Causility != Implication
1) Smoking causes lung cancer, but not everyone who smokes gets lung cancer. If smoking would imply lung cancer every smoker would also be suffering from lung cancer. It is clear that religion does not imply a low IQ, because some really smart religious people do exist.
2) Lack of intelligence also does not imply believe in God, because there are stupid atheists as well.
3) There are many possible causes for both religion and low intelligence.
- If religion is one of the rare sources of hope in insecure situations, how would that make religions look bad? This would be like saying: Antibiotics are bad, they are consumed mostly by unhealthy people.
There can also be causality chains. E.g.:
- Higher Intelligence causes people to question the believes for neighbors.
- This makes it more likely to get a different set of believes than the neighbors.
- If the majority of the neighbors believes in god, mostly high IQ people will not share this believe.
If you look at Lynn and Nyborg's data you will notice that not that nations with the overall highest level of atheist have the highest average IQ, but instead the nations with around 10-20% atheists have the highest IQ.