Asymmetrical Information

I also believe that more elite profs believe in Marxism than profs in general and definitely more than the public in general.

So... conclusion?

It would be interesting to see the breakdown by field. I'm sure there may be a pattern (I would assume theology profs had the highest rate for theism).

Jane,

I'm inclined to think that the argument falls apart with this: If all we know about a view was that professors held it more, and elite professors even more so, we would be inclined to favor that view.
Why? I see no real reason to presume that elite professors have much more knowledge and insight about a host of topics than the average layman (irony only partially intended). An elite professor should, under optimal circumstances, be expected to know more about his or her subject matter than the rest of us. Although the realities of academic diplomacy, preference for schools of thought, etc. most likely make even this statement a gross exageration. Still, that suggests to me that they don't have any particular expertise or knowledge outside their field of study, even more so for something such as faith and the validity of divine revalation.

"If all we know about a view was that professors held it more, and elite professors even more so, we would be inclined to favor that view."

Not me. On the contrary, after all the PC idiocy I've seen displayed in recent years I would tend to disfavor anything outside their area of direct expertise. If they're in the humanities, ignore that last qualification.

I'd bet good money that science and engineering professors at elite universities are more theistic than humanities and liberal arts professors.

Even if we accept the proposition that, in aggregate, professors are elite universities are smarter and more thoughtful than the rest of us, that doesn't necessarily imply they'll be better at evaluating the evidence of whether or not God exists. I wouldn't run off to the betting shop if I found out 85% of Harvard profs think the Patriots will win the Super Bowl; I don't see why I should be any more deferential to their views on God.

On the other hand, if only 6% (or less) of biology profs believe intelligent design is a significant scientific alternative to evolution, that seems very compelling. Biology professors at elite universities know far more about evolution than I would ever care to, so I wouldn't disagree with their consensus about theories in that area.

"I'd bet good money that science and engineering professors at elite universities are more theistic than humanities and liberal arts professors."

Many scientists use the word "God" in a way that is not theistic. This fools people. There are still die-hard believers who think Einstein wasn't an athiest. I have no idea what engineering professors believe. The fundamental idea of engineering is learning what aspects of reality you are free to ignore. The existance or non-existance of God is
something that all engineers are free to always ignore, so it never comes up.

I am fairly sure that of the three groups, science, engineering and humanities, that the science professors would be the least theistic. The existance of a god with a respectable claim on being divine is anathema to the possibility of genuine human knowledge. You can't have faith in the integrity of your own thought if you believe in the possibility of a being who can alter it. You have no business publishing with an implied caveat; "provided no divine being deluded me into thinking my findings were so".

Okay, I'm setting myself as flamebait here, but I can't help but wonder. The article that Hanson references points also to another study by UCLA in which 80% of professors identify themselves as "spiritual". So, my question is, how do you identify as spiritual without God? Why is one more plausible than the other? Is the crossover looking on mass hypnosis with reverence?

I love how those who thump on the absence of a Bible keep telling us that Einstein's references to G-d do not disprove their devout belief that Einstein was an atheist.

Who gives me the right answers most of the time? Clerics or professors?

I'm confused here. Since when does a belief in the scientific validity of intelligent design constitute a belief in God? And since when is religion (as in, actual creed, dogma, and practice) required for a belief in God?

I don't buy intelligent design for a second, but I still believe in God. Or do I not count, since I'm Neo-Pagan and pantheist instead of Christian and theist? (And if so, where does my Catholic, pro-Darwin brother come in?)

Hanson's question is disingenuous, as quite a few of his own readers have pointed out.

Bill D: God is so patriarchal and part of the phallo-military-capitalist conspiracy, while spirituality keeps us in tune with mother Gaia and the truths of dead native tribes, disabled transgendered lesbian pygmies, and the california condor! You must be phallo-military-capitalist conspiracist if you didn't know that!

As with nearly everything to do with religion: your ideas about mysteries, the unexplained, and the meaning of life are obviously stupid and childish, while mine are the height of intellectual sophistication and were personally revealed to me by (pick one) God, Buddha, Fairies, Ra, Kali, or "this magic crystal I wear around my neck".

As per Will's argument, professors may simply be more aware of what their beliefs actually are.

As far as respected science figures and belief, Sir Isaac Newton is legendary for his advances in scientific, engineering (optics in particular), and financial fields.
It was also said that his piety was greater than his intellectual acumen.

I have not researched any other scientific figures and their beliefs so I can only speculate on the following (warning, stereotype alert ahead. You have been warned):
I am inclined to agree that professors in the scientific and engineering fields would have a greater belief in God than liberal arts or humanities professors (agreeing partially with Meep, above) due to their quasi-religious belief in marxism, and to a certain degree a similar belief in intellectualism as a quasi-religion.

Marxism alone might explain this, as it brings about an egalitarian viewpoint, and the presence of God puts a damper on "All thinking people/things being equal". A bit of irony is that as "intellectuals", these professors who would desire a marxist society with equality for all, yet, place themselves as the "betters" of civilization.

"As far as respected science figures and belief, Sir Isaac Newton is legendary for his advances in scientific, engineering (optics in particular), and financial fields.
It was also said that his piety was greater than his intellectual acumen."

He was also a tireless devotee of alchemy and devout hater of Catholics.

Being one of the most brilliant people who ever lived does not make you right about everything, logically consistant in all your beliefs nor a good person. At best, it gets you a lot of consideration. Professors at elite universities are due no more respect (and probably quite a bit less respect) Than Newton, who was fabulously wrong about a lot.

You can't have faith in the integrity of your own thought if you believe in the possibility of a being who can alter it.

If this is your definiton of God, then yes, obviously. But I doubt this is the most common definition, at least in the West.

Let me add, if you think God can and does alter reality, then obviously, you're right. But can doesn't mean does.

If all we know about a view was that professors held it more, and elite professors even more so, we would be inclined to favor that view

I am a regular reader and fan of your blog, but that statement seriously calls your judgment into question. It is one of the most laughably false statements I have read recently. Please explain.

Response to triticale:

Here are the quotes which you were looking for about Einstein's use of the word "God":

http://www.tricity.wsu.edu/~dcarrell/einstein/quotesaboutgod.htm

"You can't have faith in the integrity of your own thought if you believe in the possibility of a being who can alter it."

Coming from a relgious area of the midwest, I know very few religious people who have this understanding, so I'm inclined to agree with AT. This seems like an uninformed or underinformed view.

For what it's worth, I am an engineer. When I went through my schooling recently, the small sample of engineering professors (the maybe 30 at my school) were by majority Christians. I did meet a few that didn't feel comfortable discussing the issue, so I'm inclined to believe that these were non-religious, but they were definately a minority.

Of the dozens of science professors I have known, and the hundreds of other scientists I have known I have never found one to show the slightest inkling of Marxist belief. Even those who might believe in economic determinism would never agree that Marx could be right about his specific predictions with such a pathetic dataset at his disposal. Marx was a philosopher, not a scientist. Of all the irrational impulses that a scientist tries to rid himself, detestation of philosophers is usually the last to go.

Newton also came before Darwin. This is crucial if you are an advocate of the best available hypothesis approach.

Possibly off topic: I wonder what the rate of believers is among those raised in non-believing house holds - does anyone know?

"Coming from a relgious area of the midwest, I know very few religious people who have this understanding, so I'm inclined to agree with AT. This seems like an uninformed or underinformed view"

Divine inspiration is the essence of evangelical Christianity. It is knowledge, not only of God's existance, but of God's love. All human knowledge has a physical counterpart in the brain. Belief in divine inspiration is belief that a God physically alters the brain to implant knowledge.

While evangelical Christians might be more extreme, all theistic religions incorporate a God capable of having effects in the physical world. I am unfamiliar of any restriction on these powers of manifestaion that would prevent alteration of the human brain.

Was Darwin a physicist or a mathemetician?

Oh, cmon. Professors at elite schools are certainly smarter than myself.

Ok, so lets just limit it to economics professors at elite schools, or Nobel Prize winning economists, or Nobel Prize winning economists from the University of Chicago, or Milton Friedman. To, like, weed out the PC Marxists.

How many theists or actively religious among those subsets?

I would just like to take this opportunity to express my skepticism at the idea of arriving at ultimate metaphysical truths by polling. I don't even have faith that you can arrive at mundane truth this way.

I was a bit hesitant to come out with this. An electorate consisting of only professors at elite universities is about the best my party could hope for, but I bet there would be fraud at the polls and God would win another 4 years in existance.

I am a professor that spent some time at an elite university. The study fits my experience. As for whether we ought favor theses held by elite professors: no. I suspect that whether or not you believe in God depends much more on the community you were brought up in than your mature reflections as an adult. Most elite professors come from a particular social/cultural/economic group with an above-average number of atheists. This broader cultural group is also more liberal than average, hence the general political outlook of elite academics.

Another thing (here much more speculative): elite professors like to be better than everyone else. The vast majority of the world's people are religious. Being an atheist is a quick and cheap way to feel superior. More charitibly: highly intelligent and successful people tend to trust their own reasoning. Most religion requires humility and deference.

"how do you identify as spiritual without God? "

I think this is possible. For instance:

I am an atheist. I would like humanity to continue surviving for many generations beyond my death. I would gladly make sacrifices for it to be so. While I can come up with materialistic reasons for why I would believe that, someone else might not. Someone else, who had no belief in God, but believed in the inherent value of human survival, a value greater than their own survival, might attribute it to spirituality.

Njorl,

They can assign it to the "super special thetans" if they want. That doesn't make it so. You've already placed it with their value system. To assign something to "spirituality" means, ultimately, a recognition of the spirit. Your hypothetical nonbeliever really has, if anything, less reason to give credence to the existence of a spirit, distinct from conditioning and physics than they would a divine being. At least the divine being can be defined away from contradiction.

I actually just wrote a paper on this very topic. The 1975 Carnegie Foundation National Survey of Higher Education revealed the same basic facts, especially that academics are twice as likely to be atheists. It also revealed that atheism is highest among social scientists, whereas "hard" scientists to not exhibit higher than average levels of atheism. I figure there are four ways to explain this:

1) Academics lack exposure to the business world, and are less moral because of it. Sounds harsh, but this is Adam Smith's idea.
2) Also from Adam Smith, academics are prone to group-think, and produce sciences which are "a mere useless and pedantick heap of sophistry and nonsense." Here, the bad science is the secularization thesis, which has dominated the study of religion for 100 years.
3) Academics seek fame more than fortune, and this is at odds with Christian theology.
4) Academics seek to persuade and influence society, partly because their minority views put them at a disadvantage. This applies to atheism as well as extreme political views.

See my blog for more.

Oops--I just realized the statement I took issue with was not yours; sorry Jane.

Jane, atheists (as evidenced in this thread) always claim to understand what theists *really* believe so it's unsurprising that one thinks he can read your mind, too.

My blog:
www.hereticatthegates.blogspot.com

I, along with just about everyone else I knew, really questioned my beliefs during my college years and into my early twenties.

My conclusion: evidence for existence of God = zero. evidence for non-existence of God = 0.

Faith has been defined as the willing suspension of disbelief. I am not willing to suspend my disbelief in the absence of some sort of proof. When I die, I'm totally gone. Kaput. End of line.

"Jane, atheists (as evidenced in this thread) always claim to understand what theists *really* believe so it's unsurprising that one thinks he can read your mind, too."

Conveniently, many theists have been writing what they believe in great detail for many centuries. That makes it a bit easier for us.

Bill,
Your question was how people identify as spiritual without God in a poll. I gave one example of how someone might consider themself spiritual without God. I am not saying my example is logically consistant, nor that the precise definition of spirituality is accurate in the description of this hypothetical poll subject. But people who are polled are not always logically consistant nor are they always aware of the precise meanings of words.

If you want to use a narrow definition of spirituality as belief in spirits, then many Buddhists (who are free to believe or disbelieve in a god) would be spiritual and atheists. I doubt though, that a high percentage of those polled were Buddhists.

Njorl,

Does that mean you're a Communist, or an Anarcho-Capitalist Ranidian. After all, atheists have been writing what they believe in great detail for some time, as well. 87D

Njorl,

Fair enough. My original question, though was addressed to the logical inconsistency of the positions. I guess I wasn't too clear.

Having spent seven and counting years in grad school in the social sciences, I'm inclined to agree with Ralph Phelan and Bill Delasio--if anything it might make me *less* likely to favor that view. As has been pointed out, just because someone is a professor, that is no reason to assume any particular depth of knowledge in any field outside their own area. And for the record, I'm a nonbeliever.

"Njorl,

Does that mean you're a Communist, or an Anarcho-Capitalist Ranidian. After all, atheists have been writing what they believe in great detail for some time, as well. 87D"

What atheists have written about their lack of belief in god probably does pertain to me more or less. What they write about the distribution of wealth, and a host of other matters, probably doesn't.

What theists have written about the nature of god probably applies to a good percentage of theists. What they write about homosexuality or moneylenders or a host of other social matters probably does not.

I was fairly narrow in my assumptions of what theists believed. I ascribed to them belief in a God with traditional divine powers. I maintain that I have not assumed too much, and will continue to believe so until I see reason to believe otherwise.

My sense is that "spiritual" is a sufficiently vacuous, protean term that it's basically impossible to say what it's self-application implies about one's other beliefs. For some people I think it's little more than a synonym for "reflective and empathetic." Though to the extent it does entail belief in some kind of non-material component to human existence, I can't think of any obvious reasons why it'd have to be accompanied by a belief in God.

My conclusion: evidence for existence of God = zero. evidence for non-existence of God = 0.

Faith has been defined as the willing suspension of disbelief. I am not willing to suspend my disbelief in the absence of some sort of proof.

Faith has also been defined as "the evidence of things hoped for; the conviction of things not seen." Of course, said faith is only valid if it is rooted in something remarkable...hence, faith in a man who rose from the dead according to the weight of historical evidence available, IS your evidence.

Now, if you reject that, it's your choice to do so, but your equation of evidence is no longer mutually balanced at 0, nor are you taking a default position in the matter.

My conclusion: evidence for existence of God = zero. evidence for non-existence of God = 0.

Faith has been defined as the willing suspension of disbelief. I am not willing to suspend my disbelief in the absence of some sort of proof. When I die, I'm totally gone. Kaput. End of line.

I'm afraid you lost me. You have no proof for the existence of god and no proof for the non-existence of god. So which disbelief are you not willing to suspend? Disbelief in the existence of god or disbelief in the non-existence of god?

Hmm...my second paragraph should have been italicized (it was in the preview screen). It is of course a quote of Rex.

Late to the party here, but:

If all we know about a view was that professors held it more, and elite professors even more so, we would be inclined to favor that view.

Um, no. My own experience is that if a view is held more strongly by "professors" than by the general public, and still more strongly by "elite professors," then unless it is within said professors' professional sphere of expertise, it's as likely or not to be bull.

I wish I could find the thing . . . the definitive comment on this was made by G.K. Chesterton on a remark by Albert Einstein, but as I can't remember whether this was pre- or post-WWI, I can't locate it. At any rate, Einstein was quoted somewhere as saying that if only two percent of the population refused to fight, there would be no more war. GKC naturally said that was ridiculous — English history is replete with ghastly conflicts in which much more than 2% of the population didn't so much as know that a war was happening.

His point, though, was that listening to Einstein just because he was, well, Einstein made no sense if the subject was something Einstein demonstrably knew nothing about.

No one seems to have mentioned W.F. Buckley (re being governed by the Harvard faculty vs. the first X names in the Boston [Cambridge?] phone directory), but I'm with him on that one. Forced to choose between elite opinion and common opinion, I'll take the latter every time.

Julian Sanchez,

Okay. What non-material aspects of human existence can you prove to me?

Julian, you're absolutely right. We need more and better survey data on this subject. The Carnegie survey does not resolve, for instance, if academics have a) lower levels of belief in God, or b) lower levels of belief in the afterlife. I speculate that hubris drives academics to reject God while still believing in an afterlife. Their's is an afterlife where fame is the only thing you can keep, and those on earth do the judging, rather than God.

I have read a lot of people who say that they don't believe in God because there is no evidence that he exists.

Well, what evidence would you accept? It seems to me that any proof that could be produced could also be faked, or simply not believed.

Look, does the Bible list 40+ some odd prophecies about the life of Jesus Christ at least 400 years before he was born, or was all that added later? If real, that would be pretty good evidence, but there is no way to know that the depiction of Christ wasn't doctored to fit the verses after he died.

I've never spoken to anyone who could cite what would be acceptable evidence to them. And I have never met a Christian who became one except by faith.

Njorl - Jane Galt physically alters your brain nearly every day. Why should God not be allowed?

Here's a working paper (pdf) by the study's authors. From page 6:

There is also significant variation on this question by disciplinary field. Looking at the top 20 BA granting fields, we find that atheists and agnostics are more common in some disciplines than others. Psychology and biology have the highest proportion of atheists and agnostics, at about 61 percent. Not far behind is mechanical engineering, 50 percent of whose professors are atheists or agnostics. Behind that is economics, political science, and computer science, with about 40 percent of professors falling into this category each. At the other end of the spectrum, 63 percent of accounting professors, 56.8 percent of elementary education professors, 48.6 percent of professors of finance, 46.5 percent of marketing professors, 46.2 percent of art professors and professors of criminal justice, and 44.4 percent of professors of nursing say they have no doubt that God exists. We caution, however, that some of these differences may be a function of the differential distribution of these fields across types of institutions.

I think using professorship status as a proxy for intelligence has some serious problems, as others have pointed out. And thus I suspect the question might have had the ulterior motive of trying to get the public to trust academics more.

But as I recall, studies that used IQ came up with similar results. And I consider myself pretty intelligent and an agnostic. So I think there's something to all of this, and I think the explanation is simply that intelligent people are the ones who learn to question authority, because they realize as they are growing up that authority figures like priests (and yes, professors) don't really know more than they do. They merely act as if they do. The authority figures worth listening to were the ones who encouraged and challenged your thinking without telling you what to think. Those were the ones who were honestly trying to help you grow without a vested interest in the specific outcome of that growth. None of the religious authorities I ever encountered fit that mold. Including God.

And I expect that most religions don't stand up to hard questions. For me, I was raised Catholic, but couldn't reconcile a just and loving God with his banishing people to Hell merely because they lived somewhere where they were never exposed to Christianity. Or with a lot of God's actions in the Old Testament (e.g. killing Job's entire family as a wager with Satan, asking for all these silly rituals involving the killing of animals in Leviticus). Never mind the outright contradictions and the tolerating of slavery and polygamy. And why would God plant dinosaur fossils in the ground without telling anybody about it? After all, he was clearly willing to perform miracles to convince people. A God that doesn't want his followers to ask tough questions isn't a God I would want to follow anyway. Look at Bush to see why this is a very bad trait for any leader.

So for me, it wasn't absence of evidence, but evidence against my former religion. Lately, I've realized that a lot of my issues were with organized religion moreso than religion itself, as my cynical self sees churches as political entities attempting to harness the tremendous power that religion can have over people (the Catholic Church would be Exhibit A, and not just in recent news, as there were good reasons for the Protestant Reformation). So I've tempered my views and now consider myself agnostic instead of an atheist.

If all we know about a view was that professors held it more, and elite professors even more so, we would be inclined to favor that view.

And we'd be wrong, since we were being convinced by the argumentum ad populum.

response to theCoach:
I can't respond to your query directly, but I can respond to the direct opposite. I, and my cousins, grew up in highly religious hourseholds (Church of Christ), I am at best agnostic , and I think that describes one of my sisters and two of my cousins. So out of a population of 8, three of us freely reject Christian teachings, and a fourth is in question.

This is from a set who have been schooled in the Bible by weekly Sunday school lessons from the time we could attend until we could escape. The Bible read cover to cover more than once. My experience has been that the more intimate you are with the fable of Judeo-Christian religion early in your life, the less likely you are to believe it as a thoughtful adult.

My father and uncle are both elders in the church . The three cousins who are most confident in their faith were not dragged to church every Sunday morning, evening and Wednesday night. Which leads me to the old adage that with familiarity comes contempt. I do not wish to be a non-believer but my deep education in Christianity leaves me no choice.

And we'd be wrong, since we were being convinced by the argumentum ad populum.

Logical fallacies don't apply in this case: we aren't saying that popular approval of a belief makes it true, especially if we have other data. We're saying that if the only thing we know about a belief is that a group of smart people share that belief, and that within that group a subset of the smartest share that belief to an even greater extent, it's reasonable for us to agree.

Your argument is only valid if you assume absolutely no correlation between belief and truth, and if that's the case you're either denying that people can reason, or denying that reasoning works. If either of those arguments are correct, appealing to logic is hardly consistent.

Ugh. Why can't elite professors keep their non-sequitor beliefs or lack thereof to themselves? I think if we all reacted to people who wear their religiosity (or lack thereof) on their sleeves the same way we react to people who give us intimate details we don't need to hear, we'd all be better off. Sort of a TMI for religious discussions.

I'd certainly agree academics tend to be better informed regarding their own area of expertise, but how many are actually experts in religion? Why would people trust that academics are better informed than others about religion? Is it possible that since most religions are based on faith and not on reason, academics lose their comparative advantage and are therefore turned off or feel threatened by it?

There may be a selection bias and path dependency story here as well. It is true that most academics tend to lean left politically. It is also true that those on the left tend to have lower levels of religiosity than the general population. With this being so, could most of the lack of religiosity be explained by the effects of left-leaning political beliefs? (Or maybe vice-versa?) According to the Seattle Times:

The disparity is even more pronounced at the most elite schools, where, according to the study, 87 percent of faculty are liberal and 13 percent are conservative.

Does this also mean that the rest of us should favor the political views of the elite as well? That doesn't seem to follow. A more plausible story is that Democrats tend to favor the elite being in control of society which empowers those in academia, particularly those in elite institutions. It would make sense from a self-interest perspective for those academics to have a greater incentive to lean left. The more elite the institution, the greater the incentive. Because of the strong correlation between political perspectives and religious beliefs, this would probably result in fewer religious people in academia. (Interestingly, there is little effect of education level or IQ on religious belief, but a big effect from being involved in academia. The implication is that highly educated religious people tend to find jobs outside of academia.)

"If all we know about a view was that professors held it more, and elite professors even more so, we would be inclined to favor that view."

Many of the highly educated people I know are brilliant folks whose opinion I would definitely take into consideration, but just as many - if not more - are as ignorant and dumb as the proverbial bag of rocks the moment they venture one millimeter outside their specialty.

What I find more interesting is the irrational assumption that one would place enhanced value on the opinion of an any university professor on any subject outside their area of expertise.

I couldn't agree more with you Brad. I grew up in a very catholic family, going to Catholic School, and I've gotta say, I don't see much of a difference between smug religious people who go on, and smug atheists who go on:

They both feel oppressed, they both hate the other half, they both are outraged on a daily basis, and they both can't have a conversation without bringing up their belief system every minute or so.

I'd bet good money that science and engineering professors at elite universities are more theistic than humanities and liberal arts professors."

I'll take that bet. Having danced between Economics and Mathematics, I can say that in econ atheism is not unusual, in Math it is assumed.

If you are a physical scientist I don't think it would be in your social best interest to let people know that you were a theist and certainly not a Christian.

"Ugh. Why can't elite professors keep their non-sequitor beliefs or lack thereof to themselves?"

Please look up "poll" in the dictionary.

"in Math it is assumed"

By whom, and why?

"If you are a physical scientist I don't think it would be in your social best interest to let people know that you were a theist and certainly not a Christian"

Again, why? And why Christian in particular?

We're saying that if the only thing we know about a belief is that a group of smart people share that belief, and that within that group a subset of the smartest share that belief to an even greater extent, it's reasonable for us to agree.

Perhaps it's reasonable, but it's not rational.

Among other things, we don't know that the people being polled know anything to speak of about the topic --- ask a bunch of professors of modern languages about pumping lemmae or information theory. We also don't know that professors at elite universities are especially smart compared to other people of similar accomplishment in other areas, and there's not much reason to assume that professors in elite universities are particularly smarter than other professors.

We also have plenty of counter-examples: topics where the "professors at elite universities" were flat-out wrong. Consider, eg, the notion of continental drift, which went from a crackpot idea to accepted fact of geology since I was an undergrad.

Anecdotally, physicists tend to be atheists--not all of them, but more than humanities people and much more than general population.

I think part of the explanation is that physics (in my experience) and hard science in general (I think) teaches you to be a very skeptical person. If you suspect that factor X might be important to something you're doing, then you estimate the effect of X, numerically, and if you can't get an extimate you simply don't depend on X, or you plan for all possible values of X. Believing things without serious, high-quality evidence will get you criticized by your peers, and more importantly lead you to waste years of your life making expensive experiments that don't work. So the instictive skeptical attitude becomes pretty ingrained.

It would be rather surprising if that attitude, constantly beaten into you both by peer pressure and by Nature, didn't seep at all into your attitudes outside of work.

In my experience, I wouldn't say that it's not in your "best interest" to let people know you're a Christian--or rather, it depends what kind of Christian. Certainly young-earthers and the like get nothing but scorn and if you're that kind of Christian you certainly would not want to admit that among physicists. But as long as you believe in the results of evolution, astrophysics, geology--as long as you accept well-established scientific results, really--then no one cares if you go to church every Sunday. (Though I don't have anything resembling a broad experience in the field yet.)

"If all we know about a view was that professors held it more, and elite professors even more so, we would be inclined to favor that view."

Um, no, we wouldn't. The historical evidence clearly shows that the popularity of an idea within the subculture of academia is not evidence of its truth.

Even if we were to reduce the set to professors in a specific discipline and the beliefs to beliefs regarding the subject matter of that discipline, I would still not give much if any additional weight to elite professorial opinion over common opinion in disciplines such as theology and philosophy.

If all we know about a view was that professors held it more, and elite professors even more so, we would be inclined to favor that view.

Agreed with all the commenters above that this remark is very odd. (Perhaps it's a joke?) It would be one thing if the remark were limited to the professors' own domain of experience -- i.e., if all we know about string theory is that most physics professors believe it and elite professors more so, we should favor that view (at least for now). But the remark does not seem to be limited in that respect; it doesn't seem to be talking about religion professors (even if it were, religion professors are experts in the study of religious behavior, not experts in whether God exists, which isn't really a question that is subject to expertise in the first place).

In any event, the notion that all professorial beliefs should be given greater respect is quite unjustified. What reason does anyone have to believe that the views of English professors on tort liability, or the views of biology professors on New Urbanism, or the views of mathematics professors on school choice, are more accurate than anyone else's?

This whole discussion strikes me as a combination of silly indirection and attacking a strawman.

Who really cares about the theistic impulses of professors? The repeated use of the word 'elite' gives a hint. Ironic that the discussion happens on the blog of an MBA from an elite institution.

Since personal experience is given so much weight in these circles, I'll offer mine. As someone with a comp sci degree and a physics Masters, now in law school, all from/in elite unis, my experience is that those in hard science tend to redefine what '[G|g]od' means. I'm an example of that. I'm best described as an athiest, but I do see something transcendent in math, and personally think of 'higher power' being roughly attributable to mathematics. My grandma, good Christian that she is, wouldn't even understand that formulation, but it serves me as something similar to religion.

If the only thing we know about an idea is that the best argument for it is that it is believed by professors at elite institutions, we should be skeptical of it. After all, if there were any real argument in favor it, those talented people would have discovered it.

88 professors at Duke have proved this to be a very bad idea.

It may relfect my analytical philosophy sympathies, but I think Will Wilkinson is "just right" about Jane.

Jane has said she believes there is a negligible but non-zero probability of God. Fine. To take a Bayesian adaptation of Reagan Fan's insightful "what evidence would convince you?" question, what evidence would even alter this probability and where does the number (or even its ballpark) of this small probability come from in the first place?

Take the biblical prophecy example. I really don't believe in its truth, but supposing that it were true, supposing there were accurate, non vague, scientifically documented true prophecies, would this not be more evidence for the existence of space aliens on Earth fucking with us via either machinery or even closed time-like curves (single history self-consistent time-travel)?

I believe people being misleading to other people is by far the best explanation for all the facts in that case, but regardless the fantastical physical explanation is still more economical (and refutable/verifiable) than an arbitrarily complex and unconstrained extra-universal being mucking around with specific matter dots in space-time to manipulate the perceptions of other little matter dots.

As Will points out far more pithily, God is the best explanation for absolutely nothing, to the extent that explanation ever prefers economy, which is something that is just not contested, really.

But more to my point, under this hypothetical why would Jane's infinitesimal acknowledged probability of God even change? And what would it change it to? From 1 in a trillion-trillion to 1 in a billion-billion?

The reality is that what God does "explain" to theistic folks tend to be their feelings, and that they occasionally use "explanation speak" as a misguided rhetoric of persuasion. And I think Jane just clings to some "possibility" for the sense of her feelings.

It's otherwise an odd, not very workable rational corner that she's adopted. At the very least "God" becomes no different than any other arbitrarily nebulous unprovable, unverifiable, undisprovable conceptual entity and doesn't deserve his own linguistic term like "agnotheism".

Better to just own up to it and face the realities of our limited existence. You won't find many people who do so describing it this way, but "leap of faith" boils down to believing in an anthropomorphic, aphysical concept because it makes you feel good -- not because you have a good argument deriving from uncontended intersubjective agreements. The anthropomorphism is especially what makes people feel good, as we're tribal monkeys at heart.

They'll use other language that starts to sound rational rather than emotional like "lending order to their perceptions", but those are mostly their emotional perceptions in their stance against hardship, injustice, and other very human feeling things. It isn't organizing their perceptions about toasters. At least, not most of them.

Religion just isn't rational. Those who try to make it so are attempting to blend the explanatory and predictive order derived from science with the emotional order derived from, oh, making shit up that feels good.

Religion just isn't rational.

The best rational argument for religion/belief in God is the relative success of those cultures which have employed particular belief systems.

The alternative to Western relgious belief is rule by various political and intellectual 'elites' like in China, the Soviet Union, or the Hindi caste system.

Though I should note that I'm tremendously skeptical of miracles and tend to have a faith more similar to that of the "Jefferson bible."

Michelle: "No one seems to have mentioned W.F. Buckley (re being governed by the Harvard faculty vs. the first X names in the Boston phone directory)"

Touché. Also, no one has mentioned Richard Feynman, who gave IMHO the last & best word on the subject: "I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy."

I argue that even in his own field of expertise, an academic is likely to be "wrong" about most things (where "wrong" is defined strictly).

As Will points out far more pithily, God is the best explanation for absolutely nothing...

Eh. Strikes me that Will doesn't have much of an imagination. "God" or some divine spark strike me as a reasonable (though not definitive) explanation for why a random collection of chemicals has acquired sapience and self-awareness. There are certainly other explanations for why the chemical soup that is the human brain has unbelievable emergent properties (e.g. it can even consciously choose its own self-destruction). But somehow "just got lucky that way" isn't very satisfying.

Similarly, people who have died and been revived usually report very similar experiences of comforting light, loved ones calling them, yada yada yada. Two explanations come to mind: transition of the "spirit" to an afterlife or standard shut-down pattern of a dying brain. I tend to think the shut-down pattern explanation is probably the correct one, but the descriptions provided by the "undead" out there certainly suggest that transition to an afterlife cannot be ruled out.

So I gotta go with agnostic on this one. God explains plenty, there is some potential evidence for the existence of the divine (or at least an afterlife) in the reports of those who have temporarily died, and no conclusive evidence against the existence of the divine. In the face of this, atheism is a faith like any other, choosing to ignore or declare resolved issues which certainly have not been closed.

DRB writes:

"God" or some divine spark strike me as a reasonable (though not definitive) explanation for why a random collection of chemicals has acquired sapience and self-awareness. There are certainly other explanations for why the chemical soup that is the human brain has unbelievable emergent properties (e.g. it can even consciously choose its own self-destruction). But somehow "just got lucky that way" isn't very satisfying.

Isn't this just the "God of the gaps" argument? After all, that same logic could be applied to any phenomenon that we don't understand. Absent any other explanation for anything we observe, our default position would be that "God did it."

However, this position is unsatisfying because for everything that we do understand today there was a time at which we didn't understand it. Back then, we would have preferred God as an explanation, and today we would regard that position as false. Therefore, we are in the odd position of clinging to a default explanation for everything that has been relentlessly refuted time and again with the march of human knowledge.

Why would we attribute any explanatory power to such an explanation, knowing that in any instance we apply it we could (and in many instances we will) be refuted sometime in the near future?

-rpl

rpl,

You provide a very good summary of the argument against "God of the gaps" and one I fully agree with. It would be a good refutation of my post if I had written that God provides a reasonable (though not definitive) explanation of how a mass of chemicals acquired sapience and self-awareness. However, I actually wrote that God provides a reasonable (though not definitive) explanation of why a mass of chemicals acquired sapience and self-awareness.

An example that comes to mind is that of a child asking his father why the sky is blue. The father launches into an explanation of optics, light, the spectrum, the sun, the earth's atmosphere and all the little tweaks of physics that make the sky appear blue, then announces to his son "That's why the sky is blue."

The child, understandably, has an unsatisfied frown on his face. However, by his father's expression he realizes that not only is that all the explanation he's going to get, but also that his father thinks it's a good one. So the child grudgingly says "OK" and leaves it at that.

Of course, the father has actually answered the question "How (i.e. by what mechanism) is the sky blue?" He hasn't remotely come close to answering the child's real question of "Why (i.e. for what reason) is the sky blue?"

There are some things, mainly revolving around "How", that scientific inquiry has explained or most likely will explain. There are other things, mainly revolving around "Why", that scientific inquiry has not explained and in all likelihood never will explain. It seems to me that Wilkinson is focusing on the former to the exclusion of the latter and declaring the case closed as a result.

DRB writes:

   somehow "just got lucky that way" isn't very satisfying

I'm sorry...how did we get the God to help out the molecules in the first place? Wouldn't that also be "just getting lucky"?

Only, under the God hypothesis we're faced with the "luck" of something far more complex than some amino acid combinations that troubled us.

And, for what it's worth, many of these molecular combinatorial improbabilities may not be as unlikely as they seem at first blush. Often when one assumes "independent" probabilities that multiply down to something preposterous one is making a mistake...there are actually correlations making things not so improbable. But the details of such correlations and probabilities may take years or decades to fully work out.

It's easy in the face of the ignorance to try to "re-label" luck as God. But you should know you're replacing one mystery by a bigger one. I.e., what rational reason have we to connect any near death experiences with some invisible hand guiding molecules? That seems pretty made up. Why not revert to the Greek pantheon? One god for molecules...one for zombie folk, one ring to rule them all. Blah, blah, blah.

More bluntly, the only way God hypothesis is more satisfying is emotionally, not rationally. As I was saying earlier...

It may be true that civilizations with religion prosper more. One might speculate that this could be in part due to a supernatural bogeyman being better at encouraging organized behavior than, um, other people asking nicely or firmly. Still, though, the prospering of a culture is a reason to encourage a belief in your peers to boost your social prosperity, but not a reason to believe it yourself. There are many false beliefs one might encourage in others in order to prosper, though.

To a major extent, more revealing than professors at "elite universities" versus other professors, would be a comparison of PhDs employed outside of academia versus their academic counterparts. Does anyone know if any such research has been done?

I'm sorry...how did we get the God to help out the molecules in the first place? Wouldn't that also be "just getting lucky"?

Who said the God was helping out the molecules in the first place (other than you, I mean)? Like rpl, you're confusing questions of "how" with questions of "why".

DRB, this has nothing to do with "how" vs. "why". It has to do with the regress inherent in all explanatory chains and where it's "satisfying" to stop. The "how vs. why" question in this realm is moronic and utterly misses the point. It's a short circuit of appying one standard to credibility to both science and religion. "Why" enjoys no magical special epistemic out over "how". It may not be satisfying to stop at chance, and many don't stop, continuing to look for patterns and ways to either eliminate the chance element or render it more plausible or connected to high probability events. This doesn't mean it should be any more satisfying to press on right on past chance into, well, just making shit up 'cause you feel like it.

Spaghetti,

This has everything to do with how vs why. The point under discussion was the assertion that the divine explained nothing, when of course there are plenty of things the divine explains that center around the question "why" and that also in all likelihood will never be answered by scientific inquiry. Science explains "how"; philosophy and faith tackle "why".

Personally, I do believe that "chance/just because" is a more likely answer to those "why" questions than the divine -- but I have no basis for ruling out the divine either. That's why I'm an agnostic. You are of course welcome to reject the possibility of the divine if that's what your faith requires.

"How" and "why" are only distinct cause & effect adverbs when applied to people -- by virtue of a theory we have of people that they have "plans" and "intent" and a "why".

The only time both words don't refer to the same sorts of cause and effect relations is when one of the causes is supposed to be inside a brain or other psychology or planning, intending, designing entity.

Thus, to apply "why" questions to a particle, molecules, or the universe and say scientific answers aren't good enough PRESUPPOSES THE ANSWER and is hardly convincing philosophy.

And I agree -- science tries to steer clear of personified explanations about "why my pet rock doesn't love me anymore" fantasies. Religion seems to embrace them head on and promote pet rocks and "explain" why Santa put me on his naughty list.

The "how vs. why" form of this debate usually ascribes some kind of marginal excess value to the "why" over the "how=why minus any personified component". Rather than marginal excess value, I say marginal excess procedural confusion of what explanation means and why it is valuable. [ and clearly marginal excess emotional satisfaction is part of it, obviously tied to the fact that you can emotionally relate to your own pet rock better than one of those other people's non pet rocks! ]

There is really nothing new in "how vs. why" formulations beyond first cause and design arguments. Just linguistic shell games.

But to each his own. Santa is real with probability one in a gazillion trillion. So, I'm an agnosanta scientist going home to take a mental rest and pet my rock.

Why ask why?

Spaghetti,

In my view, you are making two mistakes common to devout atheists:

1. You confuse the possible existence of the divine (which is a reasonable answer to a number of questions that cannot conclusively be answered) with things that answer no questions whatsoever -- e.g. Santa Claus, anthropomorphized rocks, pink unicorns, etc.

2. You mistake Occam's Razor for a proof when it is really a heuristic.

It's okay. I did it back when I was an atheist too. Best regards.

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