MATT BRIGGS: On Intelligence & Religiosity.

Write down the most intelligent people who have ever lived. Most brilliant in any field of endeavor, now. Who were the best of us? Make it at least twenty entries. . . .

Count how many in your tally have died in the last, say, fifty to one-hundred years. Anything more than about ten-percent proves you are a product of a stunted educational system and that your opinions about what follows aren’t worth diddly. You folks, wounded as you are, just sit back and listen. . . .

Now that that’s settled, time for the test. How many of your luminaries believed in God? That’s right: most, probably all. . . .

Far from being humbled by these observations, modern skeptics might claim, “Culture! These fellows existed in times where it was considered acceptable and normal to be believers. Thus they believed; why, they even used their intelligence to justify their believing.”

That so? Well, today many of the bright claim to be non-believers, and if the skeptic is right about people being at least partly a reflection of their culture, then non-believers are so because of culture. It’s cool to be a non-believer . . .

Enter the peer-reviewed paper “The Relation Between Intelligence and Religiosity: A Meta-Analysis and Some Proposed Explanations” by Miron Zuckerman, Jordan Silberman, and Judith A. Hall in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Review.

This was a “meta-analysis”, i.e. a disreputable conglomeration of other studies which hopes to prove what the individual studies could not. This meta-analysis “showed a significant negative association between intelligence and religiosity.” They mean “significant” in the wee p-value sense and not in any real consequence. And by “association” they mean linear correlation, the weakest and least generalizable of all statistical measures.

The individual studies cobbled into one were extremely heterogeneous, too, using a wide range of “intelligence” measures: GPA, syllogism tests, “Immediate free recall” exams, Peabody picture tests, and on and on. How did the authors compensate for these differences? Answer: they did not.