[sweetjazz]

Another perspective: I find it no more problematic that the common person's religious beliefs are fanciful and not based on logical analysis than that the common person's scientific beliefs are fanciful and not based on logical analysis. (Indeed, in both cases the beliefs are often based on choosing to defer to particular authorities, one reason that traction cannot be made in the evolution v. intelligent design debate. For the common person, choosing sides is a matter of deferring to one set of beliefs over another, as opposed to analyzing which set of beliefs is science and which isn't.)

Among such people, it is clear that they will never have much success in science or business or much of anything that doesn't involve them doing as they are told.

To me, it is much more interesting to examine people who do have the ability to think for themselves. Such people may become good poker players or scientists or options traders, but they may equally well become a theologian or a minister. (Of course, not all of those careers consist entirely of people who are good at logical analysis.) There are and have been some brilliant theologians, people who assume (and typically believe) a certain set of propositions based on religious texts and traditions, and then use analytical thinking to try to deduce the consequences those beliefs have in formulating and verifying (or debunking) other interesting propositions.

Among such people -- people with a well-trained ability to analyze data and reason from hypothesis to conclusions using logical principles -- I suspect the decision of what to pursue in life is largely dictated between their attitude toward the purpose of their existence. To the extent that they tend to see it as fulfilling their own wishes and desires, they are less likely to be interested in religious thought and more interested in, for example, playing poker. To the extent that they tend to see it as serving some higher purpose (possibly but not necessarily divine), they are more likely to be interested in religious and cultural and political fields, and less so in games like poker or bridge or fields such as mathematics and physical sciences.

In other words, we can divide people into those capable of analytical thinking and those not. (Of course, we cannot really do this, as there would be a spectrum of analytical thinking skills, not a binary set of possibilities.) Among those without analytical skills, we acknowledge that there is a higher propensity for religious belief, often accepted because it was passed down from their parents or simply because its teaching are comforting. Nevertheless, even among those with analytical skills, there is still a significant amount of religious belief. Thus, we cannot conclude that religious belief precludes the development of analytic thinking or that analytic thinking leads one to reject religious beliefs. It only indicates that among analytic thinkers, religious belief is nearly as common as in the culture at large.

I don't see any connection among analytic thinkers (returning now to seeing analytic skills as a spectrum) between their skill in analytical reasoning and their religious beliefs. That is, if we sample the entire population, then obviously non-believers will test higher in e.g. IQ tests than believers. But if we choose to sample only those with a certain minimal amount of analytic reasoning skills, we would find that there are still a large number of believers and non-believers and I posit that in this sample, the IQ test scores would be much closer. (There would be a certain bias toward people who routinely solve puzzles and play games.) This was my point about the observations I made in regard to the very intelligent people I have met. They are much more likely to be non-religious than the mainstream population, but within this sample, I could detect no difference in ability between religious and non-religious. There are even extreme examples of rather literalist religious believers who are quite good mathematicians, though literalist believers are very uncommon in the sample.