Religious beliefs of scientists

[Oppositionless]

what do you make of this? kinda old but I wonder if the numbers start to favor god even more today

 

 

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2009/11/05/scientists-and-belief/

[Oppositionless]

shoutout to chemists. 

[Gesundheit2]

Interesting. It basically looks like percentages of stages Blue, Green, Orange, and Yellow (respectively from left to right) among scientists, which kinda makes sense.

The lacking voting option is whether they actually know what God is. The thing they're voting on is rather a distant idea/belief/theory/speculation, not the actual thing that the word refers to.

[Carl-Richard]

I'm currently writing a paper on the religiosity of psychology students. 650 participants were given a survey where one of the questions asked to describe their religiosity along a 7-point scale (from very not religious to very religious), and 82 opted for a free text answer. My job is to analyse those answers and find out what definition of religion/religiosity best suits them.

Edited December 3, 2022 by Carl-Richard

[Gesundheit2]

@Carl-Richard That sounds super cool! Will be waiting for your final analysis.

[Oppositionless]

@Carl-Richard would not be surpised if a lot of psychologists believe in psi, nde, etc

Edited December 2, 2022 by Oppositionless

[Leo Gura]

Strange that younger ones believe more in God. Doesn't seem right.

Edited December 2, 2022 by Leo Gura

[Vibroverse]

2 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Strange that younger ones believe more in God. Doesn't seem right.

Yeah, that surprised me also. 

 

[spiritual memes]

8 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Strange that younger ones believe more in God. Doesn't seem right.

They've been watching your videos...

[AtheisticNonduality]

11 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Strange that younger ones believe more in God. Doesn't seem right.

Religion seems to get less extreme every generation, and we're at a point where people with critical thinking skills can believe in God without causing too much harm. As in, to believe in God today you don't have to be homophobic or subservient to a pope or anything anymore: you can just believe in God in the context of a progressive society without forcing it on anyone or having extraneous beliefs forced on you.

Edited December 2, 2022 by AtheisticNonduality

[Oeaohoo]

I think it makes sense that young people today are more likely to believe in God. Boomers view everything (and particularly religion!) as “the man trying to keep us down”, whilst Gen-X are just cynical about everything. Remember John Lennon’s song God: “I don’t believe in God, I just believe in me”? Most of the New Atheist intellectuals are either very old or dead. Fedora-tier atheism is a much harder sell nowadays…

Also, the older generations are whiter and atheism is mostly a Western cultural phenomenon. Many of those younger people who believe in God are probably Muslims, Christian Africans, Hindus, Sikhs and so on.

[Oeaohoo]

22 hours ago, AtheisticNonduality said:

Religion seems to get less extreme every generation, and we're at a point where people with critical thinking skills can believe in God without causing too much harm. As in, to believe in God today you don't have to be homophobic or subservient to a pope or anything anymore: you can just believe in God in the context of a progressive society without forcing it on anyone or having extraneous beliefs forced on you.

…and yet you can be exiled from this progressive society for blaspheming it’s taboos…

There’s an old Buddhist joke, “There’s no God in Buddhism, just lists”, referring to the endless lists of “the twelve links of the eightfold path of the fourth root of the Dharma” that you find in Buddhism.

I think that today we could say: “There’s no God in progressive societies, just Progress.”

[Melancholic]

I wish to be in that environment and never to go through what I hv. 

[Carl-Richard]

On 2.12.2022 at 4:09 AM, Gesundheit2 said:

@Carl-Richard That sounds super cool! Will be waiting for your final analysis.

It's basically done. I'll give a little background first. So again, the idea was to find a suitable definition of the term "religion" based on the free text answers provided by some of the students from the survey (12.6% to be exact), which may not be representative of the other students in the sample or the larger population. Also, remember that this is Norwegian psychology students, studying to become clinicians (not say a research oriented masters).

The method used was thematic analysis, which is used for analyzing text material (you create "codes" based on the content, then you group the codes into categories, and optionally you can group those into higher-order categories). You use the categories to answer the research question, drawing on theories and other research, and in my case, I had to figure out how each category would contribute to the definition of the term.

I ended up with 64 codes and 9 categories: «organized community», «vague term», «dichotomous term», «agnostics and atheists», «religious upbringing and church membership», «spirituality», « «something else» », «faith/belief», and «Christian, christian and believer». As a side note, I saw that there was a general dissatisfaction with the religion term, and that the alternative terms provided by the students (e.g. "spiritual" or "believer") may be better alternatives for describing their identity.

The definition goes something like this (I've not given my final formulation of it yet, but that's more about specific phrasing than content), and I'll qualify each sentence by certainty:

• an organized community providing a traditionally defined framework of beliefs and practices (pretty certain).
• an active and involved engagement with religious matters in the present (as opposed to merely having a religious upbringing, or merely being listed as a member of a church) (pretty certain).
• the term "Christian" (pretty certain).
• a belief in a higher power or holy figure (e.g. God, Jesus) (less certain).

The contenders that were excluded based on how the students described the terms and related them to religion were:

• spirituality
• agnosticism and atheism

The answer to the research question isn't really surprising, but it was very interesting how only 2 students mentioned the term "atheist", compared to 22 who mentioned agnosticism, 32 who mentioned spirituality overtly, 11 who referred to "something else" (i.e. something beyond our ordinary lives), 15 who mentioned belief in a higher power, and only 3 Christians (and 1 Mormon lol).

Edited December 7, 2022 by Carl-Richard

[Gesundheit2]

@Carl-Richard Awesome work, man! You're lucky to be this position. I have a couple questions:

1. Do you think the answers, and therefore the analysis, would differ if the words used in the survey did? For example, if you avoided using words that have negative connotations/cultural baggage for a big chunk of the European population, like religion, Jesus, and God.
2. Do you think this sample could represent the future trends of the world at some point?

[Carl-Richard]

On 7.12.2022 at 5:39 PM, Gesundheit2 said:

1. Do you think the answers, and therefore the analysis, would differ if the words used in the survey did? For example, if you avoided using words that have negative connotations/cultural baggage for a big chunk of the European population, like religion, Jesus, and God.

So the material I used came from a 2020 study which was a replication study of a 2005 study. In the information sheet of the survey, the researchers provided a very vague definition of the term religion, asking the students to take an open interpretation: "beliefs, practices and feelings that can be expressed either institutionally or personally". Then they were asked to rate their religiosity along a 7-point scale, and the free text answers were the people who didn't want to answer it in that way. The free text answers would certainly be different if instead of a 7-point scale of the term religion, the question instead provided alternatives like "spiritual", "agnostic", "Christian" etc. However, such a question wouldn't be a replication of the 2005 study, and replication studies over long periods are interesting for establishing patterns of change. My analysis will be able to provide useful information for interpreting the results of the 2020 study, because if the perception of the religion term has changed (and not just their level of religiosity), that could possibly impact the results as well.

Edited December 9, 2022 by Carl-Richard

[Carl-Richard]

On 7.12.2022 at 5:39 PM, Gesundheit2 said:

2. Do you think this sample could represent the future trends of the world at some point?

Some researchers describe the trend in Norway along with secularization as "religious complexity" (Furseth et al., 2019), which among other things includes a reduction in traditional and collective forms of religion and an increase in new individualistic forms ("spirituality"). So if the general trend in the world is increasing secularization, you could expect the same trend.

Edited December 9, 2022 by Carl-Richard