I never said that only religious people are intelligent, just that most of the highly accomplished people in my life are also religious. As far as intelligence goes, my brain-o-meter indicates that there’s only one non-religious person I know well whose intelligence easily surpasses my own. He’s the aimless son of the two most accomplished people I know. He hasn’t been able to translate all of his advantages, which include a genius-level IQ, into a stable and productive adulthood. He’s not a sociopath or anything, just someone who has lived off of mom and dad for his whole adult life and seems trapped in his own thoughts, anxieties and material abundance.
His parents are both retired physicians and Roman Catholics who diligently practiced medicine in the same small town in the middle of unremarkable farmland for their entire careers. While quite wealthy, as one would expect from a lifetime of high six-figure earnings, they own a modest home, drive modest cars and have dedicated their lives to improving the world around them through being generous with their time, their skills and their resources. Not to me, I haven’t asked for a penny from my wealthy relatives, but to people who actually need their generosity.
All of those good outcomes came about by living in accordance with the Roman Catholic faith. Their parenting efforts might not have panned out into a PhD who invents new mathematics of statistics and probability for a living, but he’s still got time to bring his talents to bear in the economy and begin assuming adult responsibilities. At age 44, that’s on him, not them.
You could poke around some of my posts from 10 years ago or so and see that I was a rather staunch atheist at the time. That’s something I do occasionally, revisit my old thoughts. Is it possible that I’m experiencing premature cognitive decline as I begin to embrace faith? Perhaps, but it doesn’t seem so whenever I revisit my thoughts from years past.