There is no evidence that scientists in or from China, India, Japan, and other non-Western countries are more religious than American scientists (among whom are found many immigrants anyhow). If anything, the opposite is probably the case.
>if we go back to the article yoshie posted, and the specific
>quotation that has exercised several of us (including, but only
>joanna -- and me, for that matter), we can see that far from being
>the innocent "descriptive" yoshie painted it as, only an utterly
>tone-deaf reader would miss the sarcastic dismissal of
>still-religious scientists as what we have begun on this list to
>call "residue". thus:
>
>===
>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."
>===
>
>clearly, "real scientist in the deepest sense of the word" is
>evaluative. let's not pretend otherwise.
Scientists are free to make evaluative statements on the worth of religion or lack thereof, just as the religious are free to make evaluative statementsonof the worth of science or lack thereof. You are free to assent to either or both or neither. The freedom of conscience doesn't guarantee that your belief, religious or scientific or of any other kind, will be held in high regard or even will not be disparaged by others who don't share yours.
That said, the same article that quotes Peter Atkins above also cites NAS president Bruce Alberts as reverentially saying, "There are many very outstanding members of this academy who are very religious people, people who believe in evolution, many of them biologists" (at <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20050606/011942.html>), though he had little empirical evidence to prove it, as it turned out. Then, there is the late and lamented Stephen Jay Gould, who held -- like theologians, clerics, and lay leaders of Catholicism, Mainline Protestantism, etc. -- that science and religion are "nonoverlapping magisteria" (Stephen Jay Gould, "Nonoverlapping Magisteria," <http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_noma.html>).
There is no logical reason that "a real scientist in the deepest sense of the word" can't be a real religious faithful in the deepest sense of the word. However, logic is one thing, and practice is another, so what's logically possible -- simultaneous mastery of science and belief in an actually existing religion -- may not be necessarily very common in reality.
One of the earliest statements of a modern scientific worldview is Francis Bacon's Novum Organum (1620, <http://history.hanover.edu/texts/Bacon/novorg.html>). Once such a view (supported by the rise of liberalism in politics, both of which are rooted in capitalism -- itself the main agent of secularization of life) becomes the dominant one, older conceptions of religions could not survive it (and even fundamentalists today feel obliged to justify religion on science's terms, rather than religion's -- hence their vain attempts to introduce "Intelligent Design" into science classrooms rather than insisting upon establishment of religion classes). Theoretically, one could adopt a scientific view, while making efforts to develop new doctrines of religion within limits of reason, but such new doctrines tend to raise a new intellectual problem: namely, if you go _that far_ in limiting epistemological claims as well as socio-political powers of religion, so much so that you can very well live without religion in your everyday life, why not simply dispense with it altogether? Catholicism, Mainline Protestantism, Reform Judaism, etc. have managed to survive by allowing the ordinary faithful to more or less concentrate on practical aspects of religion (dignifying life's major occasions, holding social events, ministering to the poor, etc.), paying little heed to doctrines (which are themselves radically liberalized by their respective theologians, clerics, and lay leaders in keeping with modernity). That seems to "work" for many Americans in practice, but it is probable that few scientists -- who are trained to ask, "Must I believe it?" rather than "Can I believe it?" -- find it to be an intellectually satisfying solution. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Monthly Review: <http://monthlyreview.org/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>