From: Dr. Blake Nelson (bnelson301@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Jul 14 2003 - 21:58:43 EDT
Thanks to Scott Jorgenson's help, I did a little
follow up and this is where my recollection of the
1996 and 1998 surveys was slightly off and where it
was still slightly correct.
It appears there were two studies -- 1) a longitudinal
study (EJ Larson and L Witham, "Scientists are still
keeping the faith," Nature, 286: 435-436, 1997 (April
3) and repeated questions done in a study 80 years
ago. It was a peer-reviewed paper.
The study so favored by the Skeptical Inquirer was a
1998 letter to the editor (not peer-reviewed).
If my refreshed recollection is correct, one of the
reasons this was not accepted for peer-review was that
the questionnaire used is ambiguous for the purpose of
actually surveying religious beliefs (e.g.,
potentially conflating creationism with theistic
belief -- although my memory has not een 100% accurate
so far) given the language that was used. IIRC,
Eugenie Scott touched upon the problems of the 1998
letter in an article in Reports of the National Center
for Scientific Education in 1999. While I don't have
time to look this up, I wanted to clarify to the list
my refreshed recollection which was partially
incorrect. Either way Dawkins is citing data that are
dodgy. ;)
--- Scott Jorgenson <dscottjorgenson@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi Blake,
>
> My name is Scott Jorgenson. I've been "lurking" on
> the ASA discussion list and
> noticed the recent "Dawkins dissembles" thread in
> which you questioned Dawkins'
> recent cites of religious belief among US
> scientists. You also said you were
> looking for references and couldn't find them at the
> time.
>
> I thought you'd be interested to know that Dawkins'
> cites are legit, insofar as
> they go. General theistic belief (not necessarily
> Christian) among US
> scientists as a whole was surveyed to be about 40%,
> and among NAS members
> particularly it was surveyed to be only about 7%.
> Larson and Witham performed
> both surveys, which posed identical questions
> (modeled after Leuba's
> early-20th-century work) to first a random sampling
> of US scientists, then
> **all** NAS members. I believe both their studies
> were published in Nature -
> the first in a short paper I think, and the second
> in a letter. Here is a copy
> of that letter, as maintained on
> www.stephenjaygould.org:
>
>
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/news/file002.html
>
> Note that the NAS numbers come from a sampling of
> **all** NAS members, and they
> got a good return rate; thus the NAS numbers are not
> suspect statistically so
> far as I've heard.
Thanks for the clarification. I still wonder why it
was not peer reviewed and published as an article. I
think my refreshed recollection might be correct, but
it seems odd that it was only accepted as a letter to
the editor.
> That said, please note that I probably agree with
> you on the interpretation of
> this data - namely, that NAS members are no more
> authorities on philosophy,
> religion, or the science/religion interface than you
> or me, so "so what". To
> become an NAS member, one must be a very
> well-respected, accomplished and
> well-connected US scientist - none of which requires
> any special grounding in
> the subject matter of the survey. Attributing any
> special significance to the
> NAS numbers, as Dawkins does, is to engage in
> technocratic thinking and
> scientism: NAS members must be really smart at
> science, and to be really smart
> at science is to be really smart at everything, and
> thus NAS members' opinions
> on religion are especially authoritative. Bull :-)
> Personally, I attribute
> the disproportionately-high NAS numbers more to the
> hubris that humans too
> often acquire when showered with intellectual
> affirmation and stardom, than to
> any native intelligence. Reading your comments on
> the ASA list, I suspect you
> might agree.
I do. I don't put particular stock in the theological
opinions of Fortune 500 CEOs, Hall of Famers in any
particular sport, or movie stars either. ;) It seems
there are two inferences that Dawkins wants us to take
from the NAS data 1) "smart" people are not religious
(and NAS membership is neither a surrogate for
intelligence nor even if it were does such a survey
establish causality) and 2) that science conflicts
with religion and eliminates religious belief. I
recall a survey done of academicians wherein the arts
and humanities were least religious, social scientists
somewhat more religious and by comparison "hard"
scientists were downright pious. Now, if Dawkins
wants us to presume that science drives down religious
belief, does that mean literary criticism is a
"harder" science than physics and thus leads to lower
levels of religious belief? No, what it probably
shows are the self-selection and socialization effects
of various parts of academic training.
> But that said, I thought you'd want to know about
> the veracity of Dawkins'
> cites.
>
> Hope this helps,
It does.
> Scott
>
> PS. Feel free to post this to the ASA list if you'd
> like - I don't know how to
> do that or if it is even open to non-members :-)
Thanks for catching my error. That is the danger of
writing thoughts off the top of your head without
library resources available or even googling before
hand. ;)
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