The relationship between rising IQ and decreased religiosity is not causal in the way “Brights” and other arrogant atheists assume it is.

Rising IQs and the Decline of Faith

by JOE BISSONNETTE

For a little more than 100 years we’ve had standardized IQ tests, and over those 100 years there has been a consistent, linear increase in IQ scores, on the order of 3 points per decade. According to IQ tests, we are getting smarter. Also over the last 100 years, rates of belief in God and religious participation have been decreasing. The decrease in religiosity has been less linear than the rise in IQ, but discounting periods of increased religiosity corresponding to major crises like WWI, the Great Depression and WWII, overall there has been a roughly corresponding decrease in religiosity. Correlation does not mean causation but the increase in IQ and the decrease in faith might be linked, if not as cause and effect then possibly as two simultaneous effects traceable to a common cause.

The Flynn Effect, named after Professor James R. Flynn, is the discovery that IQ around the world—as measured by standardized tests—has been rising at a rate of 3 points per decade for as long as the tests have been conducted.

When IQ tests are standardized using a sample of test-takers, the average is set at 100. When IQ tests are revised every few years, they are again standardized using a new sample of test-takers. Again the average result is set for 100. However when the new test subjects take the older tests, in almost every case their average scores are significantly above 100. This trend continues all the way back to the beginning of standardized IQ tests and has dramatic implications for relative intelligence in 1900 as compared to today. In a New Yorker article titled None of the Above, Malcolm Gladwell extrapolates the staggering implications:

If an American born in the nineteen-thirties has an IQ of 100, the Flynn Effect says that his children will have IQs of 108, and his grandchildren IQs of close to 120—more than a standard deviation higher. If we work in the opposite direction, the typical teenager of today, with an IQ of 100, would have had grandparents with average IQs of 82—seemingly below the threshold necessary to graduate from high school. And, if we go back even farther, the Flynn Effect puts the average IQs of the school children of 1900 at around 70, which is to suggest, bizarrely, that a century ago the United States was populated largely by people who today would be considered mentally retarded….

It is important to note that James Flynn and virtually everyone studying IQ categorically rejects this conclusion. IQ tests consist of 7 types of questions: Verbal Intelligence, Mathematical Intelligence, Spatial Reasoning Skills, Visual/Perceptual Skills, Classification Skills, Logical Reasoning Skills and Pattern Recognition Skills. As Flynn points out in an interview in Scientific American, some of these skill areas have increased dramatically, but not all aspects of intelligence have increased.

“[T]here have been massive gains on these tests that require using logic on abstractions, like block design, [and] picture arrangement. Block designs are, sort of, a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. And there have been very small gains on vocabulary, general information and arithmetical reasoning.” The big category gains in intelligence have been in abstract, categorical and hypothetical thinking, neatly summarized as ACH.

When asked why there have been these gains in IQ, Flynn says: “Well, I think it’s highly visual. I find my students—and I think every professor finds it—you ask them to name their favorite author today: No favorite author, or Wilbur Smith or Tolkien. Fifty years ago they would say Huxley, Steinbeck, Faulkner.”

We have become more visual and less literary, more abstract, categorical and hypothetical and less narrative, more logical-sequential and less relational. But the change which Flynn cites dates back much more than 50 years.

For intellectuals the change came with Enlightenment Evidentialism, the scientific method and the demystification of the universe, but for the rest of us who had lived within our bodies as well as in our heads, the change came with the Industrial Revolution.

My grandfather was not an engineer, steeped in the pure abstraction of mathematics, but he invented and patented the dipstick. Albert Einstein famously worked in a patent office and the explosion in patents after the Industrial Revolution was less about the legal registration of intellectual property than the popular explosion in abstract thinking and hypothesizing. The transformation of the architecture symbolizes this change as clearly as anything else. New buildings were not ornate and grandiose, rather they wore their guts on the outside, unornamented i-beams and gears proudly displaying the way they were made and how they worked.

Since the Industrial Revolution we see differently and we live within the world differently. As we have become more abstract and categorical we have become psychologically detached from our environment; we see it as if from the outside, rather than inhabit it. Through the rise of the mechanical imagination, then the electric imagination, then the electronic imagination and now the internet imagination, the stuff of the world no longer has essence, it is merely plastic to be manipulated in whatever way we see fit. We’ve moved away from oral and literary narrative imaginations in which there was nature, of which we were a part.

This has made us less receptive to God revealed in nature and in scripture.

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