Via Megan, Robin Hanson wants to know:
Last November we learned that the US public believes in God more than college professors, who believe more than professors at elite schools….If all we know about a view was that professors held it more, and elite professors even more so, we would be inclined to favor that view. But other considerations can be relevant; if we knew elite professors favored increasing elite research funding, we might attribute that to self-interest bias. So should we favor elite professors’ views on God, or can we identify other relevant considerations?
I’m sure we could tell any number of just-so stories here, though the one I’d expect most people to fall back on first—elite “social pressure”—has an obvious circularity to it. I’m inclined to favor the rather prosaic explanation that rejecting religion is just what highly intelligent, educated people typically do in a milieu where they’re expected to think hard about such questions and come up with defensible rather than merely personally pleasing answers, and that the tendency to reject will covary directly with these factors because it’s the correct tendency. But that’s not to say other forces might not be at work. For instance, if your disposition is to want to develop theories to understand and explain the world around you in an abstract and fundamental way, it would presumably be disappointing to learn that for many complex phenomena, the end of the explanatory road is just that God did it, for motives and by means that are both beyond human fathoming. Or, to borrow a page from Nozick’s account of intellectual hostility to socialism, you might prefer to think that the pursuit of the kind of knowledge to which you’ve devoted your life is important and useful, rather than a sort of sideshow to the really crucial task of attaining salvation through faith and grace, in which you have no special expertise.
We could go on, I’m sure, but it seems the fairer question to ask is: Are there any such stories where the factors we’re imagining as atheist biases aren’t matched by parallel factors in the general population pushing even more strongly in the other direction? After all, while it may be a disappointment to the theoretically inclined to discover that the answer to their deepest questions is “God did it,” surely many will find this wholly congenial: You know the Big Answer to all the Big Questions without doing any hard work; have a piña colada! I expect looking at biasing factors on both sides of the ledger will find them much heavier in the direction of belief.
Addendum: James Joyner suggests that whatever added credence we give the views of academics ought to be limited to their field of expertise. Fair enough; that would seem to suggest either philosophy or theology. But theology at worst assumes the answer to the question, at best is subject to a very strong selection bias, insofar as I doubt very many people pursue theology doctorates without a powerful preexisting conviction that God exists. That leaves philosophy. I’ve got no numbers here, but I’d lay money that there’s much, much more disbelief among philosophers at elite institutions than among either the general population or academics in general. Of course, part of the problem here is deciding what counts as “expertise.” If you think belief in religious propositions is a matter of faith generated by some kind of direct apprehension of their truth, then training in syllogisms is not going to count as providing the relevant expertise. But then, philosophers are also the ones who devote a lot of energy to debating things like whether that counts as a sound method of belief formation.
9 responses so far ↓
1 Robin Hanson // Jan 19, 2007 at 5:26 pm
Is it clear that God is a simpler answer than other answers? Can’t God be very complex and mysterious and require lots to fathom?
2 Javier // Jan 20, 2007 at 2:49 am
Let’s think back to Hume’s dialogues on religion. Even if we accept some argument for a deity (and we shouldn’t), it is a ridiculously huge leap of faith to assume any particular religious doctrine. Professors probably bear the cost for their beliefs more than other people (I realize many people will disagree with this, but the crucial emphasis is on “more than other people”), and so I think the parsimonious explanation is that most professors realize that there is no credible argument for a belief in any particular religious dogma and, I think, any deity.
I think a comparable analogy is with Bryan Caplan’s studies on the beliefs of economists. Even when controlling for income and other confounding variables, the belief gap between economists and the public is robust. The same is probably true for religion.
3 Gene Callahan // Jan 21, 2007 at 8:40 am
“I’m inclined to favor the rather prosaic explanation that rejecting religion is just what highly intelligent, educated people typically do in a milieu where they’re expected to think hard about such questions and come up with defensible rather than merely personally pleasing answers, and that the tendency to reject will covary directly with these factors because it’s the correct tendency.”
Sure, Julian. That’s just why Aristotle, Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Kant, and Hegel rejected the idea of God. They were great thinkers who seriously contemplated this issue, and of course, they… what?! You’re telling me that they didn’t reject the idea of God? WTF?
4 John Tabin // Jan 21, 2007 at 3:16 pm
Embracing left-liberalism is also “just what highly intelligent, educated people typically do” in that very same mileu. That doesn’t have anything to do with it being “the correct tendancy.” Based on what I know about professors of political science, law, and even the humanities, I see no reason to believe that philosophers are more likely than anyone else to have the right answers to the questions they are supposed to be experts on.
5 arthur // Jan 21, 2007 at 9:28 pm
The philosphy faculty has an enormous selection bias towards non-believers. Most believers with the appropriate aptitude and interests would choose to pursue either ministry or academic theology rather than academic philosophy.
6 Gene Callahan // Jan 25, 2007 at 11:21 am
A man lives in a searing desert. The only water he has ever seen in his life bubbles out of small springs in the cliffs.
One day, a trade route is established through his land, and he begins to meet many strangers. One thing he hears about from them is swimming. He has never conceived of such a notion. Secretly, he is jealous that all of these people have experienced something he’s missed out on. But he won’t admit that, even to himself. Instead, he proclaims that what these people are saying is irrational superstition, and that there supposed experiences of swimming are just self-delusion.
He begins to ask these people, with a sense of smug superiority, just how one goes about this “swimming.” One traveler describes breaststroke to him, another backstroke, another the crawl, another butterfly, and so on. At this point, he exclaims “Aha! This proves these people are talking nonsense. Although they claim ‘swimming’ exists, they can’t even agree about how its done!” He takes the fact that there are many ways to swim as proof that there is no way to swim!
7 Julian Sanchez // Jan 25, 2007 at 3:19 pm
Hm. I’m not sure what’s more striking about that parable: Its almost complete irrelevance to anything I wrote here, or how indiscriminately it could be applied to UFOs, unicorns, healing crystals, or anything else you care to name.
8 Gene Callahan // Jan 27, 2007 at 6:48 pm
“I think a comparable analogy is with Bryan Caplan’s studies on the beliefs of economists. Even when controlling for income and other confounding variables, the belief gap between economists and the public is robust.”
By this mode of evaluating beliefs:
1) In the 1930s, American economists were far more interventionist than was the American public. The stupid public did not realize interventionism is correct.
2) In the 1990s, American economists were far less interventionist than the American public. The stupid public does not realize non-interventionism is correct.
3) American historians are far more Marxist than the general public. Stupid public does not realize that laissez-faire, state corporatism, and communism are all correct!
Obviously, the mode of arguing employed in this thread is complete rubbish.
9 Gene Callahan // Jan 27, 2007 at 6:52 pm
“Hm. I’m not sure what’s more striking about that parable: Its almost complete irrelevance to anything I wrote here,”
The writer of the parable was well able to predict that the man in the desert would be quite certain he wasn’t the man in the desert!
“or how indiscriminately it could be applied to UFOs, unicorns, healing crystals, or anything else you care to name.”
Yes, Julian, literally billions of people, including most of the greatest minds in history, have reported encountering unicorns. The examples are exactly the same. You haven’t missed out on anything, and you can sleep tight.