I'll dig around and see if I can find it. You could well be right, it just seems low compared to the number of fellow scientists I personally know who identify themselves as Christian. Although thinking about it since you wrote that, I'm thinking perhaps 15% isn't too far off the mark.
There are a lot of studies, and not all of them are really reputable or really distinguish between different shades of belief -- are people who never goes to church, never read the bible, never pray, etcetera, but call themselves christian really a christian? Or are they making the culturally easy answer, and never really think about it?
quote:It is difficult to quantify the number of atheists in the world. Different people interpret "atheist" and related terms differently, and it can be hard to draw boundaries between atheism, non-religious beliefs, and non-theistic religious and spiritual beliefs. Furthermore, atheists may not report themselves as such, to prevent suffering from social stigma, discrimination, and persecution in certain regions. Despite these problems, most studies indicate that the non-religious make up about 12-15% of the world's population.
A study has shown atheism to be particularly prevalent among scientists, a tendency already quite marked at the beginning of the 20th century, developing into a dominant one during the course of the century. In 1914, James H. Leuba found that 58% of 1,000 randomly selected U.S. natural scientists expressed "disbelief or doubt in the existence of God" (defined as a personal God which interacts directly with human beings). The same study, repeated in 1996, gave a similar percentage of 60.7%; this number is 93% among the members of the National Academy of Sciences. Expressions of positive disbelief rose from 52% to 72%.[9] (See also The relationship between religion and science.)
A 2004 BBC poll showed the number of people in the US who don't believe in a god to be about 10%.[5] A 2005 Gallup poll showed that a smaller 5% of the US population believed that a god didn't exist.[15] The 2001 ARIS report found that while 29.5 million U.S. Americans (14.1%) describe themselves as "without religion", only 902,000 (0.4%) positively claim to be atheist, with another 991,000 (0.5%) professing agnosticism.[16]
Certainly we can say that there are on average fewer declared atheists in america than in the rest of the world, particularly compared to the other developed countries. There is also more prejudice against atheists, which is pretty blatant: can a person get elected if they are not a "good christian"? It's not just a matter of being an atheist but whether your religion is the right kind. We have elected women, blacks and gays ... there has been no atheist president, and not likely to be any time soon (judging by the campaigns now underway).
The other question is whether the question is being asked and counted the right way. If a poll was made about which religions you don't believe in the results would be a lot different, and the only difference between an atheist and a fundamentalist is the number of religions not believed in differ by one (1) out of literally hundreds.
The vast majority of people are atheistic regarding 99% of the world religions.
Certainly the data also shows more atheists in the scientific community, but there is another issue involved here - and that is education. Education, particularly in scientific fields can be subject to two different factors:
people of faith find that ignorant beliefs that are contradicted by fact are in fact false, and this can lead to a "loss" in faith, and
people who are already atheistic are more likely to pursue a life in science, so they would be "pre-selected" to be more atheistic.
The higher the level of education pursued the more both of these factors contribute.
This of course is the reason that creationism wants to ruin education: it's hard to convince educated people with falsehoods.
Enjoy.
Edited by RAZD, : The vast majority of people are mostly atheistic regarding most religions.
Edited by RAZD, : make that 99% of the world religions.
The intent is to examine what the theory of evolution actually is, and to determine whether it, by itself, implies any given code of morality or any philosophy.
This thread is to discuss what conclusions one can reach about morality or philosophy based on the theory of evolution.
The theory of evolution is that the process of evolution - the change in hereditary traits in populations from generation to generation - is sufficient to explain the natural history of life on earth.
If we can conclude any "code of morality or any philosophy" from this, then it would apply to all life and not just human life. The things we can conclude from the theory of evolution are:
change happens
accumulated change over time can result in increased diversity
increased diversity can improve the chance for life to survive catastrophic events
therefore change and increased diversity are good.
As such it would be impossible to be racist, by definition.
It is my position that there are no moral, social, or philosophical implications to the theory of evolution. The theory of evolution is simply a description of observable phenomena, and the use of those phenomena to explain other observable phenomena.
Perhaps it should be, but there is no question that an entire philosophy of science spawned from it.
Presumably you mean that naturalism was spawned by evolution, seeing as your subtitle was "The inescapable conclusion of strict naturalism" which is not surprising, as many creationists try to portray the science of evolution as some evil thought process.
Let's see how this assertion holds up to the evidence of reality:
In other words, it was started by the pre-Socratic greeks like Thales (620 - c. 546 B.C), then it was taken up by christians in the 12th century and also saw development during the “enlightenment” before the application of it to science in general led to the development of modern sciences, like biology and geology.
Nor does "methodological naturalism" by it's definition accomplish what you imply.
Looks like it's a typical creationist-got-it-all-wrong myth, Nem.
Yes it is just so evil to only use natural explanations for investigating only natural phenomena. The ideas been around for a while (more than 2600 years?), and you might want to try it sometime.
Now do you want to talk about evolution and what it says about racism?
Think how much easier it is to justify genocide if you believe in survival of the fittest though.
Even though genocide or "ethnic cleansing" is not strictly racist (serbs and albanians are the same race) we can use this as an example.
Natural selection tells you that "inferior" (biologically) phenotypes will reproduce at a lesser rate than "superior" (biologically) phenotypes. Thus over time the "inferior" traits will be removed automatically from the population and "superior" traits will spread.
No racial genocide or ethnic cleansing necessary.
It also means that if you are worried\concerned about your particular race\ethnic "purity" being watered down or overwhelmed by the "other genes" then you are really worried about YOUR GENES being of an "inferior" phenotype, of their losing out in the "struggle of life" ... and thus it is the "inferior" phenotypes would be the ones that would need to "justify genocide" of the "superior" phenotype.
Not the usual genocidal racists ethnic cleansing conclusion.
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