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The following comes from Christianity Today. To read the full article, click here. Thank you to Daniel C. Peterson for bringing it to our attention on his blog, Sic Et Non.
Most Christians assume that scientists who are atheists are anti-religion. I hear this stereotype a lot when I visit churches. And I used to believe it myself.
This weekend demonstrated it. Not because the March for Science has overcome concerns of divisions and managed to incorporate (most) religious viewpoints into the rally.
But what I have learned in the past 10 years paints a different picture about how scientists feel about religion and spirituality. And it’s not the same as Richard Dawkins, author of the bestselling The God Delusion.
During the past decade, I have led four large studies on the faith perspectives of scientists. The most recent is a research study published in 2016 on the religious views of scientists in eight regions: the United States, the United Kingdom, Taiwan, India, Hong Kong, Turkey, Italy, and France. For the study—the largest ever conducted on how scientists view religion—my colleagues and I surveyed more than 12,000 biologists and physicists, and interviewed more than 600 of them in depth.
Full disclosure: We did find that scientists at top universities are much less likely to believe in God than the general population in several national contexts. And many of them do believe that science is the only true way of understanding the world. However, few are actively hostile toward religion. The proportion who believe there is no God varied immensely by nation, ranging from a high of 51 percent in France to a low of 6 percent in Turkey. But I could count on two hands the number of atheist scientists we met who are as strongly anti-religious as Dawkins, the outspoken evolutionary biologist.
In some national contexts, a majority or near majority of scientists are what I call “complete modernists,” a term borrowed from a scientist we interviewed. These scientists either do not believe in God, or they do not know if God exists and they don’t believe there is a way to find out. They are not affiliated with any religious community, and they do not identify as religious or spiritual. These scientists are likely to be purveyors of scientism: the idea that science is the best or only way of knowing. They tend to be disproportionately male and in advanced stages of their careers.
But even among these scientists, few are hostile toward religion.
To read the full article on Christianity Today, click here.
