Genome,

A good way to approach the subject is in a Socratic method - asking a question.[i] "If we find study after study that IQ of atheists is higher than that of religious people in comparable socio-demographic samples, what can we infer from these studies?"[/i]

Before, of course, you need to establish that the IQ testing techniques are acceptable to the other party as a benchmark and then go from there. Or, if you are dealing with scientific method and its understanding among laymen and scientists, one needs to establish acceptance of stats that the higher degree of education is the lower is the percentage of religious people demonstrable from high school to PhD levels across the board in every developed country, and the same can be done with Christians acceptance of evolution correlated to education levels, etc.

If you cannot agree on the basics of what you are discussing (i.e. empirical data from multiple sources over extended period of time in the case of IQ uests), you cannot hold a meaningful conversation with these people. Kind of like speaking English and Mandarin if neither party understands each other. Once they accept that commonly used IQ tests are methodologically sound (this way they will never be able to backtrack on methodology) and that sample sizes are sufficient (1,000-10,000 will give you a 3.5-0.5% error rate) then the only thing that is left to say is that facts are what the studies are as facts speak for themselves.

This is an interesting point. More generally, asking what do we agree on, what do we disagree on, and what methods are available to us to investigate the areas of disagreement would be a way to start a conversation with someone who was interested in longterm, productive discussion.

I like the suggestion Dagny. However, Mike wasn’t arguing with the data I referenced. Instead Mike concludes that if I suggest Atheists are indeed more intelligent than their peers on average, then he can conclude that Atheists themselves believe they are more intelligent than their peers. While it might be true that Atheist make this assumption, that’s not supported by the data I referenced.

So although you didn’t make an argument against the data I referenced Mike, I’ll heed Dagny’s (is the correct way to shorten it) recommendation and ask for your position on the Data.

You gave an example that supports my contention that Atheists THINK they are more intelligent than believers.

So, yes, I think your post can be INFERRED to support my original inference.

Yes and it would be an even better idea to first find out how many were actually Atheists, and how many are just going along with the crowd:

New Pew survey: 21% of atheists believe in God

A good number of Atheists are not 100% certain that there is no entity with some form of intelligence that somehow created us. They are not Atheists, they are Agnostics (the middle ground), but the Atheism movement also welcomes all in between.

I would need to see results from science classrooms where Agnostics are separated out from the two religious extremes. The way the study was constructed it did not represent reality. I would expect a bell curve, or can go the other way, especially in tests that pertain to retina biology which require knowledge of muller cells, which would be a disaster for Atheists and others still being taught such cells do not exist, while CRSQ has over the years been reporting the most up to date research on retina biology but only something creationists would have read up on, believe it or not.

On the very ends of a (3 or more point) curve, religious bias is expected to become more extreme. Two data points cannot show that curve, therefore technique that was used is misleading.

IQ/intelligence tests with questions referencing retina and muller cells? Are you serious?

What study are you talking about here, "The way the study was constructed it did not represent reality" and here "On the very ends of a (3 or more point) curve, religious bias is expected to become more extreme. Two data points cannot show that curve, it's misleading"?

CRSQ reporting the most up to date research on retina biology. By "reporting" do you mean disussing research done by others and published else where first. Or actual novel retina muller cell research published first at CRSQ?

I would want to see how the numbers change in tests that gauge their scientific knowledge in things like parts of the human eye, where muller cell light-guides are as important as a lens for gathering light and should be standard K-12 knowledge by now.



The study you mentioned, that concluded Atheists have a higher IQ than Theists. It's not an accurate model of reality. In reality there are two religious extremes and a large middle ground (once called Agnostic, now misclassified as Atheist).


Here are two topics that I wrote to explain what was happening, second credits a very useful CRSQ paper that I badly needed for my work:

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1050

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1053

I referenced several papers, which one had the flaws you pointed out? And muller cells being included in k-12 education is simply not true.

I would like to contribute to this forum. When I make statements based on research and investigations, I have generally done my homework. So when posters make these types of claims,

"while CRSQ has over the years been reporting the most up to date research on retina biology" it makes it difficult to contribute.

Seriously, what are you basing this on. Clearly thousands of papers and investigations have been done on retina cells, claiming that the majority of the novel research is published at CRSQ is simply dishonest.

I would not say "flaws" the problem is this type of thing does not test for what I have been observing.



Muller cells are vital to know about when studying how the eye works, and not being in K-12 by now would just be one more part of the problem that results in what is being tested for being biased or relatively useless, because of what is not taught, that should be. If the Atheist movement isn't all excited or embarrassed by it, only Creationists like the new knowledge, then it's not considered important or can easily be assumed to be pseudoscience.


And if my work that needed the CRSQ paper really bad is nothing at all to you, then you shut me off to begin with, do not care about advancing science by making sure all are working from accurate unbiased scientific information.


I'm basing things on value to SCIENCE which is a body on knowledge that explains how things work, that at the time did not have a single paper like that in any journal, website or anywhere else. You now seem to be expecting me to judge papers based on religion of the source, instead of usefulness to people like me who actually study and model vision systems.

"I would not say "flaws" the problem is this type of thing does not test for what I have been observing."

More likely doesn't agree with your observations given you don't know what the investigation consisted of. Gary it is clear to me now that you read none of the papers I referenced. When I read your response to those papers I first assumed you read them.

"The way the study was constructed it did not represent reality" so this was in response to the general conclusions that I described of all the studies, and not an actual study as you claimed.

Gary wrote: I'm basing things on value to SCIENCE which is a body on knowledge that explains how things work, that at the time did not have a single paper like that in any journal, website or anywhere else. You now seem to be expecting me to judge papers based on religion of the source, instead of usefulness to people like me who actually study and model vision systems.

When discussing scientific issues I first focuss on the objective not the subjective. I don't expect you to judge anything, lets be objective on this issue. I am not judging any paper. Lots of papers have been published on retina biology, without placing value judgements on any of them, the vast majority have not been published in CRSQ.

Why are Atheists to blaim for the presence or absence of muller cells in science curriculum?

Genome, I understand that it is rare for CRSQ to have such an excellent paper like “Why the Inverted Human Retina Is a Superior Design” by Jerry Bergman and Joseph Calkins, but that is not reason to not give credit where due, for an excellent right-on-time summary of the evidence, without leaving anything out.

After that saved me months of sorting all the scattered all over the place information I was then further into the circuit for how insect brains work, then later this model became easy:


http://www.planet-source-code.com/vb/sc ... 5&lngWId=1

Muller cells are our light collection facets. On an insect the same idea is located on the outside with lens behind. In our design the image gets projected to hexagonal grid of muller cells that delivers light straight into their sensors. Knowing this makes it safe to say both compound or inverted eye models can be approximated with the same algorithm code, just drawn/positioned different depending on optic design. Not knowing makes it hard to say what it's modeling, do not know it's correctly modeling the light collection properties of what are now known to be muller cells.

Assuming that Richard Dawkins and others could not have been wrong, did honestly seem to lead to not first checking for something like that. After it was experimentally shown to be otherwise the Atheism movement all but ignored the news. There was bias, with it being no stretch of the imagination to expect some anyway. A person like me can even get in trouble for mentioning.

It would be useful to know whether K-12 is up to date on retina biology. If 0% omit muller cells from their curriculum that pertains to how the human eye works then it’s possible to conclude that there has been no public school level bias. Else have to find the reason why science teachers were not right away informed of something that important, like they would where Richard Dawkins and others in the movement expected it. From my knowledge, self-correcting the previously established retina biology was never made a priority. I would like to know whether it was none the less corrected by more internal public school mechanism. Do you have references or something on that?

Gary, we are talking about intelligence and measures of intelligence regarding atheist and theists. We are also discussing papers and investigations on this topic, papers you previously refered to as if you had read them. Not to mention the inferences one can make about Atheists in general. The field of biology is rather wide and deep, I really don't care to discuss muller cells, at least not without finishing the previous conversation. Care to get back on topic?

Actually, to be more specific, the question was what inferences can be made from a position of atheism.

Jack thinks that no inferences can be made from a postion of atheism; but I think that one, among others I named, is that atheists end up THINKING they are smarter than believers.

And you have provided a good illustration of that point, "Genome".

Then am I a theist or an atheist?

If you believe I cannot be an atheist then what makes me a theist? Is it a theory that is supposed to be scripture?


I have seen these studies before, and as I explained simply comparing theist to atheist hides a very large amount of bias and theists who normally say they are atheists but are not. The methods that were used cannot show the bell curve I would expect when the most devout atheists flunk a test that requires them to be up to date in science instead of muddling along with old views that are not true while proudly judging the scientific merit of theories by their religious implications and other things that show their scientific method is very messed up. If what you are suggesting were true, then Joseph Stalin would be known as a great scientific genius and Russia would now be a scientific and economic paradise. I find nothing intelligent about being in a hurry to repeat such tragic history...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressed ... viet_Union

This would mean then that probably Stalin was smarter that Roosevelt, Mussolini was smarter than Churchill, Jean Paul Sartre was smarter that Albert Schweitzer, and so forth.