Can One Serve Both God and Darwin?

In a little update to my post, Science Wars, about the August 15 edition of Time mag and its coverage of the ID vs. Evolution "controversy," I urge you to read Chris Mooney's commentary on said coverage. He begins with "It could have been worse, I suppose." His take on Rick Santorum's flip-flop is especially nice.

Still referring back to that post, where I came to the conclusion that the Fear of Evolution seems to stem from a belief that a scientist (or, really, anyone) cannot serve both God and Darwin, I came across an interesting little project done by a Rice University postdoc sociologist studying religion and spirituality among academic scientists. She has questioned both natural and social scientists, trying to find how they understand the relationship of religion and spirituality to topics ranging from developing a research agenda to ethical decisions involving human subjects and interactions with students.

She expected the social science academics to be less religious, but was surprised to find that a higher percentage of the natural scientists did not believe in God. Nearly 38 percent of natural scientists surveyed said they did not believe in God, but only 31 percent of the social scientists gave that response. Among natural scientists the biologists were the least religious, for the social sciences it was the political scientists. Both of which seem to make sense to me. So, does this prove that a belief in Darwin's theories on evolution makes one an atheist? Not hardly - 38 percent not believing in God leaves 62 percent who DO, and for the social scientists it's 69 percent. A far higher number seem to have kept some form of religious faith than not.

Her name is Elaine Howard Ecklund, she's a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Sociology at Rice, and the study will be ongoing. She's going to question a smaller group of her subjects to a deeper philosophical level, and hopefully publish her results as a book. She presented her paper this week in Philadelphia at the annual meeting of the Association for the Sociology of Religion. And you can read more, though not much more, about it here.

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