It’s not only evolution religions have problem with. And even their “support” for evolution involves handwaving about God screwing around with it.
Okay, I stand corrected. The OP was quoting Dawkins accurately.
But I think this indicates even Dawkins realized he had gone overboard with his original claim.
I’m not sure that post was the original claim. If I could figure out how to look through all of his tweets from around September 15 I’d feel more certain about what he said then. The tweet I quoted doesn’t sound like the beginning of a conversation.
You may be joking, but you have made Alessan’s point for him. As many physicists feel a certain contempt (sometimes camouflaged with humor) for the biological sciences (and indeed, for anything that is not physics and math), many biologists feel a similar (and similarly ill concealed) contempt for the humanities. I am not sure that Dawkins is actually one of them (and I very much doubt whether biologists suffer from this syndrome anything like as much as physicists and engineers do), but I am sure they exist.
Anyway, I am no particular fan of Dawkins, but if he really said this about Biblical Scholarship it was a lapse. He knows better than that. If he said it about theology it is much more defensible (although, as TATG pointed out, in an important sense, The God Delusion is a work of theology).
The paraphrase was from a brief comment Dawkins made in this conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson. If you have 77 minutes (or less) to spare you can listen for it. It was an amusing quip, nothing more. Mundane and pointless, really, but IMO worth sharing. I don’t know what this thread is doing here in GD.
I think people are arguing about what it means and whether or not it’s true.
Over the last couple of centuries, perhaps. But, to judge from these threads, not any more.
When I think of Biblical scholars, I think of the Q Text New Testament theory and the mid-chapter break points in the Jewish Publication Society Tanakh, keying the reader in the change of voice to a different ancient author. I don’t think this necessarily implies atheism, although it does imply that God didn’t hand over a completed Torah to Moses on Mt. Sinai.
Some day the child of a young atheist on this board may complain that Mom and Dad had wildly misled them about the beauties of mainstream Christianity by conflating it with fundamentalism.
Here’s a survey which says that 41% of biologists are atheists:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8916982/
(This was a survey of faculty members at elite American universities.)
Quite a few theists still have a problem with evolution, particularly in America, however. On human origins only 15% of Americans think humans evolved, and God had nothing to do with the process. 46% believe in Creation and that God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago or less. One-third believed we evolved, but God played a part in it.
For the Christians that now accept evolution, do they pretty much accept much of the biblical stores as fables, legends, myths, allegory and such?
And among eminent biologists, they "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).” Here is a bit more from eminent scientists that still reject God at NAS(National Academy of Scientists) which show 93% are either atheist or agnostic with most the former. And the Fellows of the Royal Society that show numbers of only 3.3% believing in God.
This is a serious question: What do you think explains the starkly different survey results?
Many would regard the Edenic account as a mythic description of the emergence of human consciousness, awareness of the Creator, & falling from relationship with the Creator; the Deluge account- humanity’s struggle to survive & relate the the Creator through natural disaster; and Babel- the development & spread of human civilizations into diverse forms.
When I’m in my Theistic Evolutionary moods, I can easily see that as an account of the Adamic people as the first God-Covenanted yet fallen lineage, with the Deluge as a regional disaster to punish the Adamites for oppressing the others who were not as Divinely gifted, and Bable as their dispersion among the other peoples.
I don’t see of what you quoted of me to be that starkly different, so perhaps you are referring to Elaine Eckland’s study listed by another compared to those I gave. If so, I think she’s probably a flake. From what I’ve read, her study was financed by the Templeton Foundation which gives out cash prizes for scientists that shed some good light on Christianity. She has a book out entitled, ‘Science Vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think’. I think she is trying really hard to make the scientists more religious than they really are. Besides being a sociologist at Rice, she’s also the director of the “Religion and Public Life Program.” On one cite she claims half of scientists have a religious identity and are spiritual, but she says they are afraid to speak out for fear of being discriminated against. And just who are these elite scientists? One book reviewer said she also included sociologists, economists, political scientists and psychologists in her study. Another reviewer said she should have used natural scientists only.
And as I suspected, if the book reviewers are correct that I read from, she doesn’t even bother to mention the long running survey of NAS. And I doubt she says a word about the Fellows of the Royal Society either. So much for her elite scientists.
Brights? 2003 is that way.
It’s possible, but when I read his books he quoted a lot of poetry and sounded like a borderline hippie to me. Or maybe that was his master strategy for converting people away from theism.
I was worried this would be your unserious—and unscientific—response.
What we are presented with is indeed an anomaly. You resolve this anomaly by attempting, on pretty thin grounds, to discredit the study that does not support your point view. I think that is pretty baseless.
Since you attempt to write it off as Ecklund is “a flake,” let’s show our hands.
Ecklund is a sociologist at Rice University, who has presented a formal study. Larson is a historian (at the University of Georgia at the time of the study) and law professor (at Pepperdine University, a religious school, currently). Whitam is a freelance writer. Moreover, their results are presented in a letter to the editor.
Ecklund is a specialist in the sociology of science and religion, a point from which you try to argue for tendentiousness. Rather, I see this as substantiating her expertise in the area. However, Larson also operates in this realm, and in fact, has formerly been on the board of the Discovery Institute, an intelligent design advocacy institution.
So, at least Ecklund and Larson are both potentially tendentious (although I reject this, I do not think being a specialist in a field necessarily signals bias). Instead, I acknowledge that both have expertise in this area—and expected professional connections occasioned by this.
At this point, I will say the biographical attack that you have attempted is nothing so reminiscent as what anti-science types do when confronted with disspiriting results and it is disappointing that you have advanced it. I also wonder why, if you genuinely believe that this is a valid point, why you did not concede similar caveats with respect to the author of the study on which you rely. It smells of bad faith, I’m afraid.
As to the merits, I find the implied argument to be basically the true Scotsman fallacy. Well, real elite scientists believe this way. Those scientists who are working at elite research universities are obviously not elite scientists.
NAS membership is merely meant to be a proxy. I think few people would seriously contend that being a scientist at a research university does not also betoken a high level of scientific expertise either.
And taking your claims at face value, what then is the premise? Atheist beliefs proceed from such subtle truth that even a scientist at an elite research university might overlook it; instead only the most elite of the elite can detect the truth of atheism?
This must be the inference, no? If one accepts that both surveys were adequately conducted, then there is a real incongruity that should be looked into.
But I do not think that is necessarily the inference. I do wonder if the difference in the years of the survey is the clue. The Nature study was conducted in 1998; Ecklund in 2005.
Perhaps there have been changes in society in those seven years that influenced the outcome. Perhaps some people expressed religious views because they felt pressure to do so (2005 was about the time that everyone was wigging out about Evangelicals). But also perhaps, as the American spiritual experience widened, perhaps some people expressed religious views because of the advent of traditions that they found more acceptable. As late as 1998, religious in the United States by and large meant Christianity or Judaism. Since that time, and with advent of the internet (still nascent in 1998), other traditions have become more visible. Perhaps the increased exposure to these traditions allowed scientists to identify with religions other than Christianity or Judaism (with which they did not feel that connection).
Overall, however, I think your biographical attack is misplaced and deeply unscientific. To do science is to wrestle with unexpected findings without attributing those anomalies to bad faith (this is the corollary to the doctrine of falsifiability). To do so, of course, substitutes ideology for experimentation — the death knell to scientific inquiry.
This does explain the anomaly sufficient enough for me to think she skews the numbers. I’ve read portions of her book on-line. When you have NAS and the Brits using different professions, as opposed to Eckland using physicists, chemists, biologists, but also includes the fields of sociology, economics, political science, and psychology, surely this will skew the overall numbers. And if some of those professions is where you and her think you’ll find the most eminent scientists, we disagree again.
“Probably" is different than “is.” She states although the faculty was selecting at random, oversampling occurred in smaller fields, and undersampling occurred in the larger fields. She said because there were more physicists and biologists in the universities, she used 62% of sociologists in a sampling frame, and only 29% of physicists and biologists were selected. I’m not a statistician, and not sure what to make of it, but this might also explain why her numbers don’t match up with the Brits and NAS.
lol, Yeah, you go with that. This hardly seems likely. Looking back at NAS surveys over time, belief in God has been on a continual spiral down among leading scientists not up. You really think that in seven years, there has been this mass upheavel of scientists now becoming much more religious? And to think all news reporting agencies missed it, but maybe ole Ecklund was able to find they were actually this religious after all, it only needed her. Well, that and for her not to include them.
None of these surveys are good enough. It would take a much better survey to establish anything about the religious beliefs of scientists. Yes, a larger proportion of scientists are atheists than the general public. No, we don’t know exactly how much larger. Let’s leave it at that, especially since this thread isn’t supposed to be about the religious beliefs of scientists. This strikes me as a classic case of “Hey, let’s turn this thread into a discussion of what I really want to talk about.”
This is perhaps tangential, but I do reject the premise.
Physics and chemistry are unquestionably sciences. And sociology, economics, political science, psychology (and many parts of biology) are substantially different. Physics and chemistry articulates materially deterministic laws that admit of no exceptions and which can be use for precise prediction. These other sciences do not (including, ecology/evolutionary biology).
So while the articulation of materially deterministic laws discovered by experimentation is an archetypal example of science, it does not seem to be a necessary attribute of science. That said, the ability to articulate rules of a general nature which permit a high, but not necessarily perfect, degree predicative accuracy is such an attribute.
We doubtlessly know some general principles of human societies, human economies, human nation-states, and human behavior. Likewise, we also know general principles of evolution and ecology. This is so even though we cannot guarantee our predictions about how developments in these domains will necessarily unfold.
What then, if not science, is the source of our knowledge of these general principles?
It is no answer to say, “Well, I didn’t say they were not science. I just said that necessarily no pre-eminent scientist can operate in these fields.” If that is so, why then are these fields necessarily sciences manqués?
Again, I don’t share your misgivings and think it is predicated on a silly notion that “Well, sociologist don’t use vectors, so they’re not real scientists.” Sociologist, by the way, are likely much more practiced at statistics than a physicist (but not a biologist, because as noted, biology formally resembles sociology much more than it resembles physics).
As to your remarks about the sampling frame, I’ll note that this refers to the sources from which she is drawing her sample. Perhaps Ecklund chose 62% of sociologists versus 29% of physicists because there are a lot more physicists out there than sociologists. In this way roughly equal numbers from each discipline will be sampled. This would represent a premise that while there is greater economic demand for physicists versus sociologists, they are both equally scientists, which is the ultimate population she in interested in.
It would be nice if she publicized the results of just the “hard” science subset of her sample, which would make comparisons to the Larson study possible. (In passing, I note you didn’t address his own professional connections, so if you are going to continue to insist that Ecklund has a motivation to distort her findings, I’d like you to address your own source’s potential biases.)
Because I have a scientific bent, I prefer to answer such questions on the basis of empirical observation, not meditations as to what conforms to my preferred preconceptions.
Adding many different professions is tangible. If someone chooses to ignore this, it has me wonder what else one would be willing to ignore.
Evolutionary biology has plenty of predictive power, and is both testable and falisifiable. There are many examples. So while you admit they are different, of course they are, but why do you put it alongside, sociology, economics, political science and psychology?
Science has different kinds of fields each serving different needs. Some fields get more attention and respect than others; at least I see it that way. I find it interesting that many value the opinion of scientists and would rather ask them about what they think about god as opposed to a theologian. Quantum physicists or other types of physicists and scientists are being asked more and more about their religious beliefs compared to someone with a doctor of divinity. Many people value what Hawkin, Einstein, and other leading scientists have to say, and maybe I’m wrong, but I just don’t think most people give a hoot about what a political scientist or economist has to say about their religion other than Ecklund, and maybe you.
Sure it would be, and to particular have it peer-reviewed by those best qualified to do so. And I’m not dismissing her for the fact that she is a sociologist, and was listing some of her credentials. Had I not, somebody may have pointed it out to me why I didn’t do so. And if the thought doesn’t run across others minds as to what industry or special interest group may be funding a particular study–and they don’t think this is important–then maybe they should start thinking about it. I’ve lost count of how many studies promoted X, but other replicate studies didn’t bare it out. Industry or special interest groups have motivation to seek out those that may get positive findings of what they are looking for, but maybe she is above it all. Still, there is nothing wrong to point out that the Templeton Foundation funded her study. And I get statistics from some religious sites on occasions, and if the numbers hold up with other surveys, I see no point in not using them. If it shows to be way off course with others, of course it should send up a red flag to most. Editor in chief of Gallop isn’t exactly a non-believer by any means. But let’s get to Larson of which you think this deserves a response in your previous post:
You could have simply went to wiki to realize that he was a part of the Discovery Institute before it became so anti-evolution. Kind of pertinent, don’t you think? And since he has plenty of arguments against ID, I fail to see how this needs special attention from me. But okay, you got it, and?
I don’t know what bent you have, but it seems credulous to suggest that in just seven years time elite scientists are now discovering god in record numbers.
There is history and archaeology, then there is theology.
I suppose a historian or archeologist could have a focus in ancient Cananite peoples, or 1st century Judea.
On the other hand another person could have a degree in theology with a focus on the Bible.
One of those people probably has a lot of interesting things to say about the Bible. The other will just be regurgitating what the sheep like to hear in every Sunday sermon.