Last November we learned that the US public believes in God more than college professors, who believe more than professors at elite schools: Almost a third answered "none" when asked their religion — more than twice the percentage found in the general population. Science professors were the least religious. Accounting professors were the most religious. More than half the professors at places other than so-called "elite" universities said they absolutely believed in God. About a third of the professors at elite schools took that position. … About 30 percent of community college professors considered intelligent design as a serious scientific alternative. Fewer than 6 percent of professors at elite universities took that position.
Access to social space. Elite professors probably have greater social environments than your average college professor to exist in -- at least I picture them that way. They can spend their time doing a lot of different things. On the other end of the spectrum, if you're a poor schmuck your choice might be the church, the bar(with the same godfearing people after work (which in turn feeds on itself, given the people you work with are going to have similar constraints on their social environment)). college professors should be in between somewhere. While they may be exposed to pressure *in* the space they cohabit with others, what I'm trying to describe here is access *to* space itself. It's not impossible to be an atheist who goes to church...it wears on you, after awhile. If not you, your children.
This is interesting because it means that stuff like "Facebook" and blogs like Overcomingbias are really social space - - so they may change the dynamic with time.
I belong to a church (Seaside church in Encinitas) that explicitly does not believe in an anthropomorphized god. Indeed, they are "religious" about referring to god as "it."
Which isn't to say you are likely wrong about the majority. But is to support the idea that this survey answers more about social conditioning than it does about people's metaphysics.
I refer to my church as "my atheist church" since their concept of god is SO at odds with the Roman Catholic God I grew up with. I can feel the social pressure when I refer to it this way to stop calling me and my co-religionists atheists, they don't like it.
I think a good survey about metaphysics, if one were desired, would clearly need to ask about belief in various aspects of god rather than in such a loaded catchall label.
"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.
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 ...
The GSS has questions both about belief in god, what religion people claim to believe in, as well as specific issues such as the existence of an afterlife, everyday presence of god or donating money to churches. Seehttp://webapp.icpsr.umich.e...Most of these items correlate quite strongly, surprise, surprise.
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.
Any survey asking about belief in God is pretty much useless, because of the impossibility of a consensus about how the word is to be interpreted. It would be far more useful to ask people whether they (a) believe in God, and (b) believe in life after death (other than as a metaphor for being remembered by other, living people). My suspicion is that the difference in attitude between academics and the general population will be much w[der on the question of life after death....
No, I did not control for race. Doing a logit regression on fundamentalism as a function of race, income, social class, education, wordsum and fear of someplace in the neighbourhood of where they live, the biggest effect was due to race, followed by social class, wordsum (somewhat correlated with verbal intelligence), fear, education and income. When using the confidence in existence of God variable, being fearful became the strongest predictor and the only one significantly different from zero.
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 :-)
Stuart, expertize on whether God exists would come, as usual, from carefully studying all the evidence and analysis offered on the subject. I made no claim that non-professors could not also have expertize on the subject.
Why isn't this a topic where expertize is possible?
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.
"If all we know about a view was that professors held it more, and elite professors even more so, we would be inclined to favor that view."
You have it EXACTLY backward, and Bainbridge rips you apart.
I have an Ivy League degree. My wife is a PhD and did a postdoc at one of the most prestigious medical schools in the world. She is now a tenured professor at one of the top universities in the US, if not the world.
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, and are more ignorant than the average man on the street. Without a guaranteed paycheck every couple weeks, many of them literally would die from not knowing how to accomplish actual tasks someone is willing to pay for.
They have spent their entire lives on campuses and do not have the slightest particle of knowledge on zillions of topics, and their ideological sameness pervents than from considering alternative views of things.
Exactly backward. Remarkable. One of the dumbest things I've EVER read on the Internet, and that is saying a lot.
I actually agree with all points 1-8 as being a plausible explanation of the reduced belief among the [elite] professors. There are other aspects, too. Concerning the question whether they should be believed about God, I think that most e.g. scientists don't even want to be the source of knowledge about God because they consider these questions to be ill-posed. There are also many left-wing activists who just copy each other which is why they shouldn't be copied further. I would however single out Steven Weinberg who has thought much more deeply about these questions, arrived at very atheistic conclusions, and who has a lot to say about religion - that I would mostly subscribe. Click my name to get to Weinberg's video about religion.
Access to social space. Elite professors probably have greater social environments than your average college professor to exist in -- at least I picture them that way. They can spend their time doing a lot of different things. On the other end of the spectrum, if you're a poor schmuck your choice might be the church, the bar(with the same godfearing people after work (which in turn feeds on itself, given the people you work with are going to have similar constraints on their social environment)). college professors should be in between somewhere. While they may be exposed to pressure *in* the space they cohabit with others, what I'm trying to describe here is access *to* space itself. It's not impossible to be an atheist who goes to church...it wears on you, after awhile. If not you, your children.
This is interesting because it means that stuff like "Facebook" and blogs like Overcomingbias are really social space - - so they may change the dynamic with time.
I belong to a church (Seaside church in Encinitas) that explicitly does not believe in an anthropomorphized god. Indeed, they are "religious" about referring to god as "it."
Which isn't to say you are likely wrong about the majority. But is to support the idea that this survey answers more about social conditioning than it does about people's metaphysics.
I refer to my church as "my atheist church" since their concept of god is SO at odds with the Roman Catholic God I grew up with. I can feel the social pressure when I refer to it this way to stop calling me and my co-religionists atheists, they don't like it.
I think a good survey about metaphysics, if one were desired, would clearly need to ask about belief in various aspects of god rather than in such a loaded catchall label.
Rob, that quote is from Chester, not I.
Robin,
"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
Subduction Phrases
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 ...
The GSS has questions both about belief in god, what religion people claim to believe in, as well as specific issues such as the existence of an afterlife, everyday presence of god or donating money to churches. Seehttp://webapp.icpsr.umich.e...Most of these items correlate quite strongly, surprise, surprise.
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.
Robin,
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.
Any survey asking about belief in God is pretty much useless, because of the impossibility of a consensus about how the word is to be interpreted. It would be far more useful to ask people whether they (a) believe in God, and (b) believe in life after death (other than as a metaphor for being remembered by other, living people). My suspicion is that the difference in attitude between academics and the general population will be much w[der on the question of life after death....
No, I did not control for race. Doing a logit regression on fundamentalism as a function of race, income, social class, education, wordsum and fear of someplace in the neighbourhood of where they live, the biggest effect was due to race, followed by social class, wordsum (somewhat correlated with verbal intelligence), fear, education and income. When using the confidence in existence of God variable, being fearful became the strongest predictor and the only one significantly different from zero.
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 :-)
Stuart, expertize on whether God exists would come, as usual, from carefully studying all the evidence and analysis offered on the subject. I made no claim that non-professors could not also have expertize on the subject.
Why isn't this a topic where expertize is possible?
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.
Chester, do you think there are any professors who have expertize in whether God exists? Why isn't this a topic where expertize is possible?
"If all we know about a view was that professors held it more, and elite professors even more so, we would be inclined to favor that view."
You have it EXACTLY backward, and Bainbridge rips you apart.
I have an Ivy League degree. My wife is a PhD and did a postdoc at one of the most prestigious medical schools in the world. She is now a tenured professor at one of the top universities in the US, if not the world.
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, and are more ignorant than the average man on the street. Without a guaranteed paycheck every couple weeks, many of them literally would die from not knowing how to accomplish actual tasks someone is willing to pay for.
They have spent their entire lives on campuses and do not have the slightest particle of knowledge on zillions of topics, and their ideological sameness pervents than from considering alternative views of things.
Exactly backward. Remarkable. One of the dumbest things I've EVER read on the Internet, and that is saying a lot.
Lubos, your "ill-posed" explanation seems a lot like my #8.
I actually agree with all points 1-8 as being a plausible explanation of the reduced belief among the [elite] professors. There are other aspects, too. Concerning the question whether they should be believed about God, I think that most e.g. scientists don't even want to be the source of knowledge about God because they consider these questions to be ill-posed. There are also many left-wing activists who just copy each other which is why they shouldn't be copied further. I would however single out Steven Weinberg who has thought much more deeply about these questions, arrived at very atheistic conclusions, and who has a lot to say about religion - that I would mostly subscribe. Click my name to get to Weinberg's video about religion.
See my related post "Outside the Laboratory":http://www.overcomingbias.c...