Q5: Most people around the world believe in God; isn't it arrogant to think you're smarter than most people around the world?

Patrick Julius answers: What do you mean by God, anyhow ? If you mean love, truth, beauty, meaning, a higher power, a purpose to life, a cause to the universe, a Creator, or whatever else I could list that someone, somewhere might call "God," then yes, most people in the world believe in God. If I define a unicorn as equivalent to a chair, then most people believe in unicorns, too. If you pick any particular definition of God (say, the Christian definition, or the Hindu definition), then in fact most people do not believe in any particular definition of God; no religious belief or worldview holds a majority of human minds in the world today. In fact, atheism (and its relatives, agnosticism, humanism, and so on) holds the position of 4th most commonly held belief system in the world, after Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. It is more prevalent than Buddhism and far more prevalent than Judaism.

And even if that weren't the case: There was a time when most people in the world thought the Sun revolved around the Earth. In fact, basically everyone did. There was a time when most people in the world believed that slavery was morally acceptable.

The whole world can be wrong about things, even really obvious and important things.

And as a matter of fact, if you measure in terms of standard IQ, I am smarter than most people in the world. Mmy composite IQ is 3.4 standard deviations from the average. That means only about 0.3% of people (that's still 2 million people!) are smarter than I am, and about 99.7% of people are not as "smart" as I am. Indeed, there is an inverse correlation between IQ and religiosity, with people of higher IQ tender to be atheists (Richard Dawkins), agnostics (Stephen Jay Gould), deists (Isaac Newton), or pantheists (Albert Einstein). 93% of the National Academy of Sciences is non-religious. Atheists don't just think we're smart; on the whole, we actually are.

Though, don't take my word for it; click here to read an article that cites the data from a 1998 study published in Nature, or here to read the original correspondence from Nature. The Wikipedia article on "Atheism" also has a long list of sources about correlational studies on religion, nearly all of which show an inverse correlation between intellect, education, success, and scientific knowledge and level of religious belief.

Posted November 8, 2007; edited on November 9, 2007, to add citations for NAS data. Patrick is the president of the Secular Student Alliance at the University of Michigan.