Who would you choose the get the short straw and live in the fundamentalist community? And how would you ensure that the atheist groups did not just replace religious indoctrination with some other thing such as patriotism which may also have the power to restrict thinking and creativity?Skip wrote:There hasn't been a valid comparison has there?
The problem is, most people start out with a given set of genetic predispositions and capacities. But they're helpless infants, at the mercy of their environment, which is dominated by adults with firmly-established belief systems, into which they are determined to form, knead, mold and otherwise reconfigure their offspring. Most of us haven't been given the choice of religions, or freedom from religion, or any freedom of thought, until we're strong enough to fight off the authorities who tell us what to believe. For most children, that's not before the late teens - for the majority, it's never. Starting with that kind of handicap, I would expect only the toughest, most independent, most determined minds to shake off their early indoctrination completely. So what we're comparing is the exceptional to the average - it's no surprise if they score higher.
The only way to tell whether religion aids or hinders the development of intelligence and creativity, is to conduct a rigorous study. Start with a large pool of newborns, randomly selected from all socio-ethnic backgrounds. We'd have to raise at least one group, but preferably several, in strictly religious families and communities, a strictly atheist group, and a control group wholly free from any suggestion of religion or the supernatural - each group isolated not only from the others, but also from a society full of competing folklores.
In 20 years, we'd have a pretty good idea. (and maybe a macroscope)
Actually history has sort of done the experiment in a limited way, and in ways that is contestable. But nonetheless, period of religious fracture such as the Reformation was followed by the flowering of what they like to call the Enlightenment, and much work has been done to show the forms of thinking that Protestantism opened up.
I think it was Max Weber who saw the Protestants as changing the way we look at scripture from a Deductive way to an Inductive way. Both the idea that religion could be challenged and with the idea that the Bible could be looked on as a piece of evidence for how to live our lives, changed the power if the Catholic Church whose word was law, and who used the bible to find things that conformed to a generalisation (deductive). The switch in favour of inductive thinking led to many new scientific discoveries. I think it no coincidence that breaking this intellectual spell helped bring about the invention of the USA, the growth of science, astronomy, and political change. And there is a good reason why Spain and other strict Catholic countries began to fall behind the Protestant Dutch and British.
