Science: Atheists Are Smarter Than Religious. But Are Too Stupid to Have Babies

Make. It. Stop.

This piece from Newsweek is just too painful. Essentially the crux of the piece is that SCIENCE says that atheists are smarter than dumb religious people who are dumb but atheists keep forgetting to have babies probably because they’re annoying and women don’t like them. (I added the annoying part but the rest is actually what they’re saying.)

Atheists tend to be more intelligent than religious people because they are able to rise above the natural instinct to believe in a god or gods, scientists have said.

But according to Edward Dutton, from the Ulster Institute for Social Research in the U.K., and Dimitri Van der Linden, of the Rotterdam University in the Netherlands, this could also lead to their decline—in the same way high intelligence appears to have played a role in the fall of the Roman Empire.

Dutton and Van der Linder build on the theory that religion is instinctive, and it evolved as a behavior that helped humans become the highly successful species they are today.   

There has been a great deal of research into how religion originated, with the most prevalent idea being it evolved to help societies to form —believing there was heaven and hell, for example, would ensure cooperative, social behavior over fears of eternal damnation.

But now society has developed, why does religion still exist?

Ancient Greek and Roman texts show that even thousands of years ago, the link between intelligence, religion and atheism had been formed. More recently, scientific studies suggest a clear correlation between lower intelligence and religiousness.

In a study published in the journal Evolutionary Psychological Science, Dutton and Van der Linden say the link between higher intelligence and atheism, and lower intelligence with religion, can be accounted for by our instincts.

According to the study, our genes mean belief in religion is instinctive—it did, after all, help us develop as a species. Having a higher intelligence, they say, allows people to override these instincts and engage in more rational, and therefore enhanced problem-solving behavior.

Atheists at the Reason Rally on the National Mall in 2012 in Washington, DC. Study says atheists are more intelligent than religious people because they can ignore their instincts.

But this is not all good news for non-believers, nor does it mean heightened intelligence will be selected, eventually leading to a species full of hyper-intelligent atheists. Instead, the ability to override your instincts would likely lead to a decline in intelligent, atheist people, because they are more likely to be antisocial and to have fewer children—or to not have them at all.
“It’s true that people who are less intelligent tend to have more children than people who are more intelligent,” Dutton tells Newsweek . “And intelligence is negatively associated with religiousness. So on that basis, you would expect religiousness to increase.

“If you have higher intelligence, you’re less instinctive. You’re lower in what you might call ‘evolved instincts’ that have evolved over thousands and thousands of years until the Industrial Revolution, when natural selection slowed down.”

Junk science from a junk publication. Yeah, sounds right.