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 Editorials | Opinions | June 2008 
Clever People are Atheists. Cleverer Ones Aren’t.
 Christopher Howse - UK Telegraph
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| | Charles Darwin: agnostic | | |
A retired professor has said that a higher proportion of clever people consider themselves atheists than the national average. Professor Richard Lynn, though no doubt clever himself, is hardly uncontroversial.
One of his interests is IQ differences between races. “In 1991 I extended my work on race differences in intelligence to other races,” he says on his website.
“I concluded that the average IQ of blacks in sub-Saharan Africa is approximately 70. It has long been known that the average IQ of blacks in the United States is approximately 85. The explanation for the higher IQ of American blacks is that they have about 25 per cent of Caucasian genes and a better environment.” Gosh.
Anyway, let’s get back to clever people and God. Really clever people – Dante, Shakespeare, Milton – are big enough to believe in God. It is only the followers of fashion who don’t believe in God when atheism is the fashion. They have less trouble when belief in God is the path to preferment.
Fifty years ago Marxism was fashionable in universities, and academics defended Stalin and Mao and suchlike atheistic monsters. Nowadays Marxism is out of fashion, so the middle-ranking brainboxes see themselves in the mould of doubters like Darwin.
Actually Darwin would be a good case-study for Professor Lynn, with his enthusiasm for eugenics. Charles Darwin’s family on both sides – the Darwins and the Wedgwoods – had a blind spot on religion, as Gwen Raverat showed in her charming book Period Piece.
Poor Charles believed in God when he was young, but in later life became confused on the subject, and could never quite make it out. Eventually he declared that “generally (& more & more as I grow older), but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind”. What could be clearer? |
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