“I have met more “elite” PhDs and professors than I can count. IN THEIR AREAS OF EXPERTISE, they should be consulted and their views considered. Otherwise, in general, they are clueless clowns who have not the social or economic acumen to run a hotdog stand”

Ok so in your limited experience the majority of professors wouldn’t be able to run a hotdog stand. However what criteria would you actually support when it came to this question of belief? Would you trust a survey more if it found that people with a high number of expertise were more lilely to nonbelieve?

Or would you trust a survey which found that people with a higher IQ were more likely to nonbelieve? because if you’re honest surely you must agree that professors are more likely to have a higher IQ than say hotdog stand attendants. Ok they might struggle when put up against medics or lawyers but I think they’d come pretty high up in the professions IQ league.

Oh and its not very nice to insult your wife like that, I’m sure she could run a hotdog stand if she tried, well maybe.

Actually come to think of it my wife could run a hotdog stand and hasn’t got a PhD so maybe your argument does hold some merit.

cheers

Rob

When we desire the psychological benefits of a false belief how may we obtain them? One way is to play “I’ll believe if you’ll believe”. Another way is to use a clever, obfuscating phrase to push the doubts down into the subconscious. Provided we …

Doing a crosstabulation between believing in god/believing in heaven and academic degree shows that both decline with education about equally strongly (junior college seems to be the breakpoint, with less education a majority of people people claim to know god and heaven exists, beyond that people spread out among the less extreme possibilities). Belief in God and heaven correlate with each other to 0.67, while god and academic degree -0.13 and heaven and degree -0.22. I don’t think the evidence shows that people lose just parts of religious packages, they become less certain and zealous about the entire belief system.

Still, crosstabulating strength of whatever faith they have versus degree shows an odd thing: belief decreases with education in general, but at the highest academic levels there is a small but clear rise of people in the strong faith category again. Maybe it is an age confounder (people tend to lose faith in adolescence and regain it later, often strengthened). Or maybe it is the militant atheists again.

Dang cool blog. Thanks for several interesting reads tonight.

I dance the edge of academia and industry, working for a scientific instrument company, but teaching part time and being based at a university. My Ph.D. is in Chemistry. During my year, I visit dozens of colleges in the US, UK, and other places. I guess my question would be that a belief by a scientist outside his field is somehow better informed than average. I don’t see it. I am firmly convinced that academics, including scientists, are not superior thinkers. Sadly its like my plumber, who is terribly wiser than me in terms of running a water line but isn’t much good at polymer chemistry. On the topic of say particle physics or social policy, well, we have no special knowledge.

What to make of that, I don’t know. In the present context I guess the tendency of elite university professors to be white, upper middle class people of high education and intelligence that can afford to live in safe areas would reduce the fear incentive for being religious.

(I also just noticed that there are 29 respondents who stated that they were fundamentalists, yet did not believe in God. Maybe I found the militant atheists

I note that you seem to be limiting your original observation, which discussed not professors with “expertise” in God’s existence, but all professors of any stripe. In any event, flesh this thought out — which professors supposedly have expertise in whether God exists? How did they get this expertise? What does the expertise consist of? Why do these professors have this “expertise” in any greater amount than the Pope, or the Dalai Lama, or someone who has had a religious mystical experience, etc.?

What would make you think that any professors with an opinion about God’s existence or non-existence are immune to the sort of confirmation bias that Tabor and Lodge found, which seemed to have a greater effect in the minds of sophisticated people (who are smart enough to dig out supporting evidence and explain away contradictory evidence)? In other words, why wouldn’t you suspect the same phenomenon among professors (maybe of philosophy or religion?) who have an opinion about God? I.e., they are sophisticated enough to concoct rationalizations for their pre-existing beliefs.