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Why aren't professors religious?
Robin Hanson poses the question, and Jane Galt picks it up, but no one dares an answer. Over lunch I suggested to Robin that professors are supposed to project an image of calm and reasonableness, whether justified or not. This means they will be especially allergic to charismatic religions, such as the so-called religious right. Most professors who do believe in god will be calm about it.
One prediction is that when the only major religions available are calm ones (Sweden?), professors will be less anti-religious than otherwise. Furthermore professors in the hard sciences, where answers can be proven right or wrong, may face the pressure to signal calmness to lesser degree.
Of course it is not obvious that professors are in reality calmer or more reasonable than the general population, especially once we adjust for IQ. So their rage has to come out somewhere. The further prediction is that professors are especially unreasonable toward their colleagues and competitors, and perhaps they are more likely to lose their tempers toward their children and spouses, or to behave more badly, once their tempers are lost.
I really am calm, however.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on January 19, 2007 at 01:09 PM in Religion | Permalink
Comments
Could it be a problem of diversity? In many departments there is a decent amount of intolerance towards evangelicals. I'm not sure an evangelical would feel very "comfortable" even applying to many of those departments. Somehow I doubt schools are too concerned about this.
Posted by: Adam C at Jan 19, 2007 1:16:41 PM
One thing I've noticed is that professors who are evangelical Christians usually keep very quiet about it, and I expect people think I myself am a bit foolhardy. As I've discovered myself, if you hold certain Christian views, some vocal people think you are automatically disqualified from being a professor. Hence, the surveys might be a little like anonymously surveying Soviet econ profs in 1960 about whether they believed in Marxism.
Posted by: Eric Rasmusen at Jan 19, 2007 1:26:55 PM
This raises an interesting question about detecting discrimination in general. Is there any measurement one could make to distinguish self-selection from other-selection?
Posted by: Cyrus at Jan 19, 2007 1:33:32 PM
To phrase the question by making a comparison of beliefs between "Professors" and "the rest of the population" assumes that there is a significant thing about being a professor that will incline you to or away from atheism. Why not garbage collectors and the rest of the population, or proctologists? (two professions that might incline you away from believing in a benevolent god at least).
I'm afraid the study - carried out by university professors of course - demonstrates only one thing. As a group, university professors believe they are special and a subject of interest to the rest of us. I'd say they are mistaken, but here I am reading this blog, so what do I know?
- an atheist non-professor
Posted by: tom s. at Jan 19, 2007 1:37:23 PM
You mean they're not?
I think that they are religious, just a different religion. What else is communism-socialism, but a religion -- and one far more dangerous than all but Islam?
They believe in creating heaven on earth, have an end of days (the dictatorship of the proletariat), believe in forcible conversion, killing of enemies, and completely ignore science and reality in formulating their goals.
If religion is the opiate of the masses, socialism is the religion of the academic elites.
Posted by: GMUSL 3L at Jan 19, 2007 1:38:02 PM
Why couldn't it be simply that in the hard sciences, professors have learned to reject any hypothesis that isn't falsifiable or isn't supported by evidence? Is that just too simple?
Posted by: Phil at Jan 19, 2007 1:55:33 PM
Anecdotal evidence isn't really evidence, but I've never found the professors I've known to be more or less religious than the general population. I think that there are some self-segregation effects, particularly with evangelicals (you won't find any non-religious professors at, say, Wheaton College), but when I was involved with campus ministry, it seemed like I saw a higher than expected* fraction of faculty at the on-campus mass at my secular college (* it was close to the fraction of students, which given that students almost all lived on campus while faculty had a wider range of residences, was a bit surprising).
Posted by: don Hosek at Jan 19, 2007 2:00:28 PM
Um, why does this have to be about signaling? Is it that politically incorrect to say that due to the very nature of religion, it is something that takes hold more easily in those who are not as smart and well-educated, and hence, as one moves up the intellectual ladder, people do not believe because they realize that such belief is irrational? And that there is also a correlation between the amount of rational thought that a field needs (say, the sciences vs. the arts) and the amount of atheism.
This answer may be painfully politically incorrect, but I think that it is perhaps the best answer.
Posted by: Anonymous at Jan 19, 2007 2:08:49 PM
There are hundreds of small religious colleges across the country. Maybe religious professors prefer to teach at religious colleges.
Posted by: Fundamentalist at Jan 19, 2007 2:12:43 PM
Socialism is not a religeon. It is a theory that causes efficiency problems in places.
I would offer this story as a reason: People that dedicate themselves to a deep curiousity are less likely to accept a central view of life that claims to be complete already. Put another way; those that want to figure things out for a living don't cotton to being told that it all has been figured out for them before they even get started.
Posted by: Michael Foody at Jan 19, 2007 2:21:02 PM
The question is overly general with respect to religions and overly specific with respect to professors. I'm an Episcopalian, and the Episcopal churches where I've been a member have often had a lot of not just professors but big-name prominent professors as members. Especially the campus ministry I attended at Princeton. I am confident that Episcopalians are more, not less represented on college and elite college faculties than in the general population. Ditto for Unitarians and Buddhists and perhaps Jews. Possibly also for Hindus and Muslims due to recent immigration trends, especially in science, medicine, and engineering.
The conclusion one should draw is that college professors disproportionately show the demographic characteristics of elites in American society, i.e. like Presidents they are disproportionately white, male, anglo-saxon, and (mainline) Protestant, with notable concentrations from those immigrant groups whose median income exceeds the national median income. And if you claim that professors aren't religious or choose particular religions due to their IQ or scientific principles or even peer pressure, IMHO your claim is probably as silly as claiming that most professors choose to be white males.
OTH, some would argue that Episcopalian doesn't count as religious. I'm not going to get into that.
Posted by: DK at Jan 19, 2007 2:35:08 PM
Tom S. seems on the right track to me. I wonder if it goes a bit too far to claim that professors tend not to be religious from the very limited data referenced by the post. If I read the Hanson post correctly, professors responded "none" when asked what their religion was, but this might mean many things.
As Tom S. points out, professors are (or at least like to think of themselves) as special individuals. One might expect that someone willing to complete the education required to become a professor might find most organized religions offered a version of religios experience that was not specific, thoughtful, or unique enough.
So, many professors may in fact be religious even if they do not practice a particular religion. A "none" response might reflect this sort of situation. After all, the question did not ask if the professor was an atheist or agnostic; although, maybe it should have.
Moreover, the article that the Hanson post is based on offers more data for the religious-without-religion-claim: Half of professors at non-elite schools reported belief in God. That's a lot of academic believers. Also, the article reports results of a UCLA study that found that 80% are spiritual. Likewise, the summary at the end points out that only 10% of professors in the first study report not believing in God. In fact, the study suggests that professors are pretty religious. 90% is a lot, right?
Other posts suggest a slightly different question: Why don't as many professors believe in God as the rest of us? But, neither reported study nor the posts offer any evidence about a comparison group. Moreover, such comparisons would be difficult, because an accurate sample of professors would be a great deal more difficult to generate than an accurate sample of the general public, which includes professors. Still, I would bet that the actual proportion of believers among professors and the general public once you have accounted for measurement error is not that different.
Another, perhaps more enlightening question might be, why do we tend to make claims that stretch the evidence in hand?
- Josh B., PhD
Research Scientist
Posted by: Josh B. at Jan 19, 2007 2:35:10 PM
TC's assertation is laughable, and GMUSL 3L's observation is spot-on.
Professors are, by and large, very religious --- they usually worship ferverently at the Church of Environmentalism.
As John Kay notes:
Environmentalism offers an alternative account of the natural world to the religious and an alternative anti-capitalist account of the political world to the Marxist. The rise of environmentalism parallels in time and place the decline of religion and of socialism.
Posted by: Varangy at Jan 19, 2007 2:42:24 PM
All academic disciplines involve, in one way or another, limiting one's beliefs to ones that are supported by evidence. Evidence for religious beliefs is, well ... what would "evidence" even mean here? People don't believe in gods and souls because of the evidence that there are such things.
Posted by: Lester Hunt at Jan 19, 2007 2:43:58 PM
Professors are educated. Educated people, people who have been trained at the art of thinking and analyzation are less susceptible to logical fallacies. Religion, by definition, is a logical fallacy. (The whole point of 'faith' is that you are believing in something for no reason whatsoever)
Posted by: SPSer at Jan 19, 2007 3:40:44 PM
In the hard sciences it is more likely they have little time and less interest to consider much beyond their work.
Posted by: Lord at Jan 19, 2007 3:44:45 PM
I actually just wrote a paper on this very topic. The 1975 Carnegie Foundation National Survey of Higher Education revealed the same basic facts, especially that academics are twice as likely to be atheists. It also revealed that atheism is highest among social scientists, whereas "hard" scientists to not exhibit higher than average levels of atheism. I figure there are four ways to explain this:
1) Academics lack exposure to the business world, and are less moral because of it. Sounds harsh, but this is Adam Smith's idea.
2) Also from Adam Smith, academics are prone to group-think, and produce sciences which are "a mere useless and pedantick heap of sophistry and nonsense." Here, the bad science is the secularization thesis, which has dominated the study of religion for 100 years.
3) Academics seek fame more than fortune, and this is at odds with Christian theology.
4) Academics seek to persuade and influence society, partly because their minority views put them at a disadvantage. This applies to atheism as well as extreme political views.
See my blog for more.
Posted by: will mcbride at Jan 19, 2007 3:51:26 PM
There is a documented correlation between educational level and atheism. The strength of this association has increased over the last century as all the major areas of nature (inside atoms, inside cells, etc) where God could possibly hide have been investigated and found to be, well, godless.
I am away from my blogging stuff right now, but I wrote a brief blog on this that I believe is due to be out of the box in about 9 hours from now, so maybe check tomorrow morning. Or, find the Nature piece (a letter) with the data from a major survey.
Posted by: Greg Laden at Jan 19, 2007 4:12:53 PM
Intelligence directly correlates with hubris. Find the wise professors, and see what they believe.
Posted by: Matt at Jan 19, 2007 4:25:56 PM
hey, i was wondering about this:
"One prediction is that when the only major religions available are calm ones (Sweden?), professors will be less anti-religious than otherwise."
what does sweden have to do with this? are you saying they all buddhists or something?
Posted by: jakob at Jan 19, 2007 4:34:35 PM
On keeping quiet about it--you know, not everybody thinks that talking about their religion is a good thing. For the Druze, not talking about it is almost a point of doctrine. For Abraham Lincoln, it seemed at least a matter of personal taste; perhaps a matter of conviction. But I concede that the lobby of the quiet ones is not likely to be very noisy.
Posted by: Buce at Jan 19, 2007 4:38:38 PM
Another question is why economists have an incurable tendency to assume that all social phenomena are best explained in the terms of economic theory. Why would we assume that it's a signaling phenomenon? Here are some possible explanations:
1) Academia is, in fact, hostile to openly religious people, which discourages people who want to be openly religious.
2) The family backgrounds that produce the kind of person who wants to be an academic tend to be less religious for completely unrelated cultural reasons.
Posted by: Elliot Reed at Jan 19, 2007 5:31:45 PM
This string of comments reveals a lot about the readership of this blog compared to, say, Edge.org.
Posted by: DW at Jan 19, 2007 5:39:56 PM
Professors aren't religious because they have active and probing brains. And their brains aren't afraid of not knowing everything. That is, they're not afraid of not having explanations for everything, and indeed they enjoy discovering new explanations.
God is simply a figment of human ignorance, and religion is simply a way of controlling people through a feared God.
The very definition of being a professor is to posess less ignorance than the average person.
Posted by: Manuel at Jan 19, 2007 5:46:23 PM
Or, a competing view, professors tend to have been convinced by their own gigantic brains that everything is empirically knowable, therefore they tend away from religion, which creates mysteries rather than certainties, as Manuel alleges, apparently without any experience with real faith.
Religion is about faith at its core. Faith is inherently irrational, that is, it can by definition not be the result of proof. My exposure to professors at an explicitly religious school for some 8 years convinces me that the higher one rises on the university scale, the less one is disposed to believe that some things just aren't reasonable. There was little faith there; there was even less humility. They knew everything.
I am a person of faith, and I know next to nothing. My life is filled with ignorance, and it doesn't scare me one bit. The professor next door, now, he's terrified of everything, especially not being the smartest man in the room. He therefore misses church. A lot. I think he's afraid that there is actually Someone there that is smarter than he is.
But, as indicated, I'm not very sure I have the answer to any of this. The debate's fun, though.
Posted by: Chris Jones at Jan 19, 2007 6:02:12 PM
