Are Religious People Stupid?

Richard Lynn has a knack for stirring up controversy. His belief in a possible link between intelligence and race and gender has long provoked the ire of myriad critics. Now the professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Ulster, in Northern Ireland, has ignited a fresh dispute. In a forthcoming paper in the journal Intelligence -- which was co-written with John Harvey, an independent scholar, and Helmuth Nyborg, a professor of psychology at the University of Aarhus, in Denmark -- Lynn argues that there is a strong correlation between high levels of intelligence and disbelief in God.

Citing evidence that "intellectual elites" are less likely to hold religious beliefs, Lynn told The Times Higher Education Supplement recently: "Why should fewer academics believe in God than the general population? I believe it is simply a matter of the IQ. Academics have higher IQ's than the general population. Several Gallup poll studies of the general population have shown that those with higher IQ's tend not to believe in God."

Are atheists smarter?

Paul Z. Myers, associate professor of biology, University of Minnesota at Morris: I'm afraid I don't trust it at all: The author is the infamous racist, Richard Lynn, and it carries all the baggage of his peculiar notions of genetic determinism and narrow views on the significance of IQ.

I don't think the religious are necessarily stupid, and I most definitely do not believe they are born stupid. I do believe they are saddled with a set of foolish misconceptions that can throttle their intellectual development and send them careering off into genuinely weird sets of beliefs, but this doesn't make them stupid. I also think that IQ tests are written by people who promote an implicitly scientific perspective (which is a good thing!), and it's therefore not...