Yesterday I watched 50 renowned academics speaking about God, a collage of documentary fragments of renowned scientists and philosophers who talk about their personal views on God. The film opens with the following statement (presumably by the film's creator) "The more scientifically literate, intellectually honest and objectively sceptical a person is, the more likely they are to disbelieve in anything supernatural, including God". The text continues that "All speakers featured are elite academics and professors at top institutions, many of whom are also Nobel Lareates".
After which follow 50 distinguished academics, all of whom except one (Rebecca Goldstein) are men, with a fairly large percentage of physicists and philosophers. The selection of speakers is also imbalanced in other respects. As far as I know, all speakers are senior, tenured professors, the overwhelming majority is white. Moreover, most of them are outspoken atheists or at best (at worst?) agnostic.
In the course of the film, it also became clear that many of the speakers had not clearly thought about the question of God's existence. Some of them were wondering whether they were atheists or rather agnostics. Only some responses indicated a clear and reasoned response (e.g., Dennett and Russell).
Despite the film's proposed correlation between scientific literacy and religiosity, it is still difficult to establish how prevalent theism/atheism is in academia. A widely cited 1998 survey by Larson published in Nature among National Academy of Sciences members found that disbelief in God was widely prevalent (72.2%), followed by agnosticism (20.8%) and only 7% theism. NAS represents the absolute academic elite, so it is useful to see if the pattern holds in academia at large.
Ecklund and Scheitle (2007, published in Social Problems) analyzed responses from academics from 21 universities in the US (unfortunately, these are still elite universities, so again, not a balanced sample). They found about 31.2 % atheists and 31 % agnostics - the remaining number believed in a higher power (7 %), sometimes in God (5.4 %), believed in God with some doubts (15.5 %) or believed in God without any doubts (9.7 %). If we compare this to the general American population (of which 92 % says 'yes' when asked whether they believe in God), it does seem that academics are significantly less religious.
Interestingly, despite the fact that women are more religious (as is indicated by higher church attendance rates, for example), gender was not a significant predicting factor for religiosity in Ecklund and Scheitle's study. Thus, it would not have been difficult to find more women to feature in 50 academics speaking about God. A significant predictor was age: older academics were more likely to be agnostic or atheistic than younger ones. This I found particularly interesting, because it is in agreement with a puzzling pattern I found in the PhilPaper survey results. There, we can see that 14.6% of philosophy faculty believe in God. When postdocs are included, this percentage rises to 16.3%. Graduate students have the highest percentage of theists, 20.8%. Will we see more theists in future philosophy? Or does the number of theists decrease with age?
I am intrigued by the association between age and religiosity in academics as indicated in PhilPapers and Ecklund and Schleite. The pattern is reversed compared to the population at large, where older people tend to be more religious. So why are older academics less religious? Is there a form of self-selection? Selection? Do scholars grow less religious as they grow older? I am also wondering whether the widely prevalent atheism in academia can really be explained by a high prevalence of intellectual honesty and objectively scepticism (whatever that may mean). Perhaps it's something inherent in the cultural context of academia? Conformism may then explain why people get less religious as they ascend the academic ladder.
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