Science vs. religion : what scientists really think - File PDF

The Voice of Faith 3746%ScientistsU.S. Population53%18%29% 31%22%once a month or more less than once a month neverFIGURE 3.2. Religious Attendance: Elite Scientists Compared to the U.S. Population.Sources: Religion Among Academic Scientists Survey 2005, General Social Survey 2006.While the religious group would be based on acceptance of certain beliefs, aMertonian scientific community would be based on the opposite: a relentlessquestioning of what is believed to be true.Merton’s model, though, is only one way of viewing science. And in practice,there are clearly many things that scientists no longer question. Few disputethe theory of evolution or the law of gravity, for example. And, as we’ll see,there are many scientists who live well in both communities.When we look at the numbers for attendance at religious services—a keypart of religion’s plausibility structure, or social community that reinforces itsnorms—there are stark differences between scientists and members of the generalpublic. About 18 percent of scientists attend religious services at least oncea month or more, compared to about 46 percent of those in the general population.Yet these numbers tell us very little about how the nearly 1 in 5 scientistswho attend a house of worship at least monthly experience their particular religiouscommunities. Religious scientists live in a precarious state, because thework of science is constantly reminding them of the mundane natural world.As we’ve seen, however, religious scientists at elite schools have been exposedto and practice the best plausibility structures for science and are still committedto the plausibility structure of religion. If we are able to understand howthey live comfortably with this tension, their experience might be the perfectmodel for how science and religion can coexist as plausibility structures withinthe same person. It is to this interpretive task that we now turn.How Do They Live?The famous mid-twentieth-century Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr(1892–1971) was perhaps best known for taking his faith beyond the doors ofthe church sanctuary. He consistently related and held in balance the importance