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Based on http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html I suspect that pg will not answer.

It is worth pointing out that in my personal experience there is little to no correlation between intelligence and religious affiliation. John McCarthy is very intelligent and an atheist. Don Knuth is very intelligent and deeply religious. Martin Gardner was very intelligent, religious, and was very conscious of the fact that he could not logically justify his religious beliefs. I could give you more examples indefinitely.

Pointing to yet another intelligent person who is somewhere on this spectrum demonstrates absolutely nothing, and I believe that pg fully understands that. No matter what his religious beliefs are, for him to answer would only serve to potentially upset people who believe differently. Why go there?



Your personal experience appears to differ from peer-reviewed studies...


I'm fully aware of the peer-reviewed studies that you mention. The correlations they find are highly statistically significant, but the correlations are fairly weak. For instance one study found a 5.83 point gap between the IQs of atheists and dogmatically religious people. That is significant over a large population, but not for individuals. And our society has so many more dogmatically religious people than atheists that there is no problem in finding lots of very intelligent, dogmatically religious people.

Also the cause of that is far from established. For instance religious belief and ethnic background are strongly correlated, and ethnic background is more strongly correlated with IQ than IQ is with religious belief. How much of an effect does this have? It is hard to quantify.

Therefore I wouldn't put much weight on those studies. Don't pat yourself on the back too much for being an atheist, because it doesn't say much either way for your intelligence.

(Disclaimer. I am an atheist. But I know plenty of people who are much more intelligent than me who are strongly religious.)




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