
Originally Posted by
Politesse
I think you mean hypotheses; theories by definition have been empirically tested and not discarded. Intelligence is itself a deeply problematic concept from a scientific point of view, a largely subjective judgement that relies heavily on models of cultural expectation. One can be demonstrably skilled at a specific task, but choosing which tasks are important when making essentialist value statements about others is an inherently arbitrary process.
No I mean theory. I suspect you could find an overwhelming amount of evidence that shows low general intelligence is correlated with religiosity.
I'm mainly taking my argument from
The Intelligence Paradox by Satoshi Kanazawa. Maybe intelligence as a concept is problematic to science, but 'General Intelligence' as far as I understand it measures a very specific ability of a person to solve
novel problems in their environment. For example, if you put a person in a weird situation, how likely are they to get out of it.
Said book posits that people with high general intelligence are very likely to act in ways that are novel historically.. less kids, less religion, etc, and shows this to in fact be the case with data.
When you look at something like religion you could easily frame it as just another 'problem' (if our goal is accurate understanding and not something like social cohesion). For a person to see through the facade takes significant intellectual ability, and so we should see people with less intellect making up a higher proportion of believers than atheists.
In that way, yes religion is passed down from parents to children, but in addition to that there is going to be a
genetic propensity to conform to the same beliefs.