I’ve been meaning to post on this for about a month now.
According to CNN in February 2010, “Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa at the the London School of Economics and Political Science correlated data on these behaviors with IQ from a large national U.S. sample and found that, on average, people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs. ” The IQ differences are “on the order of 6 to 11 points… Participants who said they were atheists had an average IQ of 103 in adolescence, while adults who said they were religious averaged 97” (My post isn’t about how the study was conducted or drawing conclusions from the findings.)
Now you can be a religious bigot and go about how this is not a statistically significant (it is), or how the study is privy to confirmation bias of the atheists and liberals (it isn’t), or perhaps even shamelessly claim statistics itself is useless and/or full of crap (yes, some would). But of course those same bigots would scream out hallelujah if those same statistics had confirmed the opposite.
OR
Religious people can do the following:
1) Play the morality card. Recent research indicates that religious individuals are “10 percentage points” more fair than the people tested in the following graph that shows a correlation between level of fairness and market integration.
2) Stop saying you believe in God because it says so in the Bible. And that you believe what’s written on the Bible because it’s the word of God. (please don’t ever use this circular argument. This alone is probably enough to reflect the 6 point IQ differential.)
3) Stop attacking science and cherry picking those that fall within your own range of confirmation bias. Stop saying evolution is false because 10% of the scientists believe it’s false (made up number, but probably not too far from the truth), or because your brother’s professor’s cousin-in-law’s doctor said it’s false. This creates a huge gap in credibility. If you haven’t done some research, simply say you don’t know.
4) You smart religious people go convince smart atheists to convert. You know how +2 points off turnovers are thought of as +4? Same deal. This will decrease the IQ of the average atheists and increase the IQ of the average theists. (Conversely, converting just