Religious Disbelief and Intelligence: The Failure of a Contemporary Attempt to Correlate National Mean IQs and Rates of Atheism

Abstract

In 2008 Richard Lynn, with the collaboration of Helmuth Nyborg and John Harvey, argued that one can predict the extent to which rates of disbelief in God will occur in 137 countries by considering the psychometric intelligence of their populations. They relied heavily on international statistics of atheism compiled by Phil Zuckerman and correlated these with data which Lynn had compiled about national mean IQ levels. It is argued in the present response to that study that it is severely flawed by a failure to appreciate the widely varying notions of divinity and what belief entails in diverse cultures, selective use of statistical data, downplaying many nations that do not fit the model, and untenable explanations for countries like the United States that squarely contradict the hypothesis. There is no firm evidence of a significant global correlation between national IQ levels and rates of disbelief in God.