|
Since I just recently blogged about atheists, this article in the Rice Sallyport caught my eye: Natural Scientists Are Less Likely to Believe in God than Are Social Scientists. According to this study, 38% of natural scientists and 31% of social scientists do not believe in God. All those surveyed worked at universities, as far as I could tell from the article. What I found more interesting than the difference between natural scientists and social scientists, was just how high the number of atheist scientists was. It didn’t surprise me that they were atheist but the number of atheist scientists is surprisingly higher than the average population. Just for the record, I cannot remember any professor I’ve ever had saying they were an atheist or even talking about religion. |
4 Replies to “Atheist Scientists”
Comments are closed.
Coming from the social sciences myself, I have faith in surveys but learned that the devil of them is in the details. Here, its not clear to me that they were determining how many scientists were atheists. The survey seems to have asked whether they “believe in God.” An agnostic is as likely to say no to that as an atheist. Agnostics, by common understanding, do not believe in God but are not sure that he does not exist. They do not know and many believe that it is impossible to know. Atheists, on the other hand, are sure God does not exist.
There is some dispute over these terms, but most surveys I remember seeing classified you as an atheist if you answered “Yes” to a question along the lines of “I believe God does not exist.” If you do not know or care, you may be classified as nonreligious or agnostic (of which there are lots more of than atheists).
So, while I do not doubt that there are likely a greater percentage of scientists who are atheists, I do not think the divergance is a great as first appears.
99.9% if not all the greatest scientists born before Darwin was were Christian. A tiny few were Muslims maybe, and not surprisingly the Koran endorses the Bible, so it’s no surprise that Muslims who read and believed the Bible would become logical enough to become scientific.
Darwin and his evil cousin Galton spread a virtual plague of stupidity that is hindering scientific progress. Darwin-evangelizing atheist scientists waste the world’s money and time bickering and whining over stupid immorality-spreading nonsense. They should be imprisoned by the governments they are in to prevent them from further disturbing the peace.
How Christ like of you, as a former Catholic I see the many faults in your logic. I’m sure REAL scientific evidence can show your “god” exists, also intelligent design is a bunch of bullshit. Religion is why the world is fucked up, why there is “bickering” about how people should run their lives. God wills it, right?
That’s quite amusing, because I have heard of no wars starting because of lack of religion. On the contrary, most of the genocides have been committed because of religion, not because of atheism. Ha, disturbing the peace! What an amusing person you must be.