OK, it's a naughty headline, but no less true than the one put on this survey at the aggressively atheist Sandwalk blog, which said "Atheists are smarter than agnostics". Both readings are justified. A large-scale analysis of the religious allegiance and measured IQ of a representative sample of 3,742 American adolescents found a clear trend: the more fundamentalist denominations had the more stupid believers, so that the bottom four places were occupied, from the bottom, by Pentecostalists, Baptists, Holiness churches and "Personal Philosophy", which I presume means a new-age-ish syncretism, while the top four places, again in ascending order, were taken by agnostics, atheists, Jews, and Episcopalians (Anglicans). So, atheists are smarter than agnostics, Jews are smarter than atheists, and Anglicans the smartest of the lot ...

But we should always be careful about science which tells us what we think we already know.

The research was done by a retired Danish professor of psychology, Helmuth Nyborg, and he really does believe that he has found the explanation for the persistence of religious belief in the modern world: believers are measurably more stupid than atheists. His tone of elevated scorn will be familiar:



The study begins with two sets of a priori assumptions. First, [intelligent] people have a brain based biological capacity for solving complex problems, and for acting rationally when confronted with fundamental questions about existence, human nature, underlying causes, or the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune". Second, [unintelligent] people lack this protection and are therefore unfairly ordained to live in a pre-rational world based on poorly validated evidence and little accumulated insight. They accordingly often ﬁnd themselves in cognitively, emotionally, or morally challenging situations and have to use plan B, that is, to call upon easily comprehensible religious authoritative guidance and to submit more or less uncritically to culturally given stereotyped rituals. Frustration with their life may also make them seek redemption or faith in an after life. High-IQ people are able to curb magical, supernatural thinking and tend to deal with the uncertainties of life on a rational-critical-empirical basis, and to become prosperous servants of society, whereas low-IQ people easily become trapped in religious magical thinking, in addition to achieving, earning and serving less well.



How nice to have this intuition validated by modern science and the results published in a respectable, peer-reviewed journal (Intelligence).

But is there not an overtone perhaps distressing to progressive opinion in professor Nyborg's thought? Should we really be quite so smug at his scientific discovery that Baptists make rotten servants? Should we really be quite so confident about the conclusions of a man who puts so much weight on IQ and its hereditary nature?

So I did a little digging around. I downloaded the paper, which costs, alas, $37.50 with VAT, and read it carefully through. It turns out that Nyborg is an enthusiast for scientific racism. It's not just believers who are more stupid, in his world: it's black people and women, too. In a collaboration with Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster, he measured religiosity against IQ in 137 countries, and concluded that low IQ countries always had higher rates of religion. It's not religion that makes you stupid, he told a Christian paper at the time: but if you live in a very religious country, you are very likely to be stupid. And of course the correlation of religion and poverty is in global terms very clear, while the most religious continent of all is Africa.

In the paper under review, he writes,

The ultimate causal level presumes that geographically separated peoples were subjected to different evolutionary pressures over extended time-periods. Those living under the hardest of evolutionary pressures, in cold or arctic areas, were gradually and over many generations selected for enhanced g (for details of the Climate Theory, see Lynn, 2006; Rushton, 2000). They had to replace ancient pre-rational supernatural beliefs with more effective rational approaches in order to survive under the harsh conditions given. People living in warm or tropical areas enjoyed in general more relaxed selective conditions, and low g individuals were not severely punished, as their survival was not seriously compromised by uncritical reference to ancient supernatural thinking, irrational beliefs in souls, invisible worlds, Gods, forces, angels, devils, hell, or holy spirits. A contemporary belief that supernatural forces control behavior, feelings and thinking is accordingly seen as a reminiscence of pre-historic animism and magical thinking.

Oops!

(In case anyone is tempted to take this seriously, it's worth pointing out that one of the most demographically successful populations in human history were the New England puritans, many of them descendants of Vikings, who managed to combine life in a very cold climate with fervent religiosity.)

But Nyborg is entirely serious. He argues – in the spirit of Murray and Herrnstein's Bell Curve – that intelligence is IQ; IQ is biological, and biology is destiny:



High g individuals will gravitate towards atheism or science, will discard supernatural phenomena, and will learn fast and prosper. Average g individuals will ﬁnd one of several moderate liberal denominations more to their taste, will display average learning, and will accordingly assume an intermediate socio-economic standing. Low g individuals will to submit to one of the many dogmatic denominations, will be slow learners, and will attain a low socio-economic status that accord with their limited cognitive

complexity and closed mind. Variations in disbelief, denominational complexity, educability and income are accordingly expected to follow from essentially heritable g differences, and to manifest themselves as today's mainly biologically brain based religious class differences.

By now I imagine that you are recoiling from these ideas. The belief that religion can simply be explained by stupidity suddenly looks a lot less attractive when it is presented scientifically by an intelligent man who also believes that poverty, too, can be explained by stupidity, and stupidity in its turn by race.

All of a sudden, people start remembering that IQ doesn't measure anything at all except IQ, and so on.

The trouble with this is that IQ, whether or not it measures intelligence, does measure qualities that are important for success in the modern world. Scientific racism is wrong and wicked, but to prove it so is not as simple as one might like.

The Flynn Effect

Just about a year ago, I went to a lecture in Cambridge by James Flynn, the American-born New Zealand psychologist who discovered the "Flynn effect", which shows that IQ scores everywhere have risen astonishingly throughout the 20th century. He is one of the most interesting and passionate social democratic thinkers I have ever come across. He does not think that IQ scores are meaningless. But his careful unpicking of the possible reasons for the Flynn effect – essentially that modern, urban life rewards and stimulates the kind of thinking which some components of a modern IQ test measure – offers another way to look at these correlations.

The thing that I found really fascinating in Flynn's lecture was his discussion of what makes for very low IQ scores. It is one of the paradoxes of the Flynn effect that it implies not only that our children will be smarter than we are, but that our recent ancestors were extremely stupid. Extrapolating back to 1900 on the two fastest-improving components of the IQ tests suggests that schoolchildren then would have had a mean IQ of either 50 or 70. "How did Englishmen play cricket in 1900" asked Flynn. "Taking their mean IQ at face value, most of them would need a minder to position them in the field, tell them when to bat, and tell them when the innings was over."

The answer, he says, is that one of the things that IQ tests measure is "post-scientific operational thinking". This is not the same as scientific thinking. But it is thinking about the world in terms of the categories by which science understands it. For instance, if you ask, "What do dogs and rabbits have in common", the post-scientific answer, that we would now regard as evidence of intelligence, is that they are both mammals. The pre-scientific answer is that you use a dog to hunt a rabbit. That's what matters about the two animals, not what class they belong to.

It is that kind of difference in reasoning which accounts for the huge measured IQ differences between urban and rural Brazil, and, of course, the fantastically low IQs measured in African countries.

But could something similar be true of religion? In particular, could dogmatic and fundamentalist religion be more useful to the poor and wretched? Could it lift them to the stage where they could experiment with doubt, with nuance, with novelistic thinking? The history of the early Methodists suggests exactly this. Remember John Wesley's reflection on his own success:

The Methodists in every place grow diligent and frugal; consequently they increase in goods. Hence they proportionately increase in pride, in anger, in the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, and the pride of life. So, although the form of religion remains, the spirit is swiftly vanishing away.

This was a very much longer post than I set out to write. But I have been ill all week, and have not the strength right now to make it shorter. It might provide at least some matter for reflection.