One can talk all one wants about Christian scientists, but we must also confront the fact that the scientific community has seen a very sharp drop in the proportion of its members who accept theism within the past 150 years. In 1914 US psychologist James H. Leuba did a survey study of religious belief among scientists and 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. Leuba, twenty years later, repeated his survey in a somewhat different form, and found that these percentages had increased to 67 and 85, respectively.
Leuba's 1914 survey was repeated in 1996 by Edward J. Larson & Larry Witham. They found little change from 1914 for American scientists generally, with 60.7% expressing disbelief or doubt. That year, they closely imitated the second phase of Leuba's 1914 survey to gauge belief among "greater" scientists, and fund the rate of belief lower than ever - a mere 7% of respondents. They used membership in the National Academy of Sciences, as the criterion for designating which survey respondents were to be regarded as "greater" scientists.
Attempts to reconcile science with religious faith are certainly not new. Since the Scientific Revolution began in the 17th century there have been any number of such attempts. Sixty or seventy years ago, saw the efforts of prominent scientists like James Jeans and Arthur Eddington to "merge" science and religion which were supported in turn by philosophers like Alfred North Whitehead and General Jan Smuts of South Africa.
The British biologist (and unorthodox Marxist) Lancelot Hogben criticized these efforts in his book *The Nature of Living Matter* on the grounds that these efforts to overturn scientific materialism threatened to undermine the only sound bases for scientific progress. In Hogben's view these efforts to justify supernaturalism were motivated by the fact that:
...mechanistic philosophy cannot offer to the privileged a
supernatural sanction for the things they value most. It
cannot proffer to the underprivileged the shadowy
compensation of a world into which the thought of science
is unable to penetrate.
Hogben admitted that in the nineteenth century materialism and secularism had flourished and had enjoyed support within the bourgeoisie. But in his view that was because that was a period of prosperity and expansion while "the period in which we live is one of ferment and disintegration." Therefore, the ruling class and its apologists within the scientific community had to abandon materialism along with its benevolent liberalism in order to stabilize their social order.
Hogben was writing back in the 1930s but we can see similar efforts to brig science and religion together such as in the popular writings of physicist Paul Davies. And one suspects that the forces driving such efforts are similar to the ones Hogben described back in the '30s.
References:
Leuba, J. H. The Belief in God and Immortality: A Psychological, Anthropological and Statistical Study (Sherman, French & Co., Boston, 1916).
Leuba, J. H. Harper's Magazine 169, 291-300 (1934).
Larson, E. J. & Witham, L. Nature 386, 435-436 (1997).
On Sun, 07 Nov 2004 13:00:58 -0700 "Michael Pugliese"
<michael098762001 at earthlink.net> writes:
> On Sun, 7 Nov 2004 10:22:00 -0800, John Adams <jadams01 at sprynet.com>
> wrote:
>
> > I also think I've heard that there are a lot of
> > Christians in the sciences.
>
> Via the Christian Academic Network website, Association Of
> Christian
> Astronomers
> http://www.christian-astronomers.org/
> http://www.christian-astronomers.org/articles/03092004.htm
> Blazars: Big Big Bang Trouble
> Andrew Rigg
>
> Astronomers from America's prestigious Stanford University recently
> announced a new discovery that is, once again, set to rock the big
> bang
> establishment.
> http://www.christian-astronomers.org/aabigbang.htm
> --
> Michael Pugliese
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
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