I've chosen an unusual paper for my next journal club discussion. It's a sociological study
inspired by qdragon's recent response to the Discovery Institute. The DI are asserting
that there is a strong atheist bias among biologists, and that this bias creates an
atmosphere hostile to theists, who account for only 10% of biology professors.
I think this is wrong on several levels, and I want to present this survey data in support
of why I think so.
The title is "The Religiosity of American College and University Professors", the authors
are sociologists from George Mason and U of BC and it presents an analysis of a 2006 survey
of professors from across the United States. I'm going to skip on the usual areas of the
paper such as abstract and introduction, and I'm going to only briefly describe the methods,
because the interesting points here are in the Results or Data section, and the authors'
Conclusion.
The survey subjects were selected using existing databases of degree granting institutions,
where one professor from each category of study was selected at each institution. The
data were stratified to include both elite and non-elite education settings, from Harvard
and MIT to community colleges. Elite status was determined by the US News and World Report
rankings.
Medical and law schools were excluded, as the purpose was to focus on undergraduate
degree granting institutions. This will obviously exclude the bulk of medical researchers, who
work at medical centers or schools and research institutions, rather than at 4 year undergrad
institutions.
The response rate was 51 percent, which is excellent for this type of survey, and the
total number of cases used is 1,417. They randomly conducted phone surveys with 100
nonresponders to determine if there was any bias in responders.
Here are the results: Table 1 is a belief in God survey. The selection
of responses was different from studies I've seen in the past, but strong atheists account
for 9.8 percent, agnostic atheists another 13.1 percent, and an interesting 19.2 percent
believe in a higher power, which could include pantheists, diests and other groups that classically
don't believe in a personal god. A good 51.5 percent of professors do believe in God, though,
even if they admit to some doubt.
Table 2 is interesting, as it breaks out Table 1 by disciplinary field. The most godless
groups are psychology and mechanical engineers by far, and the most religious are in finance,
accounting and elementary education. I'll leave it up to you to pore over the data,
I want to move on to Table 4, which compares religious orientation by institution type
and by discipline.
Note that the non-elite doctoral degree granting schools actually had the highest non-religious
responses, and the elite institutions show a broad distribution of different views. In
the disciplines, experimental sciences show the highest non-religious rates, but the social
sciences and humanities have similar numbers. Only the health fields show a substantial
proportion of traditional religious views.
Table 5 shows that the largest religious affiliation of professors is none, with 31.2% claiming
no particular group. 15.9% are Catholic, followed by the usual slew of different flavors of
Christian or Jewish and a few Buddhists, Muslims and Hindus thrown in. I'm willing to bet that
this same result would not be obtained if medical schools or research institutions were
included in the survey, where Hindus and Buddhists are very heavily represented.
Table 6 is regressions coefficients between a variable and a survey result. Negative values
here represent an inverse relationship, positives a direct. Stars indicate significant correlations.
For example, if you have a PhD, you are significantly less likely to claim a religious affiliation.
If you are married, you are more likely to attend church, but if you are white, you are
less likely. If you are from the NorthEast or West, you are less likely to accept the
literal truth of the Bible. And it you are a researcher of any kind, you are very, very
likely not to hold traditional religious views.
I leave it to you to read the full conclusion of the authors. I've chosen just a few of
my favorites: "But the hypothesis that the university is
a secular institution because of the irreligious tendencies of the faculty does not withstand
empirical scrutiny: it is a secular institution despite the fact that most of
its key personnel are themselves religious believers."
Here's another great one: "In light of our findings, one such [secularizing]
mechanism that might be hypothesized to existóthat students become more secular as their atheist
professors call into question the value of religionóseems implausible as a broad generalization.
If anything, our finding that the most secular professors are those focused primarily on
researchóa minority of all professors ó would suggest that the bulk of the teaching
function in American colleges and universities is being carried out by academics who are
personally sympathetic to religion, albeit not in its most traditional forms."
So, the old narrative about the evil atheist professor corrupting the youth of America
into godless socialist intellectualism isn't well supported by the demographic survey data.
Most professors are religious, just not to the same degree or in the same way as America
as a whole. Married professors are significantly more likely to regularly attend church and
professors of applied health like nursing or business professors are also more likely
to be traditionally religious, while professors with a doctoral level degree are less likely
to be religious.
In just the elite institutions, Only 1% of professors describe themselves as "born again",
while 13% describe themselves as Jewish, which is the opposite trend at non-elite institutions
like community colleges, where Born again Christians may represent up to a quarter of
the professors.
Only 5.7 percent of all responders were Biblical literalists, 39.5% believed it to be divinely
inspired, with 48.3% believing the Bible to be ìan ancient book of fables, legends, history,
and moral precepts.î
It's true that researchers and physical science professors, who rely heavily on empirical
data and evidence in their daily work, are a bit less likely to be accepting of a faith
based religious belief, and much less likely to accept biblical accounts as literally true.
If the Discovery Institute believes that studying biology and the modern evolutionary synthesis
automatically leads to atheism, I think they need to explain what about studying psychology
or sociology or even engineering leads people down that same path. The data really suggests
that the higher echelons of learning and education are inherently less religious or at least
less traditionally religious.
I'm sure that's not the narrative they want. Fortunately for them, they show an amazing
ability to live in their own imagined reality, rather than the world you or I actually inhabit.
Thanks for watching.