Do Professors Believe in God?
Neil Gross and Solon Simmons have posted How Religious Are America’s College and University Professors? (pdf) on the Harvard web site. A recent Inside Higher Ed has a detailed article on the paper, Not So Godless After All, by Scott Jaschik, with this chart:
|
Positions of Belief |
% of Professors |
|
I don’t believe in God. |
10.0% |
|
I don’t know whether there is a God and I don’t believe there is any way to find out. |
13.4% |
|
I don’t believe in a personal God, but I do believe in a Higher Power of some kind. |
19.6% |
|
I find myself believing in God some of the time, but not at others. |
4.4% |
|
While I have my doubts, I feel that I do believe in God. |
16.9% |
|
I know God really exists and I have no doubts about it. |
35.7% |
Here are the disciplines with the highest percentage of professors who “have no doubt that God exists”:
- Accounting (63.0%)
- Elementary Education (56.8%)
- Finance (48.6%)
- Marketing (46.5%)
- Art (46.2%)
- Criminal Justice (46.2%)
Biology, Psychology, and Computer Science professors had the highest rate of atheists and agnostics. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear as though law professors were questioned.
6 Responses to “Do Professors Believe in God?”
The one born-again prof I had in six years of state-sponcered business schools (Saginaw Valley State, Michigan State, Kent State) was an accounting prof at SVSU.
Business schools tend to be a bit more conservative than the liberal arts or sciences, but it’s interesting that accounting and finance (my graduate school field) were 1-3, with marketing in 4th.
I wonder where physics and chemistry profs fall. My guess is that they don’t have as many atheists and agnostics as bio, psych, and comp sci (but not as many devout believers as criminal justice).
Anecdotally, there was a sizeable contingent of physics grad students in my campus Christian fellowship group.
I suspect that their methodology didn’t catch enough philosophers to give them something reportable, but I would be very surprised if philosophy didn’t have as high a rate of non-theism as bio and psych.
The distribution across type of institution was interesting, too — interestingly, the non-theism rate seems pretty well correlated with how far up the academic food chain the institution is.
I agree with philosopher’s last point. Isn’t there some quote to the effect that to practice philosophy one must begin with atheism?
Is this just another attack angle for the “dangerous professor” crowd? Is that why Inside Higher Ed is doing a piece on it?
Once a person is out of his or her specialty, anything goes, as it should. If people can’t think critically about one another’s foibles should government step in to make sure the litmus tests are properly applied?
BTW, I though Criminal Justice was the new Elementary Education. *snort*
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