Is President Obama secretly an atheist, who fakes being a Christian for political reasons?

[Jim__]

47. The question of what can be inferred from any correlation is also important.

From the Brown review:

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The thing that I found really fascinating in Flynn's lecture was his discussion of what makes for very low IQ scores. It is one of the paradoxes of the Flynn effect that it implies not only that our children will be smarter than we are, but that our recent ancestors were extremely stupid. Extrapolating back to 1900 on the two fastest-improving components of the IQ tests suggests that schoolchildren then would have had a mean IQ of either 50 or 70. "How did Englishmen play cricket in 1900" asked Flynn. "Taking their mean IQ at face value, most of them would need a minder to position them in the field, tell them when to bat, and tell them when the innings was over."

The answer, he says, is that one of the things that IQ tests measure is "post-scientific operational thinking". This is not the same as scientific thinking. But it is thinking about the world in terms of the categories by which science understands it. For instance, if you ask, "What do dogs and rabbits have in common", the post-scientific answer, that we would now regard as evidence of intelligence, is that they are both mammals. The pre-scientific answer is that you use a dog to hunt a rabbit. That's what matters about the two animals, not what class they belong to.

It is that kind of difference in reasoning which accounts for the huge measured IQ differences between urban and rural Brazil, and, of course, the fantastically low IQs measured in African countries.

...

And from wikipedia:

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Even at the scale of the individual, IQ may not directly cause more disbelief in God. Dr David Hardman of London Metropolitan University says: "It is very difficult to conduct true experiments that would explicate a causal relationship between IQ and religious belief." He adds that other studies do nevertheless correlate IQ with being willing or able to question beliefs.[11]

Researcher Gregory S. Paul's findings suggest that economic development has a closer relationship with religiosity.[14] He argues that once any "nation's population becomes prosperous and secure, for example through economic security and universal health care, much of the population loses interest in seeking the aid and protection of supernatural entities." Other studies have shown that increased wealth is correlated with a decline in religious beliefs.[15][16] Indeed, the majority of the nations that showed a strong relationship between low religiosity and high IQ in the 2008 study were developed nations.[10]

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Correlation indicates a probable relationship. By itself, it is not a strong indicator of causation.