his conclusion after studying a survey of about 20,000 students around the United States.[2] But he wasn’t the first to say that atheists were smart. “Very high-IQ individuals tend to be atheists,”[3] wrote psychologist Helmuth Nyborg of Denmark’s Aarhus University more than a year earlier, after he examined a national study covering 9,000 American teenagers.[4]
Nyborg found that atheists scored about five IQ points higher than religious teenagers. Kanazawa revealed that students who called themselves “not at all religious” averaged about six IQ points higher than those who said they were very religious.
That’s when the storm broke. “Show me the reliability of IQ as a measure of actual, you know, intelligence,” University of Minnesota biologist P.Z. Myers growled in the science blog Pharyngula after Kanazawa’s study began to gather publicity. “Show me that a six-point IQ difference matters at all in your interactions with other people, even if it were real. . . . You can just glance at [Kanazawa’s study] and see that it is complete crap.”[5] (Myers, by the way, is no religious zealot. “Christians are morons,” he declared in a post about half an hour before his blast at Kanazawa.[6])
So maybe IQ’s debatable, but here’s a fact that’s tougher to argue: People with college degrees tend to be less religious than people with less education. In 2008, a university-sponsored poll called the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) revealed that 27% of all Americans were college graduates, but 31% of all American nontheists had their diplomas.[7]
Still, ARIS also pointed out that more than half of all American Jews finished college, so nonbelief isn’t the only measurement of academic achievement. What’s more, a college degree doesn’t necessarily indicate how smart someone is. Psychologist Todd Shackelford of Florida Atlantic University and Oakland University in Michigan has studied dozens of surveys of believers and unbelievers, and he says that even if nonbelievers outperform believers in the classroom, “There’s no doubt there are people who are extremely intelligent who are also very religious.” [8]
So who’s smarter? Depends on how you measure it.
What’s It All Mean?
So now you know what an atheist is and who atheists are. But the unbelieving life is more complicated than a flat list of facts and explanations.
[1] Satoshi Kanazawa, “Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent,” Social Psychology Quarterly (2010), volume 73, issue 1, pages 33-57
[2] Robert Bock, “The Adolescent Health Study,” National Institutes of Health (September 9, 1997), http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/sept97/chd-09.htm
[3] Helmuth Nyborg, “The Intelligence-Religiosity Nexus: A Representative Study of White Adolescent Americans,” Intelligence (January-February 2009)
[4] Uncredited, “The NLSY97,” Bureau of Labor Statistics website (December 17, 2009), http://www.bls.gov/nls/nlsy97.htm
[5] P.Z. Myers, “Stop Patting Yourself on the Back over This Study” Pharyngula (February 25, 2010), http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/02/stop_patting_yourselves_on_the.php
[6] P.Z. Myers, “Representing for Christ,” Pharyngula (February 25, 2010), http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/02/representing_for_christ.php
[7] Barry A. Kosmin and Ariela Keysar, “Percentage of College Graduates in the Population Age 25 and Over by Religious Tradition 1990-2008,” American Religious Identification Survey (March 2009), Trinity College, http://americanreligionsurvey-aris.org/reports/aris_report_2008.pdf
[8] Erin Anderson, “Scientists Investigate If Atheists’ Brains are Missing a ‘God Gene,’ ” The Globe and Mail (Toronto) (April 3, 2010)
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