Why are better educated people less religious?

Geesh, stlstrike, you're all over the place here.

If your stance is that religious institutions are misusing their authority by attempting to keep evolution out of the classroom and to prevent stem cell research, I'm with you all the way. Bad religious institutions (and bad religious individuals who support them). Bad, bad.

Worth fighting, for sure.

If you're saying that all religious people support such things, though, and/ or that they are all stupid, though, I have to take issue.

Again, is falling in love rational? Please answer yes or no.

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sozobe,

"Falling in love" is biologically "rational" and psychologically "irrational".

JLN,

I think your Japanese point underscores the fact that "education" is not simply a function of "intelligence". Despite the fact that we might statistically assign them the labels "Buddhist" and "educated" we need to consider Japanese behaviour prior to and within WW2 which is yet to be acknowledged by them. The contents of formal education are clearly a function of politics which in its most primitive form is "tribalism".

Regarding the unusual level of American "religiosity" compared with other Western cultures I tend to think (simplistically) that this fills a "cultural vacuum" in a young "melting pot" society.

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Why are better educated people less religious?

Here's another possible explanation. Religion is much easier on the surface. Understanding the current incomplete scientific state of the universe (and accepting the incompleteness) requires a certain minimum level of intellect. "God dun it" requires almost none.

But...there are other theists who are intelligent and well-educated. These people are exploring philosophical explanations of the universe at an entirely different level than those mentioned above. They are relatively few. The "God dun it" crowd are skewing the IQ results to the clever theists disadvantage.

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fresco wrote:

Regarding the unusual level of American "religiosity" compared with other Western cultures I tend to think (simplistically) that this fills a "cultural vacuum" in a young "melting pot" society.

I thought perhaps it had more to do with the large Irish (and maybe Hispanic and African) origins. The Irish are certainly up there in the Western religiosity stakes. You had fathers who were pilgrims apparently?

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cicerone imposter wrote:

..
I doubt very much level of education is the determiner of the belief religion.

hi CI good to see you again...

I too dont think a certain level of education engenders belief. But it is a fact drawn from empirical evidence that high levels of education are inversely correlated to strong belief. I would suggest that is true too in Japan, where (and I'm speculating because I dont know if there have been any studies) I would suggest the members of the Japanese Acadamy of Sciences or similiar are less religious than the general public.

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fresco wrote:

sozobe,

"Falling in love" is biologically "rational" and psychologically "irrational".

Falling in love in general is biologically rational. What about falling in love with one specific person, though, as opposed to anyone else?

At any rate, I'm most interested in stllstrike's answer to this one.

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Steve wrote: I too dont think a certain level of education engenders belief. But it is a fact drawn from empirical evidence that high levels of education are inversely correlated to strong belief. I would suggest that is true too in Japan, where (and I'm speculating because I dont know if there have been any studies) I would suggest the members of the Japanese Acadamy of Sciences or similiar are less religious than the general public.

You may be right, but I see this issue quite differently. The Japanese religion, Shintoism, is as old as Japanese history. Most Japanese are not considered "religious" as commonly associated with most other religions. The Japanese practice Shintoism in combination with Buddhism in their culture as it pertains to special events such as weddings, birthdays, funerals, and other events. It's not a "I go to church every week" kind of religion. I doubt very much educational level has much to do with their belief in their practice of their "religion."

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Fresco, I think you meant to address your statement about Japanese culture to C.I.,

but

I want to qualify the statement I made earlier that there are ways, other than science (e.g., mystical practices and the arts) to understand THE world. I do not wish to give the impression of naive realism, i.e., that there is an objective world "out there" that is knowable by different means. Perhaps we can say that each means of "knowing" provides a different kind of knowledge of a different world, or--in tentative deference to objectivisn--to different aspects of a single world. And that is an objective fact Laughing

To me the world seems Unitary because I cannot image the nature of dividing lines, but it is inherently complex and internally segmented like the facets of a diamond.
But that's just my image.

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...now there's a painting..

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An awfully big one.

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That which today calls itself science gives us more and more information, and indigestible glut of information, and less and less understanding.

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Dys, I agree in the sense that, except for the basic-science efforts of theoretical biology, astrophysics and the New Physics, much, if not most, of what passes for Science is engineering of one sort or another, necessary (in part to undo the damage that science has enabled industry to bring about) but not particularly interesting. And providing us with interesting models of the world is the better part of Science if you ask me. It's the secular form of religiosity: the search for "truth" as the generation of Wonderment.

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dyslexia wrote:

That which today calls itself science gives us more and more information, and indigestible glut of information, and less and less understanding.

... that is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever read.

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Eorl wrote:

fresco wrote:

Regarding the unusual level of American "religiosity" compared with other Western cultures I tend to think (simplistically) that this fills a "cultural vacuum" in a young "melting pot" society.

I thought perhaps it had more to do with the large Irish (and maybe Hispanic and African) origins. The Irish are certainly up there in the Western religiosity stakes. You had fathers who were pilgrims apparently?

It's sad enough to see a Pom and an Aussie slamming Americans, but it is, at least, sufficiently familiar to have lost any sting. However, i find it particularly disgusting to see an Aussie respond to a Pommie by slamming the Irish.

Let's give the racist stereotypes a rest, shall we? There are sufficient bones in this thread to contend over without descending into ethnic slurs.

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Seriously, folks, I failed to add this to my above post because youse guys jumped in before I could post it:

Science has two principal functions: its engineering function (what mundane knowledge is normally about) of prediction and control, and its more esoteric or "religious" function of generating wonderment.

Dys' post was not at all ridiculous.

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stlstrike3 wrote:

Of 43 studies carried out since 1927 on the relationship between religious belief and one's intelligence and/or educational level, all but four found an inverse connection. That is, the higher one's intelligence or education level, the less one is likely to be religious or hold "beliefs" of any kind.

Soz is right, this member is all over the highway, and continues to ignore the corpses of attempts at reasoned discourse which litter his path.

I have pointed out, and Mr. Dawkins pointed out in the passage which Steve quoted, that a lack of clear definitions in any one "study," and the difficulty (if not actual impossibility) of correlating the differing definitions and questions of the surveys which underlie those "studies" make this a pretty much meaningless contention.

Without having an overall standard of what makes someone "religious," and without having a base line from which to determine what makes someone well educated, there is simply no way to make sound statements from any of these sets of dubious "studies."

When i was in the army, everyone was required to give a religious preference, and that was stamped on one's dog tags. People who hadn't a religious thought in their heads were still required to give an answer, and would have, at the least, Protestant, Catholic, Muslim or Jew stamped on their dog tags. I told them i was a Druid. It took years to get them to acknowledge it. Both army personnel and civilian employees would put "Non-Christian" in my personal file, and i'd have to go through another round of complaints to get it fixed. They couldn't leave well enough alone, they would see the entry on my 201, and they'd change it. I finally got dogtags that said Druid when i learned to operate an Addressograph/Multigraph printer, and went in one evening and stamped out my own.

One first sergeant, more perceptive than so many others which whom i dealt, asked quietly one day: "You're an atheist, really, aren't you?" The answer to that was yes, but for more complex reasons than that i deny there is a god (i don't, i just have no good reason to believe there is one). So then he asked me why i insisted on being listed as a Druid. I told him that as an atheist, i would not get a day of worship off each week nor any annual holidays.

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Oh, and since the subtleties of human communication seem to so easily escape the "scientists" on this thread, the point of the foregoing is that just because someone responds to a survey by saying they are Presbyterian, doesn't mean they are religious. Just because they answer yes to a question which asks if they believe a deity created the cosmos doesn't mean they are religious.

And if this thread has demonstrated nothing else, it surely shows that just because someone freely and publicly acknowledges their worship of science, there is no good reason to see them as better educated than anyone else in sight.

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Setanta wrote:

Eorl wrote:
fresco wrote:

Regarding the unusual level of American "religiosity" compared with other Western cultures I tend to think (simplistically) that this fills a "cultural vacuum" in a young "melting pot" society.

I thought perhaps it had more to do with the large Irish (and maybe Hispanic and African) origins. The Irish are certainly up there in the Western religiosity stakes. You had fathers who were pilgrims apparently?

It's sad enough to see a Pom and an Aussie slamming Americans, but it is, at least, sufficiently familiar to have lost any sting. However, i find it particularly disgusting to see an Aussie respond to a Pommie by slamming the Irish.

Let's give the racist stereotypes a rest, shall we? There are sufficient bones in this thread to contend over without descending into ethnic slurs.

Huh? Not sure where you are coming from there, Set. I was talking about the history of religion in America as opposed to other "Western" nations. No stereotyping involved that I can see. Ireland is possibly more religious than anywhere else in Europe and a very large proportion of the US population shares that origin. You are the better historian, how do you account for the religiosity of USA.

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.....ditto the sentiments above. The statistics of American "religiosity" are well documented and no "slur".

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I thought Dys' post was pretty profound myself.

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Why are better educated people less religious?

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