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that “religious Americans will doubtless be pleased to know that as many as 40 percent of scientists agree with them about God and an afterlife.” This study, however, stirred up a hornet’s nest among many scientists, who felt that the 40 percent figure was too high. Gerald Bergman, for example, surveyed the literature on the religious beliefs of scientists and concluded: “The level of commitment and strength of belief is not always easy to determine. Many scientists attend church for the sake of their families, and many are simply following the tradition in which they were raised.” Since scientists do not speak with one voice, in a follow-up study Larson and Witham controlled for “eminence,” or what their predecessor James Leuba called the “greater” scientists—those who held “superior knowledge, understanding, and experience.” Leuba discovered that disbelief in God rose from 60 percent among the general scientific population, to 67 percent and 85 percent in two different samples among these “greater” scientists (defined as members of the National Academy of Sciences, an extremely exclusive body whose members must be voted in based on a stellar body of original research). Eighty years later, Larson and Witham found, even more than Leuba, that when eminence is controlled for, disbelief in God rose to 69 percent among biologists, and 79 percent for physicists. When “doubt” or “agnosticism” is factored in, actual belief in God among eminent scientists (averaged over all fields) drops to a paltry 7 percent. Why? Larson and Witham attribute the difference with Leuba not to the intervening years, but to the fact that their sampling of “greater” scientists was from the National Academy of Sciences, a considerably more “elite” group than Leuba’s, which was taken from the standard (and not so selective) reference work of the time, American Men of Science.

It should be reemphasized that these figures are for Americans. The United Kingdom, Europe, and other developed nations of the world show lower levels of belief for both the general population and among scientists, and creationism is almost nonexistent outside of the United States (with some isolated pockets, such as in Australia and New Zealand). The University of Cincinnati political scientist, George Bishop, for example, reported that while about 45 percent of Americans reject evolution and accept a strictly literal interpretation of the Bible creation story, only 7 percent do in Great Britain and even less in Germany, Norway, Russia, and the Netherlands. In the seventeen developed nations he studied, Bishop found that Americans were the most likely to accept the Bible as “the actual word of God … to be taken literally, word for word,” and the least likely to read the Bible as “an ancient book of fables, legends, history and moral precepts recorded by man.” In his survey published in The Public Perspective, the journal of the Roper Center, Bishop noted that the groups most likely to endorse biblical literalism and reject evolutionary theory were women, older Americans, the less well-educated, Southerners, African Americans, and fundamentalist Protestants.

WHY PEOPLE BELIEVE IN GOD

For years after the founding of the Skeptics Society in 1992, we were accused by the media and public of being an organization of atheists. Curious to know the level of religious disbelief in the society, I conducted a survey of members in 1995. The society is a highly educated group, a fifth of whom have Ph.D.s and almost three-quarters of whom are college graduates. With most members working in the sciences and other professional careers, I expected the survey to show an extremely low level of belief in God. The results were surprising. While the vast majority of this group reported being skeptical about such things as the paranormal, reincarnation, near-death experiences, immortality, and Satan, over a third thought it “very likely” or “possible” that there is a God. At the other end of the spectrum, to the question Do you think there is a God (a purposeful higher intelligence that created