John Hawks points me to a "He said, she said," piece which wonders whether there is an inverse relationship between belief in the paranormal and religion. The basic thesis is that the mind abhors a vacuum so without institutionally guided supernatural beliefs people simply revert to "default" intuitions. The article doesn't come to any conclusion, citing contradictory results. So of course I decided to look at the GSS. Specifically, two variables, ASTROSCI and SCITEST3, which query how scientific individuals believe astrology to be. I paired them up with belief in God, GOD, highest degree attained, DEGREE, and correct number of vocabulary words, WORDSUM. Since people complain about the GSS's ghetto graphs I just reformatted them into an HTML table. You can see the raw proportions below. After the fact I was curious about political orientation, POLVIEWS, and noted that liberals were more likely to accept astrology as scientific than conservatives. In any case, I found1) Only a mild correlation between lack of god belief and skepticism of astrology2) Stronger correlation between intelligence (vocabulary) and degree attainment and skepticism
1) Only a mild correlation between lack of god belief and skepticism of astrology 2) Stronger correlation between intelligence (vocabulary) and degree attainment and skepticism
