Do Scientists Believe in God?
The notion that science and religion are at war is one of the great dogmas of the present age. However, the views of many scientists turn out to be less rigidly doctrinaire than suspected.
Rice University sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund conducted a statistical survey to understand if scientists were categorically hostile to religious belief: “In broad statistical terms, Ecklund’s results are unsurprising: Scientists tend as a group to be less religious than the general population. About 64 percent of the respondents described themselves as atheists or agnostics, as against only about 6 percent of the general public. ‘Looked at the other way around,’ Ecklund writes, ‘only about 9 percent of scientists say they have no doubt that God exists, compared to well over 60 percent of the general public.'”
