Creationism in Crisis
Leading Scientists Still Reject God
Leading Scientists Still Reject God
"Adam and Eve,” detail, by Giulio Clovio, 1546
from the Book of Hours of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese.
from the Book of Hours of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese.
Pierpont Morgan Library,
New York City, USA
New York City, USA
Leading scientists still reject God | Nature
I'm grateful to David Edwards whose comment on my blog post, Creationism in Crisis - How the Bible Narrative Misled 19th Century Palaeontologists drew my attention to this correspondence published in Nature a few years ago.
It is yet more bad news for those few dupes who still believe the absurd Creationist lie that the Theory of Evolution is a theory in crisis and about to be replaced by their childish superstition complete with magic and unproven supernatural entities.
In their correspondence, the authors, Edward J. Larson, of the Department of History, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA and Larry Witham of Burtonsville, Maryland, USA, report on the findings of a survey which shows that disbelief [in a god] is almost total amongst "top natural scientists".
The authors repeated the survey conducted in 1914 by the eminent psychiatrist, James H. Leuba, in which he found that 58% of 1000 randomly selected scientist expressed doubt or disbelief in the existence of God and that this figure rose to near 70% among the 400 "greater" scientists in his sample.
On repeating his survey 20 years later in 1933 (published in 1934), Leuba found that these percentages had risen to 67 and 85, respectively. He attributed this higher level of disbelief in the "greater" scientists to their "superior knowledge, understanding, and experience". This view was echoed by Peter Atkins of Oxford University in his comment on Larson's and Witham's 1996 paper, in which he said, "“You clearly can be a scientist and have religious beliefs. But I don't think you can be a real scientist in the deepest sense of the word because they are such alien categories of knowledge.”
It was in response to this and similar comments that Larson & Witham decided to rerun the second phase of Leuba's study to compare the religious beliefs of "greater" and "lesser" scientists. They defined "greater" scientists as those belonging to the US National Academy of Sciences:
[Their] survey found near universal rejection of the transcendent by NAS natural scientists. Disbelief in God and immortality among NAS biological scientists was 65.2% and 69.0%, respectively, and among NAS physical scientists it was 79.0% and 76.3%. Most of the rest were agnostics on both issues, with few believers. We found the highest percentage of belief among NAS mathematicians (14.3% in God, 15.0% in immortality). Biological scientists had the lowest rate of belief (5.5% in God, 7.1% in immortality), with physicists and astronomers slightly higher (7.5% in God, 7.5% in immortality
See the above table.
The dfifference between their study and Leuba's study was that Leuba's obtained his list of scientists from the then current reference work, American Men of (AMS) in which scientists were designated as "great" by the editor. This designation is no longer used in the current editions, hence Larson & Witham used the NAS membership list.
Interestingly, Larson & Witham believe their method generated a more elite list of "greater" scientists, hence they had an even lower belief in God and human immortality.
This then explains why a major part of the Discovery Institute's Wedge Strategy is to attack and try to discredit science and the scientific method to undermine public confidence in scientists to present an objective view of reality, and also why they rarely, if ever, try to present objective evidence to support creationism - which would be far more easily discredited.
The strategy is to destroy public confidence in the scientific consensus and just allow parochial ignorance and cultural chauvinism to do the rest, confident that the scientifically illiterate will simply assume that the childish Creationism they were inculcated with as children by parents, peers and authority figures in their culture, defaults to true unless proven otherwise.
The 5-year strategy was to insert Creationism in the form of "Intelligent [sic] Design" into mainstream academia; the 20-yer strategy was nothing short of a Christian Dominionist theocracy in America.
That was 31 years ago, during which time, Creationism has declined from the view of a significant proportion of non-scientific Americans to below 40% and acceptance of the TOE as the explanation for human origins has risen from 9% to 19%, most markedly in the young; every court case aimed at overcoming the constitutional bar on teaching Creationism in US public schools has been lost and recent polls have recorded a decline in religious fundamentalism and a rejection of creationism, again, most sharply in the young in the USA.
Intelligent [sic] Design offers nothing by way of explanation or prediction and it remains entirely unfalsifiable because it has the childish notions of magic and unproven supernatural entities at its heart.
Albeit slowly and belatedly, the USA is catching up with the rest of the developed world in accepting the scientific explanations and rejecting religious superstitions.
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