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Religion is Int-based because it's a purely academic skill.  Religion encompasses knowledge of facts, and Int represents a character's ability to learn.  Wis is more about common sense, perception, and intuition, which themselves do not help you memorize a body of facts.  So Int is the clearer choice to govern the Religion skill.

Also, keep in mind that clerics are not scholars.  While they are, of course, knowledgeable of religious lore (they are auto-trained in religion), clerics are leaders and soldiers first.  They offer consul and guidance, and set an example for others to follow (cha).  They train in the art of war so that they can wield mace and shield in defense of their fellow worshipers (str).  And they intuitively wield the divine power invested in them to heal and aid (wis).  Book learnin' is not a priority for them.

That said, Clerics are by no means slouches when it comes to religious knowledge either.  Since they are trained in religion, they'll likely know more about religion than most other members of their party, let alone the average commoner, consistently making easy and moderate checks, and having a decent shot at making hard checks - or better than even chance with the right background, items, feats, or racial skill bonuses.  But knowing stuff, as I've said, is simply not their expertise.  And it's not fair comparing the cleric to the wizard, since knowing everything better than anyone else is part of the wizard's core identity.  So while the cleric's religious knowledge is not the highest, it's certainly not the lowest either.

However, OP, invokers and avengers are the religious scholars you are looking for, as both classes have builds that use Int as a strong secondary.  So if you need to know absolutely everything about religion, you don't ask your temple's face.  You ask the guy in the temple library who constantly studies every ancient tomb available, or you go to the war room and talk to the dark-hooded figure in the back whose job is to know what's what, and then use that knowledge to eliminate threats to the church.


Now back to the subject of the Int/Wis split with knowledge skills, as pointed out earlier, some knowledge skills do you Wis.  Namely Nature and Dungeoneering.  Note, however, that these skills are not purely academic, like Arcana and Religion.  Both skills also represent practical survival skills as well.  For example, someone trained in Nature doesn't just know about plants, animals, and the weather (academic knowledge), but is actually skilled at foraging for food, predicting an animal's behavior by reading subtle body language, and maintaining their sense of direction to avoid getting lost.  These kind of sub-skills require common sense and perception to actively perform them, which is Wis.  Or to put it another way, it's basically the difference between watching Survivor Man on TV and actually being Les Stroud.  So while Int and Wis could both make sense for these skills, apparently the designers felt that the survival aspects of the skill held more "weight" than the academic aspects and decided to make them Wis-based.

TL;DR: Clerics don't suck a religion, but they're not scholars either.  Invokers and Avengers are divine classes that can rock at religion.  Wizards know everything because that's what they do.

Apr 12, 2012 -- 10:33AM, Janx_14 wrote:

I'll admit I TL;DR'd the above, but i'd give a divine class a bonus to religion checks involving their own deity, but I can see why they'd know less about other religions compared to someone who studied it academicaly.

This is what I plan to do: Give Divine classes Their wisdom modifier as a bonus to Religion checks (or use it as their base Ability, if their Int is negative) on their own deity, and on deities closely related to their own (for example, a paladin of Bahamut would get the bonus to checks reguarding Tiamat or Io, but not to, say Moradin). Wizards may know more in general, about religion, since they're the book-learning kind, but if you're devoted to your god, you had better know at least as much as the Wizard about your own deity.