Are most scientists atheists these days? I haven't looked up the stats (most statistics on the internet aren't really free I think anyway). But that's the impression I get. And if so, what do they know that we don't? Because I always thought that there is a higher power out there, somewhere, somehow. But I could be wrong. And for the sake of argument, I am not including medical doctors in the definition of 'scientists'. You know why .
Hello Jimbee. Scientists just may be mostly atheists these days but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to wonder what created atheism and all atheists. Surely there is a cause to everything in existence and surely such a cause is more of a God than they.
Perhaps part of the issue is the difference between religious and spiritual. I think many more scientists might not be religious in the sense of an organized religion but ultimately believe in a spiritual entity as do I. Most religions have a pretty narrow entry door. I have known many Indians in my 12 step program and most would not fit the conventional definition of Christian but certainly have a working belief in a spiritual basis for life (higher power).
What you said! I think the more intelligent you are, the more you see how organized religion is flawed and the more you see it being inapplicable perhaps to yourself, perhaps in general. Look at Christianity. It was underground for about three centuries before the Roman emperor Constantine accepted it and replaced the worship of the particular Roman gods with it. This acceptance laid the foundation for the Catholic Church, a religion, a way of life, to be a political power, in many ways the antithesis of the earth shattering message of Jesus. To this day the Church runs a whole damn country! (It's literally the smallest country in the world, but still.) Look at how the Church has handled the worldwide child molestation scandal. Pedo priests were shuffled around quietly among parishes, offered seemingly big payouts to hush up, and even dared to excommunicate accusers if they spilled the tea. What would Jesus do? Certainly not that! To try to get back to the subject, intelligent people may love the Lord with all their being (faith) but can still see through the bullshit (science). There are the little old lady types who never in their lifetimes thought outside their comfortable little box, the Mel Gibson types who cling to orthodoxy and antisemitism like air, and others who refuse, or perhaps are unable (is there a distinction?) to see every cleric's morality as nothing short of impeccable. Maybe high intelligence is an indicator of atheism. But I see it more as a lack, or in some cases loss, of faith. It's apples and oranges. I can see someone of critical thought examining the crises of organized religion, recognizing the crises as such (and not somehow the fault of the permissiveness of homosexuality in society, for instance), and becoming quite disillusioned. It happened to me. But then I realized my problem was never with God but with the Church, which assumes quite a high opinion of itself. The Catholic Church assumes direct lineage from the founding of Christianity, because they believe God said so. So does the Orthodox Church, for the same reason. Who's right? I once saw a "made for TV" movie (inasmuch as it was on regular broadcast TV and I don't ever remember such movie being out in theaters) about a group of orphaned girls traveling with a chaperone nun on an airplane. The airplane crashes. The pilot(s) dies. All the girls happen to survive. The nun is assumed to be in the cabin of the wreckage. One girl effectively declares herself as the only person who can approach the nun directly. The other girls are convinced that this is the nun's will, so obey the "head girl." Crossing the girl is the same as crossing the nun. But eventually the girls start doubting this setup and eventually put two and two together. The nun was dead from the time of the crash. The ruse ends. This movie is a stronger metaphor for atheism and its view of religion, but I think it potentially applies to theism and its view on religion too. In this view God is dead - to science. We can't "prove" God, but some people can manipulate others' sense of God and keep up illusions with seemingly no consequences. God is not going to flood the earth because some libtard wants to remove the Ten Commandments from a courthouse in Los Angeles. But you can almost be sure some "victim" is going to decry the War on Christmas or "the children!" if someone dares to support a pluralistic society. I don't really know where I'm going with this. I think my overall point is some people stubbornly hold to beliefs (with a small B) because they are either truly that ignorant or scared shitless to admit something might be not as they have grown to accept it. Religion is very good, unfortunately, at keeping people at bay in certain ways. Someone who is able to think in a scientific way has a particular consciousness, which can discern faith with what seems like faith, and they can see what does not genuinely come from the spiritual, the metaphysical. Ironically using science they get closer to a spiritual truth, clarity, whatever you want to call it, even if it's to see they genuinely sense no spirituality at all. The poor saps who give their hard earned money to a teleevangelist are placated on false, and I'll say sinister, pretenses, unable (or unwilling) to rise above the falsehoods.
Simple answer to what do they know that we don't is basically, they know facts and only believe in what can be seen or proven, if there was a higher power surely we would have had some evidence of it by now.
Whether a food scientist or a paint chemist believes in a god, many gods, is open to the possibility, or believes that no god exists shouldn't really affect any of us. Does it really matter to you what the person who developed the formula for your hair shampoo thinks about the supernatural? That said, there are no reliable global statistics on theism and atheism, so there is no credible answer to your question. In some places it is more likely true than not that most scientists are atheists, and in other places it is more likely true than not that most scientists are theists. In some countries, the rate of atheism among scientists is lower than the rate of atheism among the general population, meaning that scientists are more likely to be theists than their non-scientist neighbors. In other places, it's reversed. Religious practice is far easier to measure and estimate than belief is. People are far more willing to give honest answers to questions about their worship, prayer, or reading habits than they are to answer questions about their beliefs. Governments fund a great deal of scientific research and applied science, and offering a public profession of atheism in many countries (the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Islamic Republic of Iran, or the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, being three examples) would be highly problematic to one's continued employment as a scientist, or as anything else. In other places and situations, an open profession of theist belief would be problematic to continuing employment. You say that it is your impression that most scientists are atheists, but you don't say what the basis for that impression is. You have a hypothesis. As someone with an interest in science, you should test that hypothesis. Define your terms; conduct the research; assemble and analyze the evidence; draw a conclusion; and publish your findings.
Being an atheist is not a prerequisite to becoming a good scientist. What is important is the ability to separate testable knowledge and subjective beliefs. Until God makes himself independently verifiable to modern society then he is simply and completely irrelevant to the word of scientific knowledge. Don't take it out on the scientific community that God chooses only to communicate conflictingly to selective nut jobs and ancient sand people. Communications that were mainly egotistical threats and blood lusts, no less.
Scientists are idiots, posers like most academics, who don't like to be criticized. Around 150 years ago, the US became the first country to adopt universal literacy, right around the same time that modern atheism was established. Until that time, most academics were careful to use the dictionary and teach students how to use a dictionary, but universal literacy and the growth of academia and the sciences pressured academia to adopt common sense approaches to teaching, which often reject teaching how to use a dictionary, in favor of everyone spouting gibberish and lies more often. For example, Scientific Positivism is neither scientific nor positive. It calls itself a philosophy and is wildly popular with atheist scientists, but it fails even its own criteria for a valid philosophy and was created merely to oppose the discoveries of quantum mechanics. Sadly, atheist scientists today are spouting more superstitious nonsense than their students at times. For example, all the mathematics and experiments have suggested that the bizarre behavior of quanta is not merely due to their tiny size, but that is the wildly popular superstition still taught today by scientists. I'm writing a book on the subject, just to show them how much I appreciate them creating so many bullies in school and, then, medicating them. Academics have the lowest reproductive rates of any profession, with the modern workaholic Japanese and white US and EU populations imploding faster than any other on the planet, in the name Darwinian evolution.
That's what they believe themselves, which is why I've written a 500 page book on the subject. It meets academic standards.
There is a lot of BS scam science out there. Especially theorists who want you to believe that mirrored photons have spooky magical behaviors. Smoke and mirrors, literal fucking smoke and mirrors!
