Why are better educated people less religious?

ya know set your not such a bad guy.......I may make a baptist out of you yet.

Don't hold your breath.

that was a quick response......

I was just strollin' through the neighborhood, lookin' for someone to kick . . .

ah come on grouch..... ya know set, i think beneath that gruff exterior, deep down (really deep down) lol.........you may be a decent guy......

Of course i'm a decent guy. That doesn't mean that i have to refrain from laughing to ridicule someone's imaginary friend superstition.

In "real" life, i never discuss religion. If we met somewhere in public, and you attempted to start a religious discussion, i'd simply get up and leave. If you came to the door, and asked to talk, i'd say that i'd be happy to talk, so long as you don't want to discuss politics or religion.

well i don't go door to door...and i don't usually go around witnessing because i'm shy in real life...so you wouldn't have to worry about that. Im just noting that bar some of your opinions, your not such a bad guy..... :wink: and i think that in time, you would make a great baptist...hehe

It would require major and debilitating brain surgery to turn me into a Babdist . . .

well set, there is always room for improvement......lol....


anyway, i agree with what your posting. This thread, in my opinion is ridiculous and without any substantial evidence. I find it ironic that the supposed intellectuals ran with it. In america alone, many of our most distinguished colleges were started by the religious. I could go on and on. Faith or lack thereof has no role in ones intelligence, to say it does is just opinion and to just run on that is stupid.

It is important for me to point out that i am not denying the thesis of this thread. It may, in fact, be true. My point has been and remains that it is not proven, nor even provided a plausible basis by anything which has been presented in this thread. I have not said that such a position is "only opinion"--it is not impossible to demonstrate that the better educated one is, the less likely one is to be religious. I have simply been at pains to point out that this thread has provided no evidence for the thesis. Steve posted a quote from Mr. Dawkins, in which Dawkins took notice of the lack of a "meta-analysis" of the data presented in the surveys referred to. It were possible to provide a meta-analysis, which is a reasonable and commonly used method in statistical analysis. No one has here provided such an analysis, and absent good data, it is begging the question to discuss the implications of such a contention without first demonstrating that the contention is well-founded. That has been my point.

i understand what your saying, but i'm going a step further. I don't believe that there is a link between faith or lack thereof and education. As i pointed out, most of our colleges in the USA were founded by religious men. Education is encouraged by the religious. And in the christian faith, most churches and christian orgs require one (who is going into a religious field) to have several years of education.

All the evidence points the other way Kate. That is the more intelligent and the higher the level of educational achievement correlates with the inverse of religiosity.

It is not necessarily so that education is encouraged by the religious. Religion has been a prominent source of censorship in history. Religious men and women have been the proponents of many efforts, for example, to prevent the teaching of a theory of evolution in American classrooms. Although there are many institutions of higher education which have been founded on a religious basis, such as Harvard and Yale, they have not remained as institutions the primary purpose of which was the instruction of members of the clergy, and the majority of institutions which provide higher education in the United States have been founded as state-supported institutions which had no religious purpose at all. Furthermore, the institutions of higher education which were founded for religious reasons were founded in colonies which had established churches--for example, Harvard was founded for the purpose of teaching the doctrines of the Puritans (the ancestors of the modern-day Congregationalists), and was concerned only to produce well-educated men (and not women) in the sense that they were properly indoctrinated in a particularist theology.

what evidence? and is seminary education taken into account? because if not, then whatever evidence you may have, will not be accurate. there are many intelligent men and women who chose religious fields of study, but this doesn't make them less intelligent and less educated.

Therein lies the problem of this thread. Without a consensus definition of intelligence and "well-educated" which can be measured, it were not possible to come to any plausible conclusions on this subject. Just as it is true that absent such comprehensive definitions one cannot assert that well-educated persons are less likely to be religious, so it is also true that absent such comprehensive definitions, there can be no certainty that people who get a seminary education are intelligent or well-educated.

Setanta,

The same criticism can be levelled at any social generalization, not just the one on this thread. At the end of the day we are talking about statistical trends and "fuzzy sets", not absolute definitions.

However, correlation is possible if definitions are constant across a survey set. So, for example, if one asks a set of questions regarding governance in two nations which speak the same language, such as England and the United States, one can come to reasonable conclusions about how governance is viewed in those two nations. The reason i applied the criticism of "fuzzy" was not because the claim relies upon statistical trends, but because the statistical trends cannot be correlated because of a lack of definitions. So, if one asserts that 90% of the population of the United States are "religious" and then purports that only 40% of "scientists" believe that the cosmos were created by a deity, you have not necessarily correlated the two surveys, until such time as the same questions, relying upon the same definitions, were applied to the larger group (all the population of the United States) and the smaller group ("scientists"). I'm not simply railing against sociological surveys, i'm pointing out that there has been a claim of correlation of data where none has been shown to exist.

Re: Why are better educated people less religious?


Now, i have asked the author more than once for the parameters of the Scientific American's survey data, and have received no response. However, this is not something with which i am unfamiliar. There was a survey done by Nature which asked subscribers about their "religious" views, and the results included a 45% "yes" response to the question of whether or not the respondents believe that the cosmos were created by a deity. Religious groups took this and ran with it. They warped the results by saying that 45% of "scientists" believe that man was the product of a direct creation by a deity, which was not at all the burden of the question. Furthermore, the survey sample was "self-selected," there is no way to establish that it was representative. Finally, anyone who subscribed to the magazine--which includes ditch-diggers, basket-weavers and rural mail carriers, so long as they subscribe--could have responded to the survey, making the survey meaningless in terms of what "scientists" believe.

So that is why i have immediately questioned the contention embodied in the original post. If the data referred to came from the two sources which the religiously devout batten on--self-identification with a religious sect by Americans (the source of the 90% contention) and the Nature survey (the source of the 45% contention)--then the opening statement is meaningless. It would only be a valid contention if exactly the same set of detailed questions were applied to a reasonably representative sample of the general population, and to a reasonably representative sample of persons who are educated in and employed in scientific pursuits. Otherwise, you have the correlation problem, perhaps even the correlation "wall" which is implicit in Dawkins' recognition of the need for "meta-analysis."

Now, the author goes on to this:



So the author has effectively begged the question. The author is calling for a discussion of a claim which has not been established.

As it happens, i went out and did a search, for more than an hour, for the article in Scientific American to which the author referred, but i did not find it. The author of the thread could have cleared up the discussion to a great extent by linking the article to which he referred. I find it suspicious that that has not happened, especially since i have called for definitions and data sources more than once.

"The horse is dead."

"Wait a minute, how do you know the horse is dead?"

"Never mind that, what shall we do about the dead horse?"

"I don't know . . . beat it?"

Earlier in this thread, JPB posted an abstract of a paper about the correlation of education and religion. I have now found a more detailed version of the paper (it may be the entire paper, but it is difficult to be certain, for a reason that the reader will see on investigating the link).

Education and Religion

In this HTML format, there is a page of what appear to be completely nonsense symbols, and the text of the study cannot be read until one reaches page four. The paper includes references to other studies and tables on religious adherence and attendance. It might be of interest to those who would like to determine for themselves whether or not there is a causal relationship between education and religious adherence.