Bad Epistemology Gains Among "Social Scientists"
Posted by Adam Reed on 8/15, 11:31am

Religious Belief Is Found to Be Less Lacking Among Social Scientists

By DAVID GLENN

Is godlessness moving from one end of the campus to the other? Perhaps so, according to a new survey described here on Sunday at the annual meeting of the Association for the Sociology of Religion. Scholars in the natural sciences, the study found, are now more likely to identify themselves as nonreligious than are their counterparts in the social sciences.

The finding, which is based on a recent survey of 1,646 scholars at 21 top-tier research universities, stands in counterpoint to several well-known studies from the mid-20th century, all of which found that social scientists were the least religious group on campus.

The new study covers scholars in three natural-science fields (physics, chemistry, and biology) and four social sciences (sociology, economics, political science, and psychology). Among the natural scientists, 55.4 percent of the respondents identified themselves as atheists or agnostics. Only 47.5 percent of the social scientists said the same.

The single most irreligious field covered in the study is biology, at 63.4 percent. The least irreligious is economics, at 45.1.

In the entire study, only two respondents -- both of them chemists -- said that they agreed with the statement, "The Bible is the actual word of God and it should be taken literally." (Roughly a quarter of the respondents agreed with the statement, "The Bible is the inspired word of God, but not everything in it should be taken literally.")

The study's authors -- Elaine Howard Ecklund, a postdoctoral fellow in sociology at Rice University, and Christopher P. Scheitle, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Pennsylvania State University -- are in the early stages of a large-scale project that will assess the spiritual practices and ethical beliefs of religious and nonreligious scholars in the seven fields.

Ms. Ecklund said that she hoped to explore how both religious and nonreligious scholars "understand the relationships between religion and spirituality and such questions as how to develop a research agenda and how to make ethical decisions involving human subjects."

Their project has been financed by a $283,000 grant from the John Templeton Foundation, a Philadelphia-based philanthropy that often supports studies of the intersection between religion and science.

Ms. Ecklund and Mr. Scheitle conducted the survey in May and June, and they have only begun to analyze the data. Their project will also involve approximately 300 in-depth interviews with scholars who responded to the initial survey.

In her presentation, Ms. Ecklund said that she strongly suspected that gender differences could explain the apparent shift of unbelief from the social sciences to the natural sciences.

In contrast to the new survey, a well-known 1969 study by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education found that scholars in the natural sciences were far more likely than social scientists to identify themselves as religious. Since then, however, women have entered the academy in large numbers -- and they have entered the social sciences at higher rates than the natural sciences. (In the new study, for example, only 16.7 percent of the natural scientists were women, compared with 27 percent of the social scientists.) Across the American population, Ms. Ecklund said, women are consistently more likely than men to say that they are religious. So, all else equal, women's greater presence in the social sciences might account for the fact that those fields are now less irreligious than their hard-science counterparts.

Ms. Ecklund has not yet performed the statistical tests that might confirm or refute her gender hypothesis.

In their paper, Ms. Ecklund and Mr. Scheitle write that they hope that their study, once completed, will "increase our overall knowledge of cognitive moral reasoning processes and the role of science in providing spiritual insights, even for scientists who are not part of an established religion and who do not study specifically religious topics."

In the new study, the proportion of nonreligious scholars is roughly consistent across all age groups: 52.3 percent of respondents younger than 36, for example, are nonreligious, compared with 54.2 percent of the respondents age 66 and older. The same is true of self-reported Protestants: Their proportions are roughly equal (around 17 percent) across all age levels.

Self-reported Catholics, however, were much more prevalent among the younger academics: 11.2 percent of respondents under 36, but only 1.4 percent of those over 65, said they were Catholic. The opposite trend was apparent among Jews: 21.1 percent of the oldest group, but only 11.2 percent of the youngest, said they were Jewish.

[Copyright © 2005 by The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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