Scientists more likely than ever to reject God belief

From The Telegraph

Date Unknown

A leading scientific journal concludes that increasingly, scientists have doubts about the existence of a deity or similar supernatural and religious claims. This finding questions the pop-culture view that science and religion are moving toward a consensus, and a shared view about the humanity and the universe. 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.

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%.

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 personal god" category suggests a precipitous drop, from about 40% in Larson's survey to 7% in the "Nature" study.

[Interesting though, as always, those who believe in God will dismiss the findings and those who do not believe will call the result self-evident. Everything is spin it would seem.]