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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

Seriously, though, why do we keep hearing that atheists are smart?  Is it something we're supposed to "believe" despite plenty of hard evidence above?[/quote]

Of course people who don't believe a load of superstitious nonsense are, on average, going to be smarter than people who do.  There is plenty of evidence to support this - e.g.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289608001013
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289608000238
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/news/file002.html

But to be honest, no amount of evidence will convince you. Religious people don't put their trust in reason or rationality, they put their trust in faith.  Why use reason when you can go with a bunch of random stories you have heard because of where and when you were raised, like children waiting for santa claus.[/quote]

I am not the person you are sparring with, and my whole family is physical scientists, mathematicians, and engineers.

There is a selection problem in the statistics behind your assertion.  Atheists in our society are iconoclasts.  It takes some intelligence to have the independence to go against societal norms.  Conversely, it is easy for people of low intelligence to go along with the dominant beliefs.  So if you measure intelligence for the two groups, you'll find intelligence differences due to that effect, which is difficult to disentangle from the merits of the positions themselves.  I am sure you are intelligent enough to see the problem.  Certainly I think that people who are educated in science see the possibility of a world that does not need God to explain physical phenomena, and therefore they are more often atheist, but having a good explanation for the physical world is only one category of arguments for religion.

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