Geoffrey wrote: ↑Wed Apr 30, 2025 12:38 am
...religious people do not generally have a high IQ.
I realise that your statement allows for exceptions, but I am not certain that you really mean it.
I have actually met a few religious people with very high IQs (or at least, I am very sure that they were very intelligent people), and I have had some long conversations with some of them about the matter, because I genuinely wanted to try to learn and understand how they could believe something that struck me as so patently false, if not completely absurd (I am not a religious believer). I also did some reading on the subject -- books and articles written by highly intelligent people who were also religious believers -- to try to acquire as much information as I could in order to understand something that had always struck me as incomprehensible.
As it turns out, there are quite a lot of reasons why and how highly intelligent people can also be religious people -- there is no one answer that applies to all of them, for how each of them conceives of and interprets their own religion and religious beliefs can be very different, as well as what it means to them and how they go about believing, and even when and where their beliefs came from, etc..
The existence of religious beliefs can be a very complex subject, particularly with people who are very intelligent and have actually thought very deeply about it: some of their reasoning involves very intellectual metaphysical and epistemological arguments, although sometimes it is based upon personal experiences that they have critically examined and assessed, plus a variety of other things that cause them to believe what they do.
Some of them even concede that their religious beliefs are completely irrational, by classical standards, but that does not dissuade them, for there are complex arguments that can explain, for lack of a better word, the rationality of irrational beliefs. That is, one can use advanced, convoluted logic and epistemological principles to explain and understand the irrational in a way that makes sense. It involves recognising that there are different frameworks of knowledge and understanding, not all of which are applicable to all subjects. Put, perhaps, too simply, religious belief falls into a different category than some other types of belief, and thus it must be understood and accepted in different ways than one understands and accepts other beliefs, for it exists in a different realm (for lack of a better word).
Of course, one can simply deny the existence of different realms of knowledge and understanding, but that arguably fails to appreciate the vast complexity of the human mind and of the universe. There has been a great expansion of knowledge and understanding of the human mind and of the world/universe over the years, and that knowledge and understanding is constantly evolving.
For example, quantum physics has opened our eyes to the fact that things are far more complex than one might initially believe, for quantum physics bends and sometimes even defies concepts of classical logic and rationality, and yet, it is based upon sound reasoning, upon what may be considered newer and somewhat different types of logic and rationality. I think that it would be unreasonable to suggest that quantum physicists
"do not generally have a high IQ" simply because they believe things that seem illogical and incomprehensible to other people.
Thus, perhaps it is not such a stretch to suggest that religious belief can also be assessed and understood within a new/different framework of logic and rationality, for although it may defy older systems of thought (systems of thought that possibly rendered it absurd and false), it can, perhaps, exist quite comfortably in newer systems of thought.
This idea is not necessarily new: I am quite certain that there have been highly intelligent people/thinkers in previous eras, even thousands of years ago, who found ways to understand and accept their own religious beliefs, quite possibly by using deep understandings of the possibilities of different types of logic and reasoning, similar to those that are used today.
In conclusion, I do not think that it is fair nor reasonable to make a broad generalisation about religious believers, suggesting that they have low IQs for believing something that someone else does not believe, for there are obviously very intelligent religious people out there, whose reasons for believing almost require having a high IQ to understand.
Yes, but when I generalize, I try to find the exceptions.