—– Psychologists Are The Least Religious Of American Professors (Tom Rees/Epiphenom; May 30)

Fifty percent of professors of psychology at US universities and colleges do not believe in any god, and another 11% are agnostic. That makes them the least religious of a pretty heathen bunch.

The data come from Politics of the American Professoriate study, a survey carried out in the spring of 2006 and published yesterday in the journal Sociology of Religion. The researchers, Neil Gross of the University of British Columbia and Solon Simmons of George Mason University, surveyed nearly 1500 full-time college and university professors teaching in U.S. institutions.

[Did this survey include profs at private religious schools as well as public secular institutions? If so, was there a significant difference between these two groups? I wish I knew....]

The results are reminiscent of a 2007 survey which found that psychiatrists were the least religious of physicians. It seems that there’s something about studying how the mind works that makes people skeptical of the God delusion!

Gross and Simmons looked into the link between academic field and religion in some detail. Here’s what they concluded:

With other factors controlled, biologists and psychologists – relative to professors outside the top 20 fields – are less likely to believe in God and less likely to hold traditional views of the Bible; professors of communications, English, and history are less likely to hold traditional views of the Bible; sociologists are less likely to have a traditionalistic religious orientation overall; and professors of accounting, finance, and nursing tend to be more religious.
Lord knows why mechanical engineers are so irreligious!

Another factor that separates nonreligious professors from the religious is whether they actively engage in research, or just teach:

Those who are oriented primarily toward research are less likely to believe in God, less likely to have a traditionalistic view of the Bible, less likely to attend religious services, more likely to describe their overall religious orientation as “not religious,” and less likely to consider themselves spiritual persons.

That might either be because they consciously reject religion as a result of their commitment to science, or it might be because religious people choose other careers.

Regardless, one thing this survey does is further demonstrate that academics are less religious than the general population. Overall, 9.8% said they don’t believe in any god, and 13.1% said they didn’t know.

Which is about three times the proportion of atheists and ‘don’t knows’ as found in the general population!

So, mechanical engineers are much more likely to be atheists than are electrical engineers? (Might that be because the former deal with tangible machinery and the latter deal with ghostly electrons?)

And economists are far more likely to be atheists than are accountants? (Might that be because the latter deal with neat, ordered columns and rules and the former deal with a much more chaotic, rule-resistant macrocosm?)

And virtually NO ONE teaching elementary education is an atheist?? (Might that be because people who deal with children KNOW that the world is full of little demons?)

Well, I suppose it’s foolish to speculate, let alone attempt to draw any general conclusions from a single study (the details and methodology of which are beyond easy retrieval).

But go ahead for the next few minutes and then tell me what you’ve come up with. :-)

(I’ll be here, trying to guess how many atheistic professors of theology there might be in the world….)