The New Atheists tend to annoy their opponents with their apparent smugness and arrogance, typified by their conscription of the term "Brights" to apply to themselves, a self-attribution promoted by Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. However, it appears that not all atheists are all that "bright".

Using the GSS: SDA (General Social Survey: Survey Documentation Analysis) 1972 - 2008 one finds that 11.5% of those who do not believe that God exists have an IQ of 71 or less (i.e a mild to moderate degree of intellectual impairment). By comparison, only 6.2% of those who claim to "know God exists" are at this level of IQ.

Nevertheless, at the upper end of the scale (and it only goes up to IQ 126), 44.3% of non-believers have an IQ of 104 - 126, and 8.8% of atheists have an IQ sitting on 126. Compare these figures with 36% and 3.2% for confident believers (they "know").

Combining the figures for those who don't believe in God with those who say there's "no way to find out", we find 7.7% of, shall we say, skeptics, in the lowest IQ category and 52.8% in the highest. That is, nearly 53% of skeptics have a relatively high IQ. Combining those who believe in God's existence with great confidence and those who "believe, but have doubts", we find only 4.9% of these respondents at the lower end and 40.3% at the upper end.

On the one hand, one could point to these percentages and say "See, skeptics/atheists/agnostics are brighter - 52.8% compared to 40.3% have (relatively) high IQs!". On the other, one could point out that combining folks who "know" God exists and those who "believe but have doubts" is not a very valid thing to do. In any case, the IQ range from 104 to 126 is a wide one and there is a significant population above 126 (or 125 really) - about 5% - in which, undoubtedly, New Atheists would expect to find a high percentage of non-believers. I don't have any data for that, but I suspect they'd be right.

http://sda.berkeley....0/cgi-bin/hsda3 (If this link doesn't work, you can go to http://sda.berkeley....a?harcsda+gss08 and place IQ in the Row and God in the Column.)

The study is clear enough......but I suspect that it would be even more conclusive if "idiot savants" were considered seperately from people of low IQ.