There we are. Welcome to the atheist experience live. It's Sunday, January 24, 2016. I'm Matt Delhoney joining me. The president of the ACA.

Jen, people is weird. How you doing? I'm alright. Well, alright. I was in second bed most of the week.

But for whatever reason, you know, there are people who, every time I say I'm sick or something's going on, I will hear from somebody saying, you know, this is God punishing you.

And it's been absolutely hilarious because last year I traveled more than I have in any two years combined. I made every single event even when I almost lost my hand in Sydney.

Even when I got bit by a spider, very little. All my illness is falling to downtime. Yeah. And so, you know, I go and I do all that stuff.

I go have a nice two week vacation over Christmas break. Come back and do a week and a half. Swear the work. And then I get sick. I miss one episode of the show granted.

It was a really special episode of show because Neil Kerry was here in town. I wanted to be here and I couldn't.

Neil Carter. Yeah. Anyway, sorry, I'm in. And I wanted to be here, but I'm back. And I'm still going to get work done. So it's like, you know, it's like the same thing when they said God was trying to punish New Orleans with the

Katrina and the magical gayshield protected the French wire entirely. So how have you been? Not too bad. Pretty busy.

Science experimenting. Yes. Yes. But you had a topic that we've addressed. I don't know how many times I know how keeps coming up.

Yes, we keep having to address this. This idea that theists are stupid or that they are in some way less intelligent than atheists or something.

And it's of course always the atheists who are patting themselves on the back for being smarter than the average bear while demonstrating that they probably are not.

And in this case, it was a couple of guys who showed up in the ACA or excuse me, the atheist experience Facebook discussion group, the official discussion group that we have.

And one of them had posted a link to a blog and the guy had referenced some kind of published study that had been done on a correlation of IQ and religious belief.

And they were, if they had aggregated these results somehow on a national level. And there were so many problems with this. I mean, first of all, the study in question, it was published in a, in a not terribly well known journal.

But it was behind a paywall. So couldn't grab the study and actually read the original study to find out, for example, what kind of instrument they used to assess IQ?

Because if they used an instrument that wasn't even valid for that population, then automatically that calls into question the rest of the results.

The other thing is the only measure that I could determine for assessing religiosity was percentage of people who report some kind of religious belief in that population, which is, that's another problematic way of measuring that.

So we don't have any idea of assessing really how, how devout people are or anything, you know, what denomination, because that can make a big difference in how people perform on a specific test, for example.

But we also didn't get any information about did they control for things like poverty? Because that has a huge impact on how well people do on the so-called IQ tests.

So there were all kinds of problems with this claim just from the beginning. And again, it was behind a paywall. So I couldn't assess, you know, the quality of the paper or the research.

And I wasn't going to pay $35 to read what was probably a crap paper. So anyway, I don't know that this necessarily means much because we know people.

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