Atheism Intelligence Correlations - The Strongest Argument for Atheism

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Most of the top scientists in natural sciences are atheists. If we compile the list of Nobel Prize winners in Physics from 1907 to 2007, I'd be very surprised if we find more than 10% theists. (I haven't checked it.) I suspect that it's true for chemistry, biology, mathematics. Probably even economics.

Doesn't it qualify as a good survey?

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Let’s first determine if that is a survey, then we can qualify it as good or not.

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WTF, you seriously doubt this? Here's a 1998 survey of the National Academy of Sciences. Note that only 7% would qualify as theistic by the standards of Christian orthodoxy.

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No, that is not a survey of the National Academy of Sciences. That is a journal article about said survey. Find the actual survey, read the question posed then get back to me. This is one of the surveys I was referencing. If you read the actual questions posed I think you will find that this article, along with most articles written about the survey, is misleading.

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In that article they describe their methodology, i.e. how they chose their respondents, they describe the questions that they asked (such as: Do you believe in personal god?), and the options, that people could choose: Yes, No, I don't know (agnoscism). What else do you need?

I'd like to ask you how many scientists do you know? It looks like you are expressing doubts without any knowledge of the field.

P.S. Bible is not a holy book, it is just some words printed on the paper. I can compose lots of sentences like this about any religious subject. (I don't want to offend you, just show the logics that you use.)

[Max Raker]

One argument against OP's view is that if God exists, many people are going to be right but for the wrong reasons. Lets the the bible is true, some guy in ancient greece would have been correct on the question "does God exist" but only beacuse he believes in god living on a mountain and throwing thunderbolts. When people are right based on luck it doesn't matter how smart they are beacuse they used bad logic to get there anyway.

[RJT]

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Most of the top scientists in natural sciences are atheists. If we compile the list of Nobel Prize winners in Physics from 1907 to 2007, I'd be very surprised if we find more than 10% theists. (I haven't checked it.) I suspect that it's true for chemistry, biology, mathematics. Probably even economics.

Doesn't it qualify as a good survey?

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Let’s first determine if that is a survey, then we can qualify it as good or not.

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WTF, you seriously doubt this? Here's a 1998 survey of the National Academy of Sciences. Note that only 7% would qualify as theistic by the standards of Christian orthodoxy.

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No, that is not a survey of the National Academy of Sciences. That is a journal article about said survey. Find the actual survey, read the question posed then get back to me. This is one of the surveys I was referencing. If you read the actual questions posed I think you will find that this article, along with most articles written about the survey, is misleading.

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In that article they describe their methodology, i.e. how they chose their respondents, they describe the questions that they asked (such as: Do you believe in personal god?), and the options, that people could choose: Yes, No, I don't know (agnoscism). What else do you need?

I'd like to ask you how many scientists do you know? It looks like you are expressing doubts without any knowledge of the field.

P.S. Bible is not a holy book, it is just some words printed on the paper. I can compose lots of sentences like this about any religious subject. (I don't want to offend you, just show the logics that you use.)

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No offense, but:

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He found that 58% of 1,000 randomly selected US scientists expressed disbelief or doubt in the existence of God, and that this figure rose to near 70% among the 400 "greater" scientists within his sample.

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This is a quote from the article. It is not a quote from Leuba.

The table in the article is the article’s table, it is not a table from the survey.

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No offense, but:

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He found that 58% of 1,000 randomly selected US scientists expressed disbelief or doubt in the existence of God, and that this figure rose to near 70% among the 400 "greater" scientists within his sample.

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This is a quote from the article. It is not a quote from Leuba.

The table in the article is the article’s table, it is not a table from the survey.

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I don't get your objection. You doubt the integrity of the author, assuming that he falsified the figures?

In this case you can repeat his survey and sent it to the same journal claiming that they used a misleading methodology or falisfied the data. That's the way science is done, normally scientists doesn't try to mislead each other. In a few cases when the manipulation of the data did take place, it was found quite fast by people who tried to reproduce the results.

[RJT]

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No offense, but:

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He found that 58% of 1,000 randomly selected US scientists expressed disbelief or doubt in the existence of God, and that this figure rose to near 70% among the 400 "greater" scientists within his sample.

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This is a quote from the article. It is not a quote from Leuba.

The table in the article is the article’s table, it is not a table from the survey.

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I don't get your objection. You doubt the integrity of the author, assuming that he falsified the figures?

In this case you can repeat his survey and sent it to the same journal claiming that they used a misleading methodology or falisfied the data. That's the way science is done, normally scientists doesn't try to mislead each other. In a few cases when the manipulation of the data did take place, it was found quite fast by people who tried to reproduce the results.

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I don't get your objection. You doubt the integrity of the author, assuming that he falsified the figures?

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The article is written by a journalist I bet. I would be very surprised to find it was written by a scientist. He does not falsify numbers. He takes numbers and misleads the reader. For example, he suggests that a question was posed in the survey “Do you believe in the existence of God?” No such question was asked.

I don’t have a link to the actual survey (actually “surveys”, the original one and the one repeated years later.)

The survey is not misleading. The author of the article misleads the reader by not correctly capturing the results of the survey.

[madnak]

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The article is written by a journalist I bet. I would be very surprised to find it was written by a scientist.

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"You bet." How about you actually read the damned article? It was written by Edward Larson and Larry Witham, the very people who conducted the survey. They used the model created by James Leuba in 1916. There is nothing fishy going on.

I don't think there's a free copy online, but there are plenty of reviews. I've seen this referenced before and have just run it through Google and nobody appears to have any issues with the method except that the definition of God is too narrow (see my post earlier in this thread). You are being an ass and refusing to do your own homework. The high incidence of atheism among scientists is well-documented and no amount of hand-waving is going to change that.

[RJT]

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The article is written by a journalist I bet. I would be very surprised to find it was written by a scientist.

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"You bet." How about you actually read the damned article? It was written by Edward Larson and Larry Witham, the very people who conducted the survey. They used the model created by James Leuba in 1916. There is nothing fishy going on.

I don't think there's a free copy online, but there are plenty of reviews. I've seen this referenced before and have just run it through Google and nobody appears to have any issues with the method except that the definition of God is too narrow (see my post earlier in this thread). You are being an ass and refusing to do your own homework. The high incidence of atheism among scientists is well-documented and no amount of hand-waving is going to change that.

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My apologies for assuming the article was written by a journalist.

I didn’t read this correspondence thoroughly, I glimpse through it and it seemed to be similarly written as those I posted about a few years back.

I still contend the article and the table summarized in the survey do not accurately depict the questions asked.

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According to a much-discussed survey reported in the journal Nature in 1997, 40 percent of biologists, physicists and mathematicians said they believed in God - and not just a nonspecific transcendental presence but, as the survey put it, a God to whom one may pray "in expectation of receiving an answer."

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This for the most part was the gist of the survey. If you feel the table accurately reflects that question than I will have to concede defeat. (I doubt there are many theists who actually expect to receive answers to prayers. Does that imply they don’t believe in a personal God?)

[madnak]

The Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Gods fit that criterion. I believe that was Leuba's stated purpose in selecting it. And yes, in the real world there are few who believe in a personal God but not in answers to prayers - Christianity is really the prime target here and there's no question of it in Christianity. I already mentioned that some people thought the definition was too narrow.

At any rate the criteria have been accepted for many decades. Nobody has raised any serious objections (even though I believe the study was used in the Scopes trial), and in none of the three studies has anyone come out to protest how the results are being used. I also don't think it's credible to suggest that the scientists didn't know what was going on, particularly since so many expressed disbelief rather than simple uncertainty.

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The article is written by a journalist I bet. I would be very surprised to find it was written by a scientist.

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In the posted link it is witten:

NATURE CORRESPONDENCE

I hope you know what it is.


Then there is a reference to the original article:

Nature, Vol. 394, No. 6691, p. 313 (1998) © Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

or THE LINK
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal.../394313a0.html

You can actually buy this article for a small fee, if you doubt that the link correctly reflects its content.

And in the end there are names of the autors:

Edward J. Larson
Department of History, University of Georgia,
Athens, Georgia 30602-6012, USA
e-mail:edlarson@uga.edu

Larry Witham
3816 Lansdale Court, Burtonsville,
Maryland 20866, USA


It seems that you don't even tried to think about it and check anything, claiming that 'this is journalist'. This shows the difference between scientists, who try to tests everything and open to new ideas and believers who choose only the right things to believe.

[luckyme]

From an Nature correspondence on a 1998 survey duplicating Leuba's 1914 one-

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Table 1 Comparison of survey answers among "greater" scientists
Belief in personal God 1914 1998

Personal belief 27.7 7.0
Personal disbelief 52.7 72.2
Doubt or agnosticism 20.9 20.8

Belief in human immortality 1914 1998

Personal belief 35.2 7.9
Personal disbelief 25.4 76.7
Doubt or agnosticism 43.7 23.3

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There does seem to have been a major change, whatever one thinks of the questions. In both surveys the results would seem very different from what one would expect if we surveyed coalminers in Kentucky at the same time. same questions.

luckyme