Hypothesis: the more educated you are the less likely you are to be religious - by SubJeff
Forever420 on 26/1/2012 at 20:53
Quote:
and my point is still the same god damn thing: nobody listens to abusive assholes.
Stones in glass houses, mah hateful brutha.
faetal on 26/1/2012 at 20:53
At the very least, you missed the word "if".
faetal on 26/1/2012 at 20:57
Let's at least throw this into the mix: (
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289611000912)
It only applies to the US though, which I'm not sure is a great example.
There are plenty more like this also.
However, no false syllogisms should be implied. This doesn't mean religious = dumb, just identifies that there is some relationship between higher intelligence* and lower religiosity.
* - taking into account that it's a very tricky metric.
faetal on 26/1/2012 at 21:06
Worth bearing in mind here that there are essentially 2 hypotheses here, the null hypothesis:
H0 = Education/intelligence has no significant relationship to religiosity
and the alternative hypothesis:
H1 = Education/intelligence has a significant relationship to religiosity
Now, bearing in mind that one of these is going to be right to the exclusion of the other, what you'd expect to see is a heavy dose of cognitive dissonance from one side of the fence. No one here, if proven to be incorrect is going to say "ok, well I guess I was wrong then" (well they might on the science side if they are good critical thinkers and the chips fell that way), but I'd say it is unlikely that anyone who is religious is going to be ok about saying that it is despite being intelligent, or worse still, that it is in keeping with a lower intelligence.
Now I'm NOT saying that those statement are true, just that is what someone who is religious and accepts such findings might think it is tantamount to.
My girlfriend is Catholic, has 3 degrees and a doctorate and I certainly don't think she is stupid. That said, we flat out don't discuss religion.
Few more articles:
(
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289608000238)
(
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289608001013)
I'm sure there are more if I keep looking. I'm trying to avoid confirmation bias by not just showing ones which confirm the correlation, but I've not found any which confirm the null hypothesis yet.
faetal on 26/1/2012 at 21:19
To quote myself: "..pareidolia, apophenia.."
Beleg Cúthalion on 26/1/2012 at 21:24
Quote Posted by the statistic linked above
The results indicated that lower intelligence is most strongly associated with higher levels of fundamentalism, but also modestly predicts central components of religiosity such as a sense of religious identification and private religious practice.
That's basically what you can say about political or cultural/traditional ties as well. So to resolve the matter of H0 and H1, I guess the closest you come to a reasonable result is to say that higher education keeps you from relying too much on precast mindsets, either religious or secular. Those mindsets make up a portion of being religious but don't represent all of it; and should be separated from intentionally taken or formed mindsets which can be religous or secular again.
I couldn't access the whole thing, though, just in case there's a big turning point.
Quote Posted by DDL
As far as I'm aware, this is still simply a discussion.
Your former post read to me rather cast in ...erm...paper, that's why I questioned the current status. I wouldn't suggest a better metric (aside from what I suggested above), I rather opted for changing the question. There's no use in asking "Does a good taste in music result in a bad clothing style?", even if you could find lots of reasonable arguments supporting that. If however you ask whether or not people tend to focus on one specialty or hobby and rather ignore most of the rest of their lives, this might lead to something.
DDL on 26/1/2012 at 22:05
Ah. No I was simply pointing out that saying "I have a friend (or many friends) who is/are smart and also religious" is not in any way a successful proof of the null hypothesis. It doesn't prove the hypothesis either, but I figured that wasn't necessary to restate.
Mind you, those papers posted aren't exactly helping disprove the hypothesis...(will read them tomorrow if I get the time)
As for "Does a good taste in music result in a bad clothing style?", if you CAN find good evidence for this causation, then that'd be super interesting. Totally not analagous though, coz: hypothesis phrased to imply causation, rather than mere correlation (as is the case in the thread title). Also, utterly unrelated. :confused:
faetal on 26/1/2012 at 22:55
Beleg - assuming that you didn't get time to read the papers and examine the methodology, you can not just re-cast the abstract to mean what you want it to mean.
This would be the cognitive dissonance one would expect. Your brain alters the playing field to fit a version of reality which creates the least tension against the backdrop of a person's predilections.
Happens to me too when ideas I base my life around are challenged in some way - it's a natural function of human cognitive behaviour. As spontaneous as iris response to light.
[EDIT: Just re-read and noticed you can't access. I can email the papers if you want to read the whole thing? What you say about people of lower intelligence being more prone to template mind sets isn't out of the question. Generally, I'd just say that becuase religion doesn't demand as much intelligence as good understanding of science, it is a natural product of equilibrium that the two things would correlate. You can have intelligent religion and dumb religion, but the same can not be said for science, as dumb science isn't science, it's just bullshit]
Beleg Cúthalion on 27/1/2012 at 09:18
Thanks but I found it using the university VPN channel. However, it's not like the abstract gives a narrow image of the whole survey or I misinterpreted it in one way or the other. Rather, I'd point to at least one thing used and admitted in this study: The aspects of religion are about half "personal" or inwardly and half outwardly. With that I mean that there are elements which refer to the very personal interpretation of religion and which might be withdrawn to some extent from worldy aspects of religion which were shaped over hundreds of years in society. The others were more or less based on these worldly aspects (like taking the Bible literally, identification with a religious group etc.). Now then they showed that the inwardly aspects used have less negative correlation with IQ/Edu then the rest. In the conclusion they point out (next to last paragraph) that there are other aspects of religion not included, which are however IMHO also inwardly aspects.
To repeat what I said earlier: I think the negative correlation exists mainly between intelligence/education and the outwardly elements of religion which were shaped in society but don't equal the core of it or of religiousness. Bright people are more inclined to notice this discrepancy (if the outwardly aspects have become oldfashioned etc.) and approach religion on their own.
Besides, I cannot help the feeling that except for the first study their definition of religion is rather...outdated I'd say, left aside some of their literature worries me with its reliance on the natural explaination of where religion comes from (praying to the rain god, as it were).
faetal on 27/1/2012 at 10:06
I'd say that a large amount of it is also the natural equilibrium product of religion being more inclusive than education, which has to be increasingly exclusive as it gains complexity in order to be effective.
So I'd say that it's a fairly natural product that there will be more people in religion with lower intelligence because it offers lots of pseudo explanation about life and the universe without the need for entry qualifications.
It's still interesting though.
(got to love Uni VPNs)
