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Ohio State University core class teaches that atheists are smarter than Christians

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From Campus Reform.

Excerpt:

Ohio State University (OSU) class has apparently determined another fundamental difference between Christians and atheists: their IQ points.

An online quiz from the school’s Psychology 1100 class, provided to Campus Reform via tip, asked students to pick which scenario they found most likely given that “Theo has an IQ of 100 and Aine has an IQ of 125.”

The correct answer? “Aine is an atheist, while Theo is a Christian.”

According to a student in the class who wished to remain anonymous, the question was a part of an online homework quiz. Students were required to complete a certain amount of quizzes throughout the course but were encouraged to finish all of them in order to prep for the final exam.

“I understand that colleges have a liberal spin on things so it didn’t surprise me to see the question, which is a sad thing,” the student told Campus Reform in a phone interview. “But how can you really measure which religion has a higher IQ?”

Psychology 1100 is a general education requirement class which can primarily be taught by an undergraduate teacher’s assistant.

[…]Dr. Mike Adams, an outspoken conservative Christian professor at the University of North Carolina, said “every group is protected from offensive speech on campus except for conservative Christians.”

The university is a challenging problem for Christians who want to make a difference. On the one hand, it’s definitely a center of influence where many young people come to learn how the world works. On the other hand, if you are a conservative Christian, you will be attacked there. It would be nice if Christians could somehow influence the university, helping young people to find or keep their relationship with God in Christ. But I don’t think it’s a priority for most Christians. Ratio Christi does a good job, and I like to sponsor their events. We lose a lot of young people who are raised in Christian homes at the university.

17 thoughts on “Ohio State University core class teaches that atheists are smarter than Christians”

  1. Technically there is at least one study that actually showed that the average IQ of atheists is higher than the average IQ of religious people. Of course, correlation doesn’t imply causation and IQ doesn’t really mean “intelligence”…

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      1. Nope, because a sample group of 10 is not big enough to make any meaningful statements.

        I would suggest the meta study “The Relation Between Intelligence and Religiosity: A Meta-Analysis and Some Proposed Explanations ” (Pers Soc Psychol Rev 1088868313497266, first published on August 6, 2013 ), which showed some correlation of lower IQ and American protestants.

        You could also look at Nyburg, 2009 or Lynn, Harvey, Nyburg, also 2009, etc.

        Sorry, the effect is there. Not really huge. But, if you feel threatened, you should not forget what I said: Correlation does not imply causation.

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    2. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if atheists, as a group, were slightly higher in IQ than Christians, as a group. But that isn’t because being an atheist is a more intellectual position. Not at all.

      The real reason I would expect that is that atheism is commonly propagated by converts made in colleges and universities. In general, atheism isn’t passed down through families or taught to children. Atheism is largely passed from professor to naive student, who then grows up to be an atheist professor. Given that method of propagation, one would expect atheists to have higher IQs on average simply because the pool they are selected from has higher IQs than the general population.

      Christianity, on the other hand, more often spreads among the general population and through families. Thus, one would expect Christians to have an average IQ more similar to the population at large.

      Another factor is that atheists are a small minority and thus any outliers have a greater impact when speaking of average intelligence. Because atheists are a smaller sample from the general population, they are more likely to show variation from the norm. Christians, on the other hand, are a large and very diverse group, making it more likely that the higher IQ individuals are “balanced out” by those of lower IQ and that the overall average will be closer to that of the entire population.

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      1. As I already said: Correlation does not imply causation. We might not agree on the specific details, but the idea is of course probably correct, I don’t assume that atheists are more intelligent because they are atheists or something like that.
        Ok, honestly, I think you are misguided if you think that professors converting their students are a big factor there – losing your faith in college is probably much more rooted in the fact, that many people get their first real contact to many other worldviews there and start asking questions about their own, something that doesn’t happen if you stay in your home town where you know everyone from church. The preaching atheist professor is, sorry, a Christian chain mail cliche. But the concept is, of course, the same: Chances to lose your faith if you go to college are greater than if you stay in your home town and get a job immediately, for example.

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        1. I have personally experienced the “preaching atheist professor,” even at a small university. I also know many other people who have as well at different universities. While it is certainly a misconception that every professor at secular universities is like that, the stereotype exists because there is a lot of truth to it.
          The point is, most atheists become atheists at a college or university. So my statement stands. One would expect a group selected primarily from those at a university to be higher in IQ than a group selected from the population at large.

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      2. Well put. In accord, Christianity can appeal to the most illiterate and poorest amongst us. It does not take a high IQ to comprehend Genesis 1:1, the foundation of Biblical Christianity, nor should it. God desires that all might come to Him. He makes fools of intellectual (Obama-style?) elitism, as my personal testimony demonstrates.
        But, on the a-theist view, it DOES indeed take a very high “intellect” to establish the universe popping into existence uncaused ex nihilo. One has to concoct an elaborate fairy tale to do so, as Larry Krauss did: take some matter, add some anti-matter, place in a QM-style vacuum, and then label all of that “the nothing that created everything!” Yes, to do those sorts of intellectual gymnastics, it most certainly takes a high IQ! :-)

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  3. FWIW, Joe Hinman (Metacrock over at the CADRE Blogspot site) has posted several critiques of those “atheists are smarter than religious believers” studies. Here’s one search results page using merely “smarter” as the key word. Results (which include others than merely Hinman’s posts) are not in chronological order, so be sure to peruse the whole page.

    (NB: Joe/Metacrock is dyslexic and, despite his CADRE colleagues’ encouragement, doesn’t use spellcheck quite as often as he should. ;-) So you’ll find occasional — okay, make that frequent — spelling errors. They may be annoying, but don’t let those fool you into disregarding or disdaining his expertise. Check out his June postings!)

    Btw, Joe (who is very well-read in the area of religious experience/psychology) also has a book out, The Trace of God. (“This work, compiling empirical scientific studies that show that religious experience is not the result of emotional instability but are actually good for psychologically, constitutes a ground breaking work that places religious experiences on a higher level.”)

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  4. This is old stuff. Even if the avg. IQ of the atheists is higher (and apparently it is, slightly), the total number of Christians with the same IQ dwarfs that of atheists. In other words, there is no shortage of equally intelligent Christians–in fact, for a given IQ, there are a lot more Christians than atheists.

    Vox Day has more here.

    Additional tidbit: Most atheists have sub-100 IQ.

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  6. Send your kids to engineering school. It’s really hard to be an engineer for a long time and reject theism (although I did my best!), because engineers design stuff, and many times we mimic creatures in the life sciences area, begging the question “where did THAT superior design come from?” (I know, I know, time and chance.)

    If you want your kids to be a-theists, however, send them to the pure sciences (or worse, the liberal arts!), where they will be presuppositonally taught that the universe miraculously popped into existence uncaused ex nihilo, life magically arose from non-life when lightning hit some mud, mind rose inexplicably from non-mind, etc. And, they will learn to attack premise 1 of Kalam (which no self-respecting productive engineer would EVER do, but perhaps some on welfare might!) since premise 2 has been largely closed off to them.

    All that said, there is a big difference between intelligence and wisdom, as our nation’s fuehrer has shown quite well for 5 years and especially most recently as the world falls apart around him, but he hardly misses a fundraiser (or a golf game), and high-brow academia tends to confirm. There is something to be said for the wisdom of the uneducated peasant, provided she is conservative of course. :-)

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  8. I wish pride was measurable. Certainly many of those with high IQs reject the notion of God not because belief in him is irrational, but because his authority is a threat to their perceived self-superiority. Great intelligence, talent, wealth will, unless recognized and checked, feed pride and contribute to a person’s belief in themselves as their own god.

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