8 Answers

  1. Although the percentage of atheists among scientists is higher than among other people, they do not appear in the overwhelming majority. Here, for example, is a relatively recent study.

    Distribution of the proportion of believers, agnostics, and atheists among scientists surveyed in eight countries.

    It can be seen that even in the United States and Great Britain, believers make up a third of all scientists. Less than half, but the gap is not huge.

    If it were a matter of mastering the scientific method or a purely quantitative amount of knowledge, then one would assume that a religious scientist is a bad scientist. He either doesn't know enough or hasn't mastered the method well, but I don't think there is any solid evidence for this claim.

    In general, I think that the method of obtaining such data contains an error. How do we know if you're a believer or an atheist? We ask this directly. But when we do this, the answer “I am an atheist” usually implies a completely different amount of information than the answer “I am a believer.” The first answer often involves a lot of thought work, while the second is just words.�

    I know religious scientists – moreover, scientists in the field of natural sciences-physicists, chemists. And I know ordinary believers. And, as for me, the word “believer” can not cover both of them, for someone you will have to come up with a different name.

    I think that a huge number of people consider themselves to be a religion more by inertia than by common sense, religion is inherited by many from their parents and environment and consists not in faith, but in the formal observance of rituals. If you dig such people deeper, they will turn out to be more superstitious than religious. The difference is about the same as between a person who carefully selected a suit and even sewed it to fit himself and someone who simply put on the first thing that came to hand, not knowing whether he was wearing a hat on his head or underpants. I would venture to suggest that there are significantly fewer truly religious people, people for whom religion has become a conscious choice that provides a satisfactory answer to important questions, perhaps just the same third (and maybe even less!) as we see among scientists in the UK and the USA. That is, the point is not that there are fewer believers among scientists, but that there are almost no superstitious people there – it is by mastering the scientific method, accumulating knowledge, that a person gets rid of superstitions, and after getting rid of them, he has the opportunity to freely and consciously choose a worldview foundation – and after that about a third still remain believers, and the rest become atheists or agnostics.

    There were also doubts about the existence of the study and complaints about how the data was presented.

    First, I believe that it is correct to refer to believers as all those who believe in the existence of higher forces, whether they are confessional believers or not.

    Secondly, the data on how believers consider themselves to be “religious” and “spiritualists” are present in the work, here is the graph

    Third, the job itself is also easy to find https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2641964-A-Global-Lab-Conference-Summary-Report-2015-1201.html

  3. Unfortunately, no one has conducted global research.
    What Nikita K. relies on is actually the work of a religious organization at Rice University.

    When clicking on the link and further searching, I still didn't find the original 🙁
    1. We can't estimate the scale of the work

    1. Areas of activity of the surveyed scientists (theology? physics? engineering? the economy? or all of them in equal numbers?)

    2. It should be understood that even if the schedule has a supporting document, researchers understand believers as not only religious people, but also any belief in a higher (even without flesh and form) power.

    3. Where the link leads is an article by a patronymic journalist (not the original). And here's what they write at the end of their article :�

    Note: In the original version of the article, it was stated that believers make up more than half of the scientists surveyed. In fact, the authors of the study do not make such a claim in the report, only data on individual countries are published. In five of the eight countries, believers are indeed the majority, but the authors do not provide cumulative data on the basis of which it would be possible to speak about the total prevalence of believers in all the countries studied. The editors apologize to their readers.

    And I repeat: in this context, a believer is any person with faith in something (i.e., not necessarily referring to a religious concept).

    PS The work is very muddy

  4. That's not so. Among natural scientists, 30 to 50 percent call themselves believers (according to various studies). Between 15 and 25 percent confidently declare themselves atheists. So not everything is unambiguous in the scientific world.

  5. God says that I will hide true wisdom from the “wise” of this world and reveal it to simple, ordinary, honest people…. But in fact, no one has ever considered this…

  6. The majority does not mean right, a person cannot serve two masters, science or faith, good or evil, these are two ways-each one is beaten for himself.

  7. By and large, I agree with the opinion of Nik Nikita K. : “I think that a huge number of people consider themselves to be a religion more by inertia than by common sense, religion is inherited by many from their parents and environment and consists not in faith, but in formal observance of rituals. If you dig such people deeper, they will turn out to be more superstitious than religious.”

    I see another reason for “atheism”, in quotation marks, because their atheism is as unconscious as the faith of the majority. And most of them just never bothered to think-why does everything in the universe exist due to the so-called Laws of Nature, because no law of nature was created by man, and how did these laws arise? Without them, there would be no subject for science. Those who thought about it, became believers, and even with an understanding of the essence of what is the root cause of everything. Which science is currently unable to reason about.

    This is what Jesus says in his prayer before his death, ” Salvation lies in the knowledge of God.”

  8. I don't know if I can talk about the scientists ' judgment, but I can give you my point of view about it. The more a person knows , the more deeply they think. Let's imagine a situation when a child in kindergarten is told: “if you eat a lot , you will grow up big and strong!”, when a person grows up, this myth will be dispelled and he will find out that this was only partially true, because for strength you need at least to play sports, in order to grow up big you need a whole meal. Now I will turn to the reasoning of scientists who, having learned a little more about the world than you and I can make up the whole picture and be sure that there is no God, because many religions refute their theory of the creation of the world and all mankind. My opinion is that they believe that something created us after all, the explosion, the evolution of animals-it doesn't matter, the important thing is that there is no god, Buddha, Krishna and similar gods, because there is not a single significant proof of this, and it's not even worth searching for the so-called god. After all, why do some people live happily, while others suffer? Religion has invaded the whole world, which causes children to have no normal development from childhood, which can even cause hatred of religion itself. Please do not judge strictly, I am an atheist and I have my own opinion, I hate religion, because even from the age of 4, they started dragging me to church and so until the 11th grade (at least every resurrection) they forced me to go there, besides, I saw the whole picture of what is happening and believe me, no one thinks about children, the future and improving their

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