Are Believers Less Intelligent?

It’s tempting to accuse believers of being less intelligent than non-believers.  Atheists throw that accusation around quite a bit and nothing could be farther from the truth.

Here is what is really going on and it has nothing to do with lack of intelligence.

As a species we have evolved with a trait called confirmation bias. This simply means that we try to confirm what we already believe. In order to pull this off our brains require us to discount evidence that runs counter to our beliefs and a strong bias for evidence that proves us right.

Here’s an example. Let’s say a believer prays for a sick friend to get well. If the friend actually gets better, the believer sees that as evidence that prayer helps heal the sick. On the other hand, if the patient does not get better or in fact gets worse, that evidence is ignored. In other words we tend to keep the “yes” vote and ignore the “no” vote.  We tally our wins and ignore our losses.

We have also evolved so that as children, we will believe anything adults tell us. Go back a few millennia and it’s easy to see how that came about.  Children who did not believe their parents when they were told that crocodiles would eat them if they swam in a particular place in a river were eaten by crocodiles and quickly removed from the gene pool, as well as children who did not believe their parents who told them not to eat a particular red berry because it was poisoned.

When children are told by adults that a super-natural celestial dictator in the sky is watching their every move and reading their every thought, they not only will believe it, but spend the rest of their lives looking for confirmation of their beliefs.

This is why children of Muslims will grow into adults thinking Mahomet rode a white horse to heaven and back and that Jesus in most definitely not their ticket to heaven.  Children of Christians will grow up to believe that virgins get pregnant, that 10 million species of animals really did fit in a boat 500 feet long and that it rained six feet per hour (feet, not inches) for 40 days and nights. And of course children of Mormons will believe that the con man Joseph Smith really did dig up those golden plates.

And this is why, stuffing all that rubbish into the brains of innocent children before they have attained critical thinking skills should be a crime punishable by imprisonment.

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P.S. Anyone notice that the pope, the head of 1.2 billion Catholics set a special day aside each year to pray for peace?  Anyone ever notice how his prayers have utterly and miserably failed?