IQ and Religion

Well, religion (mythology) is the result of humans not understanding something and attempting to explain it using fantasy elements. Which is very normal and natural.

So if a society currently lacks the education or intelligence to understand complex scientific principals of course they're going to use fantasy to try to understand the world around them. Once people understand the world around them using non-fantasy or non-religious explanations, they usually abandon religion.

The way I see it, science and religion are just 2 different ways of achieving "understanding". All humans want answers, and will get those answers using which ever method, science or religion, they have access to (sometimes both).

So apparently:

- Religion causes people to have low IQs (No)

- People who are religious are usually of a lower intelligence (Not really)

- People who are of a lower intelligence usually tend to be more religious (Yes, usually)

- Some people are both very intelligent and very religious (Yes)

If these observations are true, how much of society will be offended by them?

"IQ is not lower because nation is more religious. IQ is lower because the nation is poorer."

I am mystified as to why people assume that education provides a higher IQ.

IQ is ability to learn; the brains ability to solve problems in an independent way and has nothing to do with education. If a person who rarely thinks deeply begins some form of education then they will receive a spike in IQ but it is not lasting.

A good way to think of it is the ability to think outside the box. There is no increase of IQ from education although a person with a high IQ may score better in an academic environment (or not if they are easily bored). Education is about memorizing facts whilst IQ is the ability to think.

Wealthy people don't feel a need for a God but poor people do.

The irony is that the religious tend to be extremely educated and in history served as teachers of many things.

The Catholic Church believes in evolution (although its not exactly dogma). Pope John Paul II:

In his encyclical Humani Generis (1950), my predecessor Pius XII has already affirmed that there is no conflict between evolution and the doctrine of the faith regarding man and his vocation, provided that we do not lose sight of certain fixed points.... Today, more than a half-century after the appearance of that encyclical, some new findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than a hypothesis. In fact it is remarkable that this theory has had progressively greater influence on the spirit of researchers, following a series of discoveries in different scholarly disciplines. The convergence in the results of these independent studies—which was neither planned nor sought—constitutes in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_evolution

Dual Masters, Higher than avg IQ, & Catholic.

Again, I agree. I'm just pointing out that this graph doesn't support well the theory of religiosity's correlation with poverty.