There is a paper doing the rounds at the moment which is a meta-analysis of various intelligence related studies that concludes atheists are smarter than religious people (on average). I'm reasonably schooled in maths and statistics but I can't understand how different kinds of intelligence measures can be combined to calculate a single correlation, it would seem like a case of apples and pears to me, anyway I'm also not sure a complex thing like intelligence can be boiled down to uni-dimensional measures like this? Mathematically it's probably OK but it doesn't mean much in the real world. I know plenty of religious people who are smarter than me in many different ways and I know atheists who are as thick as pig excreta, luck, environment and personality must also play a significant role in ones deistic outlook I reckon (but only have anecdotal evidence for that)
I'm sure that social scientists can use statistics to prove that social scientists are cleverer than you but I'm also sure that those who still use chickens entrails to determine things will continue to disprove them with gut feel..
No comments:
Post a Comment