Polls of this sort are never easy to interpret with much confidence. What polls have shown consistently for many years is that academics (including scientists) are far more "liberal" both politically and religiously than the general American population. That is a generalization, obviously, and any given academic or scientist can be a right-wing atheist, a left-wing Christian, or any other combination you can imagine.
The reasons for this are not really clear to me, but even 60 years ago it was probably true that a large majority of leading physicists (confining my comments to physicists, since they are based on what I know anecdotally about the Manhattan Project) were very liberal politically and mainly irreligious. Some, like Oppenheimer, had considered Communism very seriously (his wife was the genuine article), and a few even worked covertly for the Soviets (American versions of Klaus Fuchs), as documented extensively by the new book, "Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America," based mainly on Soviet archives that became available briefly several years ago.
I won't try even to guess at the reasons for this type of demographic, but I think it would not be too hard to refute a trivial conclusion that intelligence results in liberal political views and religious scepticism. Plenty of corporate executives, attorneys, and other folk are also highly intelligent, and the demographics among them are probably not similar to those among academics and scientists. People in all walks of life tend to encourage and empower people who think similarly to themselves, and similarities of beliefs in these areas are surely part of that. As someone from a top research university once said to me, "places like [the university of X] don't hire people from places like Messiah."
Ted
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Received on Tue Jul 14 11:17:59 2009
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