How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [52]
There is, unfortunately, much historical evidence to support this perspective. From the Crusades’ numerous attempts to cleanse the Holy Land of infidels (anyone who was not a proper Christian), to the Inquisition’s efforts to purge society of heretics (anyone who dissented from Christian dogma), to the Counter Reformation’s push to extirpate reforming Protestants from Catholic lands, to the Holy Wars of the late twentieth century that continue to produce death rolls in the millions, all have been done in the name of God and the One True Religion. However, for every one of these grand tragedies there are ten thousand acts of personal kindness and social good that go largely unreported in the history books or on the evening news. Religion, like all social institutions of such historical depth and cultural impact, cannot be reduced to an unambiguous good or evil; shades of gray complexity abound in all such societal structures, and religion should not be treated any differently than, say, political organizations. One could easily build a case that state-sponsored terrorism, revolutions, and wars make even these horrific religion-sponsored catastrophies appear mild by comparison. If God is a meme, so is King and President; and if religion is a virus, politics is a full-blown epidemic replete with copy-me memes such as nationalism, jingoism, and outright racism. Yet no memeticist would propose that we do away with the state. Why? Because the state is a complex social entity with countless nuanced beneficent effects that go along with the pernicious.
Belief in God may partially be explained through the influence of techniques described by memeticists, but memes do not get to the core of what is going on inside the mind of the believer. To reach into that we must ask believers why they believe.
SCIENTISTS’ BELIEF IN GOD
For those atheists who believe that the secularization thesis is more prescriptive than descriptive (that is, even though secular institutions are not replacing religion, they should), there is the problem of explaining why so many scientists believe in God. In 1997, the British science journal Nature published the results of a random sampling of 1,000 scientists (from the latest edition of American Men and Women of Science), comparing these findings to a similar study from 1916 by the psychologist of religion, James Leuba. As earlier in the century, approximately 40 percent of scientists proclaimed a belief in a personal God. (Of the 60 percent who said they do not believe, 45 percent were strong in their convictions of “personal disbelief,” whereas 15 percent consider themselves agnostics.) Edward Larson and Larry Witham, who conducted the 1997 study, concluded: “The stereotype of scientists is that they tend to reserve judgment about things they don’t know about. It turns out not only in history but about the same in our time, that scientists seem to know what they believe—or don’t believe. Either they’re a theist or a nontheist. There was not that great sea of doubt I would have expected.”
Belief in immortality was a different story. Here we see a shift downward in belief by more than 10 percent, as well as a change in belief across fields. Eighty years ago Leuba found that biologists showed the highest rate of disbelief—almost 70 percent—whereas today physicists and astronomers were the biggest skeptics at close to 80 percent. Of all the sciences, Larson and Witham found that mathematicians are the most likely to believe in God, coming in at 45 percent. (See the graph, showing the breakdown of belief between 1916 and 1996.)
Larson and Witham concluded