Science vs. Religion, Part 2

A follow-up from last week's post...

A separate study to the one I mentioned last week about scientists who believe in God--done by the same people, actually--surveyed a different set of scientists with different results (read about it here) The results this time showed a much greater amount of 'faith' in the science world--relatively speaking--with 40% believing in God, 45% disbelieving, and the rest in the 'not sure' agnostic category. The main difference appears to be the second survey was composed of more 'ordinary' scientists, while the original one (where over 72% were in the 'disbelieving' category compared to less than 10% who were 'believers') was from members of the National Academy of Science--'high ranking' scientists, if you will. You might conclude from this that the farther you rise within the scientific ranks, the less likely you are to believe in God. (Or you might conclude that the NAS has some sort of prejudice against believers and they are less likely to be 'promoted'...) In a sense, though, it doesn't matter which numbers we look at. Even using the higher number (around 40%) for believing scientists, it is still significantly lower than the belief rate for the population at large (80-90% depending on the survey), showing scientists are still significantly less likely to believe in God than people in other occupations.

If we accept that from a purely scientific standpoint, there is no legitimate, acceptable proof that shows God doesn't exist, nor one that shows He does, then the issue of belief within the scientific community comes down to how you want to interpret the existing evidence. Yet despite the lack of proof either way, both of the studies show scientists are still more likely to actively disbelieve (72% and 45% respectively), than remain in the 'maybe' category (22% and 15%).

Given the lack of conclusive evidence, let's look at some reasons why scientists may be (generally speaking) more likely to choose 'disbelief' over 'neutrality'...

Pride: Many members of the scientific community feel (correctly, perhaps) that they are significantly smarter than the average Joe or Jane down the street--that they belong to the upper echelon of 'elite minds' in the world. Conceptually, in a universe that is God-free, humans represent one of the most advanced level of intelligence in the universe (and perhaps the most advanced, depending on what you believe about life on other worlds). And since scientists are the most intelligent of the humans, this means that they can theoretically think of themselves as the smartest beings in the entire universe. Of course, you couldn't think of yourself in that context if you happen to believe in God, because belief in God inherently lowers your standing on the intellectual totem pole of the universe, where you are already admitting you have at least one intellectual superior, and probably many. This 'humbling' aspect of religion isn't a big deal to the average guy or girl who doesn't have a particularly high standing in human society as it is, but if you're accustomed to thinking of yourself as the 'best and the brightest', you're not going to easily adopt a philosophy that purposefully minimizes your universal standing without being more or less forced to by some new, indisputable evidence.

Disdain for religious 'superstitions' and 'legends': In some cases, the rejection of 'God' by scientists is not so much a denial of a higher intelligence in the universe but more of a rejection of religion, as it has been recognized and observed within human civilization. Many scientists may feel that religion at its heart was only a means through which primitive people in human history explained away natural phenomena without knowing (nor having the ability to comprehend) the true scientific explanation. Traditions to explain falling rain or the movement of the sun or moon, for example, (“It’s the sun god in his chariot moving across the sky”) are easily disproved by modern scientific discoveries, and often leads to the common opinion that religion is for backwards, less intelligent people and that more cerebrally-developed scientists have no need to depend on or look toward ‘supernatural’ or ‘celestial’ explanations for anything—even the many things that have no current scientific explanation. Thus, it is likely that scientists reject the idea of God because they’ve already rejected many of the other ideas that people who believe in God present as truth—not helped by the numerous instances where religious people argue against scientifically verifiable facts as ‘heresies’ based on a mistaken interpretation of scripture (see for instance the Catholic Church’s condemnation of Galileo for saying the earth revolved around the sun, or the arguments by churches today against dinosaurs or ‘natural selection’), thus hurting the credibility of all religious ideas in the eyes of science.

Scientists’ purpose for existing: Most scientists know that if God exists, He exists in a realm that defies traditional scientific analysis. In other words, God can’t be analyzed by man in the same way an alien creature who landed on Earth could be—through chemical analysis, X-rays, experiments, dissection, etc… Not believing in God means essentially that everything that happens in the universe has the potential to be explained through scientific means—that the scope of science is boundless. Belief in God, however, means admitting that there are areas of human existence which cannot be explained or analyzed through the scientific method—likely extremely large areas. This considerably reduces the scope of science, and marginalizes scientists’ reason for being. If 95% of the universe can’t be explained through equations and identifiable processes, then science becomes essentially useless—going from being the only source of information on who we are, where we came from, and where we’re going, to being a incomplete and ultimately meaningless niche. Similar to the pride argument above, I don’t believe many scientists would readily accept a philosophy that minimizes their entire field.

Conclusion: Hopefully, this amateur psycho-analysis hasn’t oversimplified a complicated issue too much. Belief (or disbelief) has many forms and bases among scientists (and all other occupations), and these general statements—like all general statements—will have many counter-examples. In basic terms, though, I don’t accept the notion put forward by some that belief in God is merely a ‘crutch’ of intellectually inferior people, and that science has ‘proven’ God doesn’t exist. As outlined above, there are logical reasons by which the disproportionate unbelief of scientists can be explained without assuming that scientists “know something the rest of us do not” about God. One cannot know God through scientific means, and my point is that more people should acknowledge the fact that science has not (and in fact cannot) disprove the existence of God, and that in my opinion proper scientists should at least be allowing for the possibility that God exists based on lack of evidence to the contrary, rather than making assumptions based on incomplete information and/or personal pride.

In future posts, I’ll discuss some specific issues in the science vs. religion debate such as evolution and multidimensionality…