Assume that "surveys" show that the percentage of "top" (TBD) scientists who consider themselves religious is dramatically lower than that of a similar demographic of non-top scientists (and non-scientists). How would one go about explaining the causes of this differential theoretically and then testing the theory?
Gmar Tov
Joel Rich
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: Assume that "surveys" show that the percentage of "top" (TBD) scientists
: who consider themselves religious is dramatically lower than that of a
: similar demographic of non-top scientists (and non-scientists). How would
: one go about explaining the causes of this differential theoretically
: and then testing the theory?
The people who get ahead in any profession spend more time within its
community, and therefore pick up the attitudes of its echo chamber. Even
when those attitudes are not compelled by the field itself. And like any
echo chamber (think the current state of American politics and social
media), you will end up with a feedback loop (the chamber's "echo")
that pushes the demographics away from the middle ground.
I guess the only way to test it is to lot at
(1) People who found their scientific calling in childhood, but lacked
the opportunities to get that immersion in the community. And/or
(2) Those who didn't originally go into the sciences, such that their
religious opinions were set before they did.
Just to consider another way the community's culture could have played
out. Had history not included things like the Church denying Copernicus,
which set up an adversarial background even before Darwin was born....
In Calculating God, Robert J. Sawyer (2000) tells the story of humanity's
encounter with a group of alien scientists who come to study other planets
and learn from its inhabitants. Their paleontologist is amazed to learn
that his counterpart is an atheist. On their planet, the scientific
orthodoxy is that given the evidence of evolution and yet the sheer
unlikeliness of evolution getting anywhere -- never mind the rise of
sentient species -- it had to be guided by a Creator. (Where the story
progresses beyond the main character's first few discussions with the
alien palientologist is less illustrative my point.)
There really is no compelling reason the community gravitated to
one philosophical underpinning to the explanation of the data than
another. Something e are now seeing in other fields. In Quantum
Mechanics, the first explanation of what the wave function was and
how/when it collapsed was Niel Bohr's Copenhagen Interpretation. And
it dominated thought in physics until its popularity started fading
in favor of other explanations less than two decades ago. Not that
there weren't other interpretations of Quantum Mechanics that equally
fit the same data. These were different interpretations of the theory,
not different equations but different justifications for why they would
exist. Just that one captured the community's imagination. Until people
found less mystical explanations that allow them to take consciousness
off the pedestal Copenhagen put it on. (And seem to make more sense even
to this person who believes in souls and that an intellect that can observe
should be special...)
I would be wondering whether some aspect of the same extremely skeptical personality that makes a person tend toward atheism also helps him succeed at the sciences.
I would also be looking at that "TBD" you left open, i.e. the definition of "top" scientists, which is controlled almost entirely by subjective factors, including bias against open religiosity. IOW a scientist who is openly religious will tend (consciously or not) to be thought of by his less-talented peers as not a real scientist, and thus will be rated as "not top".
Historical nitpick: The RC Church did not deny Copernicus; on the contrary, it honoured and valued him. He was himself a churchman, and was encouraged in his research and speculations, all the way up to the pope himself. The key factor, though, was that he never pretended to be doing more than speculating. He didn't claim that his theory was The Truth(tm), since there were many scientific problems with it that he could not resolve. He was so embarrassed by his inability to resolve these that he delayed publishing his theory until what proved to be the last year of his life.
Galileo, on the other hand, despite the serious unresolved problems with it, asserted that heliocentrism was the absolute truth, and proposed ways to reinterpret the Bible to fit it. The Church's position was that there are only two sources of absolute truth: science and the Bible, and since Galileo's theory was confirmed by neither one he had no right to present it as more than a theory to be discussed. Cardinal Bellarmine told him at his trial, if you could prove this scientifically then we would have to accept it, would have no problem reinterpreting the Bible accordingly, and wouldn't need or appreciate your help with that; but so long as you not only can't prove it but can't answer the strong evidence against it we see no need to do so.