Contending For The Faith---Part 29

 

In St. Jude 1:3, we read, "Dearly beloved, taking all care to write unto you concerning your common salvation, I was under a necessity to write unto you: to beseech you to contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints." [Emphasis mine]. Contending For The Faith is a series of posts dedicated to apologetics (i.e.,  the intellectual defense of the truth of the Traditional Catholic Faith) to be published the first Monday of each month.  This is the next installment.

Sadly, in this time of Great Apostasy, the faith is under attack like never before, and many Traditionalists don't know their faith well enough to defend it. Remember the words of our first pope, "But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect..." (1Peter 3:16). There are five (5) categories of attacks that will be dealt with in these posts. Attacks against:

• The existence and attributes of God
• The truth of the One True Church established by Christ for the salvation of all 
• The truth of a particular dogma or doctrine of the Church
• The truth of Catholic moral teaching
• The truth of the sedevacantist position as the only Catholic solution to what has happened since Vatican II 

In addition, controversial topics touching on the Faith will sometimes be featured, so that the problem and possible solutions may be better understood. If anyone had suggestions for topics that would fall into any of these categories, you may post them in the comments. I cannot guarantee a post on each one, but each will be carefully considered.

Are Atheists Smarter Than Believers?

A few years back, I had an argument with another lawyer with whom I worked. He was an atheist and about as arrogant as you can be. He challenged me on a point of law concerning one of my cases, telling me that the case would be lost unless I changed the particular process of service I was planning to use. He was the type of guy who couldn't let anything go, and gave me no small amount of grief by constantly asking me "Are you going to change the way you serve your summons and complaint"? followed by an argument when I said "no." 

Final outcome: not only was service fine, I won the case. The next time I saw him, I said, "Before you tell me something is wrong over and over, it might help if you actually understood the topic you were discussing." He turned red with anger. About a week later, he came into my office when the door was open, and slapped a paper on my desk. "If you were really so smart, you wouldn't be praying to imaginary friends in the sky, " he said as he turned and quickly left. 

He printed out an article, the headline of which read: "Atheists are more intelligent than religious people, finds study" It referenced this study: The Relation Between Intelligence and Religiosity: A Meta-Analysis and Some Proposed Explanations.

(See journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1088868313497266) . 

Here is the study Abstract:

 A meta-analysis of 63 studies showed a significant negative association between intelligence and religiosity. The association was stronger for college students and the general population than for participants younger than college age; it was also stronger for religious beliefs than religious behavior. For college students and the general population, means of weighted and unweighted correlations between intelligence and the strength of religious beliefs ranged from −.20 to −.25 (mean r = −.24). Three possible interpretations were discussed. First, intelligent people are less likely to conform and, thus, are more likely to resist religious dogma. Second, intelligent people tend to adopt an analytic (as opposed to intuitive) thinking style, which has been shown to undermine religious beliefs. Third, several functions of religiosity, including compensatory control, self-regulation, self-enhancement, and secure attachment, are also conferred by intelligence. Intelligent people may therefore have less need for religious beliefs and practices.

As a result of this study, I find this alleged “fact” that regularly makes the rounds online: “Studies show that theists are less intelligent than atheists.”  Atheists, like my lawyer colleague, want to reinforce their claim that religion is for the poor, ignorant, unintelligent, and non-believers are well-off, well-educated, and super-smart. 

The purpose of this post will be to explain what this study (and those like it) really means. I will then show some very unintelligent attacks on faith used by atheists; attacks which only seem intelligent. 

I have taken this information from numerous sources, both online and in books. I wish to credit these sources and will take personal credit only for putting all the information into a terse and readable post. God bless you all, my dear readers---Introibo

What Studies Really Prove

First, many people should be acquainted with the power of  statistics to bolster weak arguments. To paraphrase and old adage, "There are three types of lies: white lies, big lies, and statistics." So let me say from the very outset that even if we could reliably measure which group is smarter, the answer wouldn’t tell us anything about the truth of Christianity. Intelligence doesn’t equate to always having the right answer.

Second, what do those 63 studies actually demonstrate? A breakdown reveals the following:

• 35 showed a significant negative relationship between intelligence and religiousness (the more intelligent a person, the less likely to be religious).
• 2 showed a significant positive relationship between intelligence and religiousness (the more intelligent a person, the more likely to be religious).
• 26 showed no significant relationship between intelligence and religiousness.

Therefore, roughly 55.5% of the studies found religious people less intelligent than atheists, but almost half (44.5%) found showed no such finding. The researchers of the meta-analysis wrote: The relation between intelligence and religiosity has been examined repeatedly, but so far there is no clear consensus on the direction and/or the magnitude of this association. (See study citation above).

Yet, the atheists are trying to show this as a definitive statement of fact that they are scientifically proven to be more intelligent than believers. They are depending on "sound bites" from the media that are misleading and the lack of checking by religious people as to the actual content of the meta-analysis. 

The validity of this meta-analysis is inconclusive. There are several major methodological flaws:

• Some studied precollege teens, some studied college students, and some studied non-college adults (people recruited outside an academic context).
• Sample sizes ranged from 20 to more than 14,000
• The studies were done over an 84-year span of time (the earliest study in 1928, the most recent in 2012)

How do you measure "religiosity"?  Some studies measured religious behavior (for example, church attendance and/or participation in religious organizations) and some measured religious beliefs (for example, belief in God and the Bible). This is very difficult to quantify. 

There are problems with the intelligence measurements. Twenty-three different types of tests were used to measure intelligence (for example, university entrance exams, vocabulary tests, scientific literacy tests, etc.). Details weren’t provided on how exactly each study measured religious behavior and beliefs, but that surely varied extensively as well.

Serious methodological concerns aside, The results suggest a negative relationship specifically between intelligence and religious belief for adults, but the mathematical magnitude of that relationship is very small. Religious belief has a very weak negative relationship with intelligence for college and non-college adults. (The higher the intelligence, the less likely a person is to have religious beliefs; the weak relationship is a -0.17 correlation between intelligence and religious beliefs for the college studies and a -0.20 correlation for the non-college studies). To give an example, I wouldn't consider someone with an IQ of 120 to be "less intelligent" than someone with an IQ of 125. The difference is not large enough to be significant.

When combatting this nonsense that is how to respond. You should not list the impressive geniuses who believed in God, such as Aquinas, Bonaventure, Copernicus, Bruno, Kepler, Galileo, Pascal, Descartes, Newton, Bach, and Mendel, just to name a very few. It doesn’t matter if the 50 or even 1,000 most intelligent people on Earth are theists or not—that doesn’t statistically mean anything about the relative intelligence of theists as a group. Engage instead on the studies underlying the atheists’ claims by sharing this analysis.

Twenty (Vacuous) Statements

One of the many loathsome atheists doing all he can to take people away from God is Michael Nugent. Nugent is the chairman of Atheist Ireland. The group describes itself as follows:

Atheist Ireland is a democratic and successful advocacy group for secularism, rationality, pluralism and human rights. We led the successful campaign to Repeal the Irish Blasphemy Law, and we are the only national-level atheist advocacy group to have special consultative status at the United Nations.

Formed in November 2008, Atheist Ireland promotes atheism and reason over superstition and supernaturalism, and also promotes an ethical, secular society where the State does not support or finance or give special treatment to any religion.

Atheist Ireland has a democratic structure and is a major player in leading reform, promoting wellbeing, equality, justice, rationality and human rights in Ireland and abroad. We adhere to a policy of peaceful and legal advocacy via debates, media, information tables, lunches, education, lobbying and rational argument etc. (See atheist.ie/information/about/).

Just before Vatican II, Ireland stood with Belgium, Italy, and Spain as among the most Catholic countries on Earth. As of 2022, almost 15% of Ireland has no religion. (See https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-cpp5/census2022profile5-diversitymigrationethnicityirishtravellersreligion/religion/#:~:text=Census%202022%20Results&text=The%20number%20of%20people%20who,they%20were%20Agnostic%20or%20Atheist.)

Ah, the "New Springtime of Vatican II"! Moving things along, Nugent has frequently discussed "20 statements" that make "God improbable." While I have not been able to locate a list of all twenty statements, I have found some. Rather than "making God improbable," they make Nugent nonsensical. 

I will list a small sample of his statements against God, with a short response below. (N.B. Nugent blasphemously refers to God as "it.")

1. If God is changeless then "it" (God) cannot create anything because it would have to change in order to do so.

Response: That God cannot change intrinsically and substantially conceded; that He cannot change externally and accidentally, denied. God, considered in Himself, is changeless. He "changes" insofar as He created a world with people, and He can interact with them.

2. If it is all-perfect and all-good then it would have created a perfect universe. At a minimum a perfect universe would not contain suffering or evil. If the response is that even a perfect God can only do what is logically possible then it is logically possible to have a universe without suffering or evil.

Response: It is not true that if God is all-perfect and all-good then he must create a perfect universe. That is a false assumption. On the one hand, it may be that a perfect universe is impossible. It is not feasible for God to create a world in which there are free moral agents who always do the right thing and never go wrong. Secondly, there can be cases in which God may permit suffering or evil in order to achieve some greater good. So it is just not true that in virtue of God’s perfection he has to create a world without suffering or evil. Therefore, Nugent simply fails to reckon with this crucial distinction that philosophers make between what is logically possible and what is feasible for God.

3. If God is perfect but we don’t understand how then why did God have to intervene in this perfect universe through miracles?

Response: It is NOT true that we don’t understand what God’s perfection means. We don't fully understand his moral perfection and holiness. However, the reason for miracles is that they serve as signs to people of God’s existence and activity. When Jesus Christ performed His dramatic miracles, these were signs to the people of the arrival of the Messiah in His Person. Jesus’ miracles and exorcisms were signs of  Hid Divinity. 

4.  If God is all-knowing then it knows the taste of strawberry yogurt. Yet, if it doesn’t have a body or senses then how can it know the state of anything? If the response is that saying what it knows is the truth of the proposition then it is not all-knowing; it is less than all-knowing.

Response: When someone is tasting strawberry yogurt, there is a certain mental state that the person is in. Why can’t God simply put Himself into that same mental state without having a body or taste buds? I don’t see any reason to think that He couldn’t. If there is a mental state associated with the taste of yogurt or the feeling of a rough surface or the sound of something, God can put Himself into such a mental state and thereby have that mental experience even though he doesn’t have a body with eardrums and nerve endings and taste buds.

Conclusion

The so-called "scientific fact" of atheistic superiority in intelligence is really a bald-faced lie. The meta-analysis based on various other studies does not support that contention at all. Moreover, non-believers, like Nugent, merely display their gross and culpable ignorance when making statements that demonstrate a lack of understanding of theism. "For professing themselves to be wise, they became fools." (Romans 1:22).