Also keep in mind that most of these men and women that were scientists, yet claimed to be theists of some sort, usually had to say they were or else no one would take their science seriously. It was a social suicide to say you were an atheist up until... well... now. Of course this wasn't always the case, but many times it was. Then there are those that really did/do believe in a god of some kind. Just because someone can map an electron that doesn't mean they disbelieve. I'd even go so far as to say it's the exact opposite and that most scientists do believe in some form of higher power/sentience. Atheism is fighting an uphill battle in many regards.

-=Grim=-

Yea. My point was that there's at least a chance now-a-days that you won't be discriminated against. Slim, but it's there.

-=Grim=-

A great modern example of a theistic scientist is Ken Miller. A PhD in biology and author of a popular High School biology textbook (the one used in Dover, PA in fact), he's also Catholic.

One's theism only matters if it confounds one's scientific principles. Dr. Miller's doesn't, as his non-fundamental theism has no problem with evolution. This is the case with many liberal interpretations of the bible.

An interesting question is how the theism of scientists has changed over time as there has become fewer "gaps" to fit "god" into. In this respect I'd think it really parallels that of the population at large, only a bit ahead of the curve.

Also, note that also theism certainly exists among scientists, it IS at a lower percentage than with the general populace, and the higher one goes in education level and prominence achieved, the lower the theistic rate drops.

BTW, can I use the fact that there are NO outspoken atheists in the national government of the USA as an argument FOR atheism?

I think I should, it goes without saying.

I agree, whenever something is brought up in any debate I am in to the affect of how many people follow Christianity or any other religion, regardless of their intellect or their contributions to humanity, I always stop that line of thinking by noting that the number of people who follow a religion has no bearing on the truth of said religion. This can be a double edged sword if an atheist attempts to use the same set of illogic by saying that the majority of intellectuals are atheists.

I agree with an much earlier post on the idea that they had to claim to be believers to be taken seriously. Take Ben Franklin. He claimed to be deist. But, most of his close contemporaries suspected him of being athiest.

 

really so why are there atheist still

I'm not surprised that one can find lots of notable scientists who are at least nominal believers in some religion, especially in past centuries. People tend to believe in the religion of their social environment, and scientists are no exception.

This can be a dangerous apologetic strategy, because many of them had believed in sects that such apologists would consider heretical. Should one be a Catholic or an Anglican/Episcopalian or a Lutheran or a Presbyterian/Reformed/Calvinist or an Eastern Orthodox or some other sect of Xian? Should one be a Jansenist, a sort-of-Calvinist heretical Catholic, because Blaise Pascal had been one? Should one be a Trinity-denying nominal Anglican obsessed with Biblical prophecies because Isaac Newton had been one? Should one be a Sandemanian because Michael Faraday had been one? Should one be a Unitarian because Joseph Priestley had been one?

Let us not forget about other religions. Should one be a Jewish deist/pantheist because Albert Einstein had been one? Should one be an Ahmadi Muslim because Abdus Salam had been one? Should one be a Hindu because Srinivasa Ramanujan had been one? Should one be a Hellenic pagan because of the classical Greco-Roman philosophers?

Isaac Newton had kept his Trinity denial a secret, because he was afraid of getting in trouble for that heterodox opinion. So keep that factor into account.

Actually Pet Stark is in our Congress. AND Obama(although not an atheist) gave us a shout out during his campaign and during his inauguration. Look at my sig, it is a quote from his inauguration.

Time are what change take. I think you know where we once were as a voice and where we are now. You cant go one day now without googling "atheist" then clicking on "news" without seeing stories involving atheists.

 

Was that list taken from a christian site?

It says that Mendel invalidated Darwinism?? 

 

Leading scientists still reject God

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

Sir — The question of religious belief among US scientists has been debated since early in the century. Our latest survey finds that, among the top natural scientists, disbelief is greater than ever — almost total.

Research on this topic began with the eminent US psychologist James H. Leuba and his landmark survey of 1914. 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 ^[1]. Leuba repeated his survey in somewhat different form 20 years later, and found that these percentages had increased to 67 and 85, respectively ^[2].

In 1996, we repeated Leuba's 1914 survey and reported our results in Nature ^[3]. We found little change from 1914 for American scientists generally, with 60.7% expressing disbelief or doubt. This year, we closely imitated the second phase of Leuba's 1914 survey to gauge belief among "greater" scientists, and find the rate of belief lower than ever — a mere 7% of respondents.

Leuba attributed the higher level of disbelief and doubt among "greater" scientists to their "superior knowledge, understanding, and experience" ^[3]. Similarly, Oxford University scientist Peter Atkins commented on our 1996 survey, "You clearly can be a scientist and have religious beliefs. But I don't think you can be a real scientist in the deepest sense of the word because they are such alien categories of knowledge." ^[4] Such comments led us to repeat the second phase of Leuba's study for an up-to-date comparison of the religious beliefs of "greater" and "lesser" scientists.

Our chosen group of "greater" scientists were members of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Our survey found near universal rejection of the transcendent by NAS natural scientists. Disbelief in God and immortality among NAS biological scientists was 65.2% and 69.0%, respectively, and among NAS physical scientists it was 79.0% and 76.3%. Most of the rest were agnostics on both issues, with few believers. We found the highest percentage of belief among NAS mathematicians (14.3% in God, 15.0% in immortality). Biological scientists had the lowest rate of belief (5.5% in God, 7.1% in immortality), with physicists and astronomers slightly higher (7.5% in God, 7.5% in immortality). Overall comparison figures for the 1914, 1933 and 1998 surveys appear in Table 1.

Table 1 Comparison of survey answers among "greater" scientists
Belief in personal God	1914	1933	1998
Personal belief	27.7	15	7.0
Personal disbelief	52.7	68	72.2
Doubt or agnosticism	20.9	17	20.8
Belief in human immortality	1914	1933	1998
Personal belief	35.2	18	7.9
Personal disbelief	25.4	53	76.7
Doubt or agnosticism	43.7	29	23.3
Figures are percentages.

Repeating Leuba's methods presented challenges. For his general surveys, he randomly polled scientists listed in the standard reference work, American Men of Science (AMS). We used the current edition. In Leuba's day, AMS editors designated the "great scientists" among their entries, and Leuba used these to identify his "greater" scientists ^[1,2]. The AMS no longer makes these designations, so we chose as our "greater" scientists members of the NAS, a status that once assured designation as "great scientists" in the early AMS. Our method surely generated a more elite sample than Leuba's method, which (if the quoted comments by Leuba and Atkins are correct) may explain the extremely low level of belief among our respondents.

For the 1914 survey, Leuba mailed his brief questionnaire to a random sample of 400 AMS "great scientists". It asked about the respondent's belief in "a God in intellectual and affective communication with humankind" and in "personal immortality". Respondents had the options of affirming belief, disbelief or agnosticism on each question ^[1]. Our survey contained precisely the same questions and also asked for anonymous responses.

Leuba sent the 1914 survey to 400 "biological and physical scientists", with the latter group including mathematicians as well as physicists and astronomers ^[1]. Because of the relatively small size of NAS membership, we sent our survey to all 517 NAS members in those core disciplines. Leuba obtained a return rate of about 70% in 1914 and more than 75% in 1933 whereas our returns stood at about 60% for the 1996 survey and slightly over 50% from NAS members ^[1,2].

As we compiled our findings, the NAS issued a booklet encouraging the teaching of evolution in public schools, an ongoing source of friction between the scientific community and some conservative Christians in the United States. The booklet assures readers, "Whether God exists or not is a question about which science is neutral"^[5]. NAS president Bruce Alberts said: "There are many very outstanding members of this academy who are very religious people, people who believe in evolution, many of them biologists." Our survey suggests otherwise.

Edward J. Larson Department of History, University of Georgia,
Athens, Georgia 30602-6012, USA
e-mail:[email protected]

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

I wouldn't say intelligence per se regardless the studies, unless you're talking about fundamentalists. Really, it's a matter of laziness IMHO, people would rather watch an episode of Family Guy than stick their noses in a science book or just simply go rogue Socrates and think to themselves "I wonder..." Laziness leads to a lack of intelligence. I've learned less from Family Guy than I have from school, and I've learned less from school than I have on my own. But if this is true why did people centuries ago believe in God? They didn't have TV back then. That's a matter of ignorance, we know much more now than we did long ago. What was prior ignorance became lazy dogma and peer pressure.

And probably half of these so called "Christians" today just say they're Christian so they don't have to deal with all these Jehovah's Witness' and Evangelical Christians. I mean seriously, shut the fuck up already and get the hell away from me, pest. Believe whatever you want, just don't push it on me you rotten bastards. They're worse than telemarketers.

What's the moral of the story? Extremists are bad.

 

Yah, I have no idea where it came from. That being said, any mention of “Darwinism” is a code word for the fundie follies.

 

I also noticed this time around that the list also says that Pasteur had a beef with “Darwinism”. Big fucking deal. They were both contemporary biologists (OK the exact term did not apply back then but in retrospect...). If Pasteur did have reservations (and I can't get much on the matter from google), then it was as a fellow scientist in a similar field.

 

In other news, Leonard Susskind had a large disagreement with Stephen Hawking over the nature of Black Holes. History shows that Susskind had the right side of the matter.

 

As far as Mendel goes, his personal copy of “the Origin of Species” still exists and it has handwritten notes in the margins, so we know that he read it and thought about it. However, he did not publish on the matter, so we can hardly jump to the conclusion that he had a problem with it.

 

What we can know is that his work is considered to be an essential part of the “Modern Synthesis” of evolutionary thought and actually confirms what Darwin wrote about selective breeding.

Mendel provided the necessary details of how inheritance works, in that the offspring were not simple blends of their parents, that made Darwinian evolution plausible.

The 'blending' model was a real problem for evolution, which required that new traits did not simply get progressively diluted as they were passed on, but were discretely 'coded' in some manner. Mendel's experiments demonstrated that at least some traits were indeed passed on such a manner, either there or not.

So they have the truth exactly backwards.

Religious scientist = cognitive dissonance

 

 

The difference is that theists invent their authority.

 

Yes but Heidi Montag and Paris Hilton are believers in Jesus. So that negates all those atheist scientists.

Appeal to celebrity trumps all others.

"Religion without science is blind. Science without religion is lame” - Albert Einstein

"Paisley without an internet search engine is mute" - Source Unknown