Reading a report on religious practice and science

[benlehman]

Reading a report on religious practice and science for a class presentation.

Interesting things:
* Around %50 of scientists at top-level American universities report having religious beliefs. Around %70 say that they have some "spirituality."

* The "hard sciences" report more religion than the "soft sciences" report more religion than the "social sciences." The least religious science is psychology. The most is chemistry.

* Scientists are less religious than the population as a whole. The only Christian denomination represented more among scientists than the population at large is "liberal protestant." Several minority religions are over-represented among scientists by 2-3x : Jews, Buddhists, and Hindus. If you consider Atheism a religion, it is also over-represented, about on the same scale as Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism.

I'd really like to see a cross-comparison by social class and income bracket, but the study didn't have one.

Comments

[moreocean.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that doesn't surprise me. An honest survey of physical science has to recognize the absolute interconnectedness of matter. From there, religion doesn't look like an evolutionarily useful fantasy but rather a separate instrument, keener in some ways than science. Human concepts like morality, love, and God are often astute, objective observations of nature. (Not to say that there haven't always been plenty of fake scientists and fake priests saying a lot of wrongheaded things.)

The "social scientists" are removed from the truth that can be teased out of matter, and much more likely to believe "the march of science means magic/God is fake, and morality does not matter" which is really just victorian industrialist propaganda. Biologists who have done the reading have always scoffed at "social Darwinism." Greed and exploitation are in fact maladaptive traits. Witness the state of the planet. When a small group of tightly-related organisms promote their own growth to such an extreme as to unbalance the surrounding/supporting body of slightly less-related organisms, that's called cancer.

[moreocean.livejournal.com]

I'm not calling the human race cancer, just that small cluster of folks who have managed to cut themselves off from the interconnectedness that every other being on the planet feels. They have a lot of power in the world at this time. But whether of not the greater body survives, the cancer always dies. From an evolutionary perspective, our situation is one of natural selection beginning to regulate of capacity for selfishness (which we need some of, but not too much.) If we can't head off the coming climate-driven war-disease-famine, the mostly likely scenario is that a few human being will survive, their descendants will build up again over hundreds of years, and then we'll try the whole thing again. (The Hindu concept of Karma, as I understand it, dovetails nicely with evolution: you keep repeating the same scenario until you get it right or make it worse.)

To carry on the cancer analogy, the solution to the crises of the 21st century is to engage our destructive institutions and convince the people inside them that their only survival is in abandoning their blood-rich isolation and to be reabsorbed into the older, slower, poorer, healthy function of the surrounding body, which is, with equal validity, their society, their species, and their planet.

It's all there in the sermon on the mount, or the eightfold path, or Rumi and Hafez, or the annelects. As I said, a keener instrument in some ways.

[graypawn.livejournal.com]

or Bill and Ted, "Be Excellent to one another."

everything you just said is awesome.

[moreocean.livejournal.com]

I would vote for Bill and Ted.

But don't short the nuances of religion. Our ancestors learned a lot of hard lessons and wrote about them.

"What comes up must come down," is enough gravitational theory for most situations.

But Newton is more wonderful.

And Einstein is really getting somewhere.

[benlehman.livejournal.com]

That's the great divergence theory, anyway.

I'm not sure I buy it. Malthus ... was a moron in many ways.

yrs--
--Ben

[benlehman.livejournal.com]

the march of science means magic/God is fake, and morality does not matter is more modernist than Victorian. Vickies were big into God and morality.

I think that it's actually a question of removal from the scientific method. The closer you are to the scientific method in your practice, the more likely you are to realize that it has nothing to do with religion.

yrs--
--Ben

[platonic1.livejournal.com]

I wish science education were not so neglected in religiously-oriented institutions of learning, at least all the ones I've experienced.

[benlehman.livejournal.com]

Yeah. There were a couple of religions that had really dismal numbers, and sadly to me, "traditional Catholic" was one of them.

Personally, I think "does God exist?" and "science v. religion" are simply the wrong questions to ask. Like "Why are leaves pink?" You can argue a lot about why leaves are pink, but it doesn't change the fact that it's the wrong question to ask.

yrs--
--Ben

[alexpshenichkin.livejournal.com]

Did this study cover scientists in general or just scientists in academia?

If it's the latter, I really wish they broadened it to all academics. The "hard"->"soft"->"social" thing would be a lot more meaningful if you could actually extend it out to cover professors of history, literature, art, &c.

-- Alex

[benlehman.livejournal.com]

Here's the study: http://religion.ssrc.org/reforum/Ecklund.pdf

There's a lot of ways that it could be expanded. I'd like to see it based on income bracket or other class markers. But it's a landmark study regardless.