Scientists whose belief system requires the supernatural,
compartmentalize (separate) their actual scientific activities
from their religious life. Ever since the systematic scientific
study of the universe without reference to the supernatural,
our knowledge of the universe has grown exponentially.
Just look at the results. No other view of the universe
comes even close to being so successful, except the
atheistic one. Imagine a scientist studying a phenomenon
and using God, a spirit, or an angel as the cause.
How far would he get? No where!
Even a traditionally religious scientist approaches
his scientific research as if God or the
supernatural do not exist.
Christians who rationally demonstrate the existence of a supernatural being
refuse to offer similar demonstrations of the Trinity, Divinity of Jesus,
the Resurrection, etc. For these they appeal to faith.
AANEWS for July 24, 1998
SCIENTISTS “MORE LIKELY THAN EVER”
TO REJECT GOD BELIEF
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 consumate 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 commonsense 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 “commonsense” 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
pseudoscience 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
newsrooms of popular magazines, than in the libraries, labs and observatories
where scientists actually do their work.
Naturalism and Religious Experience 