Web Posted: July 25, 1998
study in today's edition of the prestigious science journal "Nature"
reveals that members of the scientific community are "more likely than
ever to reject God and immortality," discloses Britain's Daily
Telegraph.

http://www.atheists.org/flash.line/atheism1.htm

Web Posted: July 25, 1998
study in today's edition of the prestigious science journal "Nature"
reveals that members of the scientific community are "more likely than
ever to reject God and immortality," discloses Britain's Daily
Telegraph.

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.


"NATURE" SURVEY -- LESS AND LESS BELIEF
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%.


THE GLASS IS EMPTIER...
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 person god" category suggests a precipitous drop, from about 40%
in Larson's survey to 7% in the "Nature" study.


CHANGING VIEWS OF SCIENCE, RELIGION, GOD
While Leuba and his study were historic curiosities when Dr.
Larson and co-researcher Larry Witham decided to revisit the findings,
during its time the 1916 survey ignited considerable controversy. Paul
Karr of Research Reporter noted that Leuba's findings "touched off an
anti-evolutionary movement that would culminate in the historic Scopes
trial where science and Darwinism faced off against Christianity and
creationism for the mind and soul of the American schoolchild."
Indeed, just nine years after the Leuba findings, high school biology
teacher John T. Scopes (1900-1970) was in the middle of a legal
controversy, accused of violating Tennessee's Butler Act which forbade
the teaching of evolution in the state's public schools. The trial
drew worldwide publicity, and was soon dubbed the Monkey Trial due to
popular misconceptions about evolutionary findings -- that "people
came from monkeys."

Criminal attorney Clarence Darrow faced off against the
prosecution's most illustrious witness, former U.S. Secretary of State
William Jennings Bryan, a populist known for his famous "Cross of
Gold" oration. Darrow conceded "the facts of the case," that Scopes
had indeed violated the Butler Act -- but he also argued for the
scientific validity of evolution. Scopes was convicted and fined $100,
but the state supreme court later overturned the verdict on technical
grounds; meanwhile, the Butler Act remained on the books in Tennessee
until 1967.

But William Jennings Bryan, the consummate politician, also was
typical of the "amateur scientist" of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century. He was a member of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, but as described by Edward Davis in a review
of "Redeeming Culture: American Religion in an Age of Science (James
Gilbert, University of Chicago Press, 1997), was also "representative
of an older, less abstract, way of understanding scientific knowledge,
a common sense Baconianism that eschewed speculative hypotheses (such
as evolution) and saw both science and religion as ways of glorifying
God."

The paradigm exemplified by Bryan -- the practical, "amateur
scientist" who understood the scientific enterprise as a reaffirmation
of the sacred -- may be even less represented today within the
academic community than when John Scopes went to trial in Dayton,
Tennessee nearly three-quarters-of-a-century ago. Evolution, a core
tenet of modern life sciences such as biology, was not a major point
of contention even among professional academicians then. It reflected
the tension between the "common sense" position of the "amateur
scientists" and the more rigorously trained professionals. Davis
argues that "Bryan's 'greatest mistake' was to assume that this view
of science was still operative among professional scientists in the
1920s. Because it was still part of the popular conception of science,
however, his actions leading up to the Scopes trial 'revealed a fault
line between popular and professional science.'"

Today, the fault line appears between the scientific community
which increasingly doubts supernatural or religion-based explanations
of how the universe operates, and the wider popular culture which is
in the midst of both a fundamentalist revival, and a disturbing
popularity of new age and related pseudo science beliefs. One example
could be the recent article in Newsweek Magazine, which suggests a
convergence of scientific opinion and more traditional religious
doctrines. The agreement may exist more in the news rooms of popular
magazines, than in the libraries, labs and observatories where
scientists actually do their work.



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