Why are better educated people less religious?

According to "Adherents-dot-com," the "non-religious" are number three . . .

This was exactly the point i was making from the beginning--why proceed any furher than the the core assumption, if the core assumption is not proven.

However, the author now writes:




However, in the initial post, the author of the thread wrote:



So not only did the author of the thread assume the premise without providing reliable evidence (and for pages on end, i asked the author to provide some evidence--and was ignored), the discussion which the author proposed was not at all whether or not the premise were true, but a series of questions which assume that the premise is true. In that post the author wanted to discuss why it were true, not if it were true. The author wanted to discuss what it means, not if it were true. The author wanted to discuss why "religion attacks science," but neither demonstrates that "relgion" (a sufficiently vague term) attacks "science" (another vague term), nor intends to discuss that--the author simply assumes that it is true, and wants to discuss that.

So now, when Stlstrike says that the purpose is to determine is there is an inverse relationship between education and religion, it is painfully obvious that the author of this thread is playing fast and loose with the truth.

This might make an interesting discussion, but this is the first time that the author actually asserted that this is the purpose of the thread, and the author is lying if he attempts to claim that this were always the purpose of the thread.

Yeah, but it has been a sort of interesting thread.

Dude... I think you need to pop a Xanax.

I'm not ignoring you... I simply have a life to tend to. I will bring you some more evidence. Meanwhilst... simmer down.

Your sig is nice too Eorl.

My name, of course, is not Dude.

This is the kind of thing you consistently get from people who don't have a position to articulate or to defend. It is easier to suggest that i am angry or otherwise worked up than it is to deal with the accusation i've made.

In a thread that now runs to more than 40 pages, this is the first time you've offered to provide any evidence for your core thesis. You still haven't provided any evidence, you've just said that you will.

I suppose that's a start. However, i'll believe it when you actually step up to the plate with your evidence.

You're not the only one who has a life. You responded to my post 5 and half hours after i posted it. I am now responding to your post more than 14 hours later. The evidence of this and other threads, though, is that you're not real quick on the up-take, so i thought i'd point out that out to you.

It appears that Bartikus doesn't do irony.

Gentlemen, despite my lack of a life, I have nothing to say. Oh, what do you think of my sig lines?

I'm going to assume that most people would recognize preeminent scientists as being more educated than the average person. With that assumption, that I feel is very appropriate, out of the way:

NEW SURVEY: SCIENTISTS "MORE LIKELY THAN EVER" TO REJECT GOD BELIEF

A leading scientific journal concludes that increasingly, scientists have doubts about the existence of a deity or similar supernatural and religious claims. This finding questions the pop-culture view that science and religion are moving toward a consensus, and a shared view about the humanity and the universe. The study also touches on the changing character of the scientific enterprise in modern society...

A study in today's edition of the prestigious science journal "Nature" reveals that members of the scientific community are "more likely than ever to reject God and immortality," discloses Britain's Daily Telegraph.

That claim is based on another study which repeats a historic survey first made in 1916 by Dr. James Leuba of Bryn Mawr University. It revealed that over eight decades ago, only about 40% of the scientists surveyed expressed belief in any supreme being. Leuba predicted that advances in education and technology would further erode faith in religious claims.

In 1997, Edward Larson of the University of Georgia decided to revisit Leuba's study and evaluate the prediction that religious belief was disappearing, at least in the scientific community. Author of the book "Summer for the God's" and a professor of science law and history, Larson said that Leuba's original survey raised "good questions."

"They provoke responses and give much more insight into how people think than the vague Gallup poll question, 'Do you believe in God?'" he told a writer from Research Reporter.

Larson closely followed Leuba's methodology, repeating the same questions and attempting to find a representative sample which met the original survey profile. "I had no idea how it would turn out," Larson said.

60% responded, a figure considered high for any surveys. Of those, 40% expressed belief in a deity, while nearly 45% did not. Larson's survey also discovered that physicists were less likely to have such faith, while mathematicians were significantly more likely to believe in a supreme being, as defined by Leuba.


"NATURE" SURVEY -- LESS AND LESS BELIEF
The follow-up study reported in "Nature" reveals that the rate of belief is lower than eight decades ago. The latest survey involved 517 members of the National Academy of Sciences; half replied. When queried about belief in "personal god," only 7% responded in the affirmative, while 72.2% expressed "personal disbelief," and 20.8% expressed "doubt or agnosticism." Belief in the concept of human immortality, i.e. life after death declined from the 35.2% measured in 1914 to just 7.9%. 76.7% reject the "human immortality" tenet, compared with 25.4% in 1914, and 23.2% claimed "doubt or agnosticism" on the question, compared with 43.7% in Leuba's original measurement. Again, though, the highest rate of belief in a god was found among mathematicians (14.3%), while the lowest was found among those in the life sciences fields -- only 5.5%.


THE GLASS IS EMPTIER...
Dr. Larson, in commenting on his 1997 replication of the 1916 study, noted that as with Leuba's report, his revelations elicited wildly different accounts in the news media. "It's being spun in different ways," Larson observed. "The Christian Science Monitor ran an editorial exhorting the fact that scientists still do believe -- despite the fact that well less than half of the scientists in my survey believed in God -- while the Journal of Humanism ran a piece proclaiming that they do not."

"Is the glass half empty or half full?," Larson asked.

It would be difficult to interpret the figures reported in "Nature," though, as suggesting that belief within the scientific community is gaining popularity, or even holding its own. The "belief in a person god" category suggests a precipitous drop, from about 40% in Larson's survey to 7% in the "Nature" study.


CHANGING VIEWS OF SCIENCE, RELIGION, GOD
While Leuba and his study were historic curiosities when Dr. Larson and co-researcher Larry Witham decided to revisit the findings, during its time the 1916 survey ignited considerable controversy. Paul Karr of Research Reporter noted that Leuba's findings "touched off an anti-evolutionary movement that would culminate in the historic Scopes trial where science and Darwinism faced off against Christianity and creationism for the mind and soul of the American schoolchild." Indeed, just nine years after the Leuba findings, high school biology teacher John T. Scopes (1900-1970) was in the middle of a legal controversy, accused of violating Tennessee's Butler Act which forbade the teaching of evolution in the state's public schools. The trial drew worldwide publicity, and was soon dubbed the Monkey Trial due to popular misconceptions about evolutionary findings -- that "people came from monkeys."

Criminal attorney Clarence Darrow faced off against the prosecution's most illustrious witness, former U.S. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, a populist known for his famous "Cross of Gold" oration. Darrow conceded "the facts of the case," that Scopes had indeed violated the Butler Act -- but he also argued for the scientific validity of evolution. Scopes was convicted and fined $100, but the state supreme court later overturned the verdict on technical grounds; meanwhile, the Butler Act remained on the books in Tennessee until 1967.

But William Jennings Bryan, the consummate politician, also was typical of the "amateur scientist" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, but as described by Edward Davis in a review of "Redeeming Culture: American Religion in an Age of Science (James Gilbert, University of Chicago Press, 1997), was also "representative of an older, less abstract, way of understanding scientific knowledge, a common sense Baconianism that eschewed speculative hypotheses (such as evolution) and saw both science and religion as ways of glorifying God."

The paradigm exemplified by Bryan -- the practical, "amateur scientist" who understood the scientific enterprise as a reaffirmation of the sacred -- may be even less represented today within the academic community than when John Scopes went to trial in Dayton, Tennessee nearly three-quarters-of-a-century ago. Evolution, a core tenet of modern life sciences such as biology, was not a major point of contention even among professional academicians then. It reflected the tension between the "common sense" position of the "amateur scientists" and the more rigorously trained professionals. Davis argues that "Bryan's 'greatest mistake' was to assume that this view of science was still operative among professional scientists in the 1920s. Because it was still part of the popular conception of science, however, his actions leading up to the Scopes trial 'revealed a fault line between popular and professional science.'"

Today, the fault line appears between the scientific community which increasingly doubts supernatural or religion-based explanations of how the universe operates, and the wider popular culture which is in the midst of both a fundamentalist revival, and a disturbing popularity of new age and related pseudo science beliefs. One example could be the recent article in Newsweek Magazine, which suggests a convergence of scientific opinion and more traditional religious doctrines. The agreement may exist more in the news rooms of popular magazines, than in the libraries, labs and observatories where scientists actually do their work.

========================

The study they are referring to is here:

Nature 394, 313 - 313 (23 Jul 1998)

.... but I'm not paying $18 for it.... if you want it, hit a medical library up.

In absolute terms a mass murderer who is down to one or two a year is still bad. Thats what I think.

Take that up with William James. He would make a good case for relativism, I'm sure.
Which is worst, a mass murderer who is trying to do better or an indiviudal who has aspirations to be a mass murderer (but has only killed one person so far)?

I'm sure it is convenient to your argument to make such an assumption, but it is an unwarranted assumption. The only basis upon which it could reasonably rest, is by comparing "average people" to "pre-eminent scientists." "Pre-eminent scientists" have believed some truly goofy things--Albert Einstein could not be trusted to zip up his own fly before he left the house. He constantly made pronouncement about what God does or does not do, prompting Neils Bohr to comment that Einstein needed to stop telling God what to do.

We have fertile ground here to wade again into the idiotic claim that all well-educated people are equal, but that well-educated scientists are more equal.

Therefore, the premise of your thread is not established by what follows, because it concerns itself with people who are attracted to the sciences--and as has already been pointed out by others in this thread, those are probably people who are skeptical to begin with. That skepticism doesn't make them "more well-educated" than people who are not educated in the sciences.

The rest of your article is rife with silly contentions, some express and some inferential, such as that there is any "pop cultural" view that science and religion are "moving toward a consensus."

The only basis you have for discussion here, is whether or not it is true that scientists are less likely to be religious.

From the outset, i have actually considered the contention that the better educated one is, whether in the sciences or not, the less likely one is to be religiously devout. However, what was both disgusting and hilarious, is that you attempted to take the ball and run with it, without having established your premise. You crow about the superiority of science, and abandon scientific principles at the first opportunity you have to take a pot shot at religion.

Oh, by the way, when you copy and paste like that, you should at least have the honesty to give your source. After all, not everyone would necessarily consider "American Atheists" an unbiased source.

The article (a letter actually), which was published in Nature, can be read here.

If you think science is so great, then why don't you meet some basic scientific standards--such as providing definitions, providing sources, and giving credit where it is due when you just copy and paste someone else's work?

A final note. Just the other day, you whined about having a life, and therefore not having time to track this down. But what, in the end, have you done? You ran off to American Atheists, and copied and pasted an article--all of two minutes work (or rather, two minutes to take someone else's work without attribution). Then you claim you can't link the Nature article because you don't want to spend $18.00. That's odd--i found it for free, and that took me a few minutes.

If your life is so busy that this was all the time you had, and what you offer is no better than this, then i wonder that you've had the time to start this thread in the first place.

Setanta, I stopped reading your rant about 2 sentences in....

You are ridiculous.

So, I'm done with my own thread.... thank you for ruining it by attacking my character and not adding anything to the conversation.

Please spare others your rants, as I will not be back on this thread.

Enjoy your solitude.

I didn't attack your character, i criticized your method. If you can't distinguish the two, then you are no better than the canting religionists you are eager to criticize. You also have no business to call yourself a scientist (as you have done in these fora) if you can't distinguish criticism of your method from criticism of your character. If is also highly ironic and amusing to see you complaining that i've attacked your character after having stated, in a "stand-alone" sentence, that i am ridiculous.

None of this is ranting on my part. I have objected to this thread from the outset for a variety of reasons which anyone with a scientific background should well understand. Your support for your thesis is a study which refers to only scientists, and not to all well-educated people. Throughout this thread, until very recently, you didn't bother to provide support for your premise, and you didn't even provide definitions of a plausible nature upon which to base a speculative discussion. You, who raise science to the level of religious devotion, violated every principle of logical empiricism in this thread.

But your effort was dishonest from the outset. The title is "Why are better educated people less religious?" Leaving aside the problems which arise from having no basis upon which to determine who are better educated, and who are "religious," this was basically dishonest. You didn't wish to discuss that, you wished to assume that so that you could proceed to discuss an unfounded and vague contention that religion attacks science.

Leave if you want, it's no skin off my nose. If this is the death of this thread, that also doesn't bother me. Both because i frequently do enjoy solitude, and because you are nobody to me. The lack of your company certainly won't condemn me to solitude.

OK, so I lied... I'm not done with this thread because I ran across something that had to be placed here.

And, no, Setanta, I STILL have not read your most recent posts because I know they're just going to make me mad.

Excerpt reposted from: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070625/aronson/



Is this any better?

I would think a highly intelligent and educated person as yourself would realize that it is impossible for someone to make you angry unless you have somehow given him control over your autonomic nervous system.

As for the assertion that educational level has a positive correlation with religious disbelief, this could simply be a symptom of the arrogance that so often accompanies lofty achievement.

It has been proven through the ages that man's scholarly achievements has little to do with what they are capable of to harm other humans.