[Dark Ronin]

My only problem with your statement is that there are essentially two types of intelligence. There is a person’s total accumulated knowledge, as well as their ability and capacity to learn. (Ex: A fifty year old college professor would certainly know a lot about things in his field, he would be a very “intelligent” person. Then you could also have a seven year old prodigy who is a junior in high school, and can pick up nearly any book and quickly learn and understand every bit of it, also incredibly “intelligent”.) When you look at it that way, it would be impossible for religion to affect it.

Let’s say a college student who worked hard for his knowledge could choose to discontinue his learning because it somehow offended his religious views. This would end his ability to accumulate knowledge, but he could still be intelligent in the sense that he might have the ability to learn things far more quickly and efficiently than other people.

The only type of intelligence that should be viewed as true intelligence would be ones personal capacity for learning. Your total knowledge will eventually reach a plateau, a point where it can no longer grow. True intelligence could make ones plateau much higher than someone else’s, but when religion is introduced it might possibly cause a persons total amount of knowledge to level out much more quickly than it should have. And so with or without religion one would still have that ability to learn, religion could only affect the total amount of knowledge you have. I only wish I knew how to put a simple graph up here instead of having to go through such a lengthy explanation.

On a final note even atheism is a sort of religion. Atheists completely dismiss the possibility that there might in fact be some sort of higher being. We can’t prove that there is nothing supernatural, and on that same note we can’t prove that there is either. All the information we know or think we know could be completely worthless. There could be a major breakthrough on any given day. And so the ones who would be most intelligent in the first sense I mentioned would have to be agnostics, or just anyone who has a really open mind. You can’t dismiss anything. I mean we all KNOW the earth is flat, right?

I hope that answers your question. To sum it all up there could be no correlation between the two. If there were to be one it would be that anyone with an open mind would in theory win out in the end. Both atheists and religious people have limits that they choose to set for themselves whereas agnostics have no such limit.