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To: allmendream; betty boop

You wrote: “The things you think you know are wrong. Again.”

On the contrary, the very article you linked to backs up what I said about “biologists”. Here is the key excerpt from your 2005 article:

“Those in the social sciences are more likely to believe in God and attend religious services ___than researchers in the natural sciences___, the study found.

“The opposite had been expected.

Nearly 38 percent of natural scientists — people in disciplines like physics, chemistry and biology — said they do not believe in God. Only 31 percent of the social scientists do not believe. ...”

And here’s even more:

August 23, 2005
Scientists Speak Up on Mix of God and Science
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/23/national/23believers.html?pagewanted=print

[snip]

Dr. Francis S. Collins, who directs the National Human Genome Research Institute .... noted that ____until relatively recently____, most scientists were believers. “Isaac Newton wrote a lot more about the Bible than the laws of nature,” he said. ...

[snip]

Polling Scientists on Beliefs

According to a much-discussed survey reported in the journal Nature in 1997, ____40 percent____ of biologists, physicists and mathematicians said they believed in God - and not just a nonspecific transcendental presence but, as the survey put it, a God to whom one may pray “in expectation of receiving an answer.”

The survey, by Edward J. Larson of the University of Georgia, was intended ____to replicate one conducted in 1914, and the results were virtually unchanged.____ In both cases, participants were drawn from a directory of American scientists. ....

[[[[ Surveys of the last decade have shown that religious beliefs about God, ___professed by 93 percent of Americans___ have become more diverse. When Americans are ___asked to define “God,”___ a fourth of them opt for something other than a conventional theistic deity. ....

....Despite the stable 40-60 split in belief-disbelief over 80 years, there has been ___a significant shift in views held by the three professions surveyed—mathematics, biology, and physics/astronomy.___

The 1996 survey showed that scientists in mathematics are most inclined to hold belief in God (44.6 percent).

While biologists showed the highest rates of disbelief/doubt in Leuba’s day (69.5 percent),

that ranking was given to physicists and astronomers this time around (77.9 percent). http://www.beliefnet.com/News/1999/12/Scientific-Semi-Belief.aspx ]]]]

.....when Dr. Larson put part of the same survey ____ to “leading scientists”____ - in this case, members of the National Academy of Sciences, perhaps the nation’s most eminent scientific organization - ____fewer than 10 percent____ professed belief in a personal God or human immortality.

This response is not surprising to researchers like Steven Weinberg, a physicist at the University of Texas, a member of the academy and a winner of the Nobel Prize in 1979 for his work in particle physics. He said he could understand why religious people would believe that anything that eroded belief was destructive. But he added: “I think one of the great historical contributions of science is to weaken the hold of religion. That’s a good thing.”

No God, No Moral Compass?

He rejects the idea that scientists who reject religion are arrogant. “We know how many mistakes we’ve made,” Dr. Weinberg said. And he is angered by assertions that people without religious faith are without a moral compass.

In any event, he added, “the experience of being a scientist makes religion seem fairly irrelevant,” he said. ____ “Most scientists I know simply don’t think about it very much. ____ They don’t think about religion enough to qualify as practicing atheists.”

___Most scientists he knows who do believe in God....believe in “a God who is behind the laws of nature but who is not intervening.”____

<>

Noted scientist tackles question of religious faith
http://www.malibutimes.com/articles/2011/06/29/news/news5.txt
Dr. Francis Collins
Wednesday, ___June 29, 2011___ 11:01 AM PDT

[snip]

Like many scientists, Collins said he believes the universe was created 13.7 billion years ago.

___Unlike most scientists___, Collins argued that God created the universe, bestowing it with evolution as the mechanism that would shape its eventual form. From evolution, man was gifted with free will, consciousness and morality. Thus man was made “in God’s image,” Collins said. Challenging scientists who say evolution disproves the existence of a higher being....”

[snip] bttt


32 posted on 08/17/2011 2:27:12 PM PDT by Matchett-PI (Obamageddon, Barackalypse Now! Bam is "Debt Man Walking" in 2012 - Rush Limbaugh)
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To: Matchett-PI

Majority is what I said.

Are you unaware that >50% is a majority?

Only 38% of natural scientists didn’t believe in God. A majority of those in the natural science DID believe in God.

Thus the majority of scientists are people of faith in God.

As I said.


33 posted on 08/17/2011 2:58:00 PM PDT by allmendream (Tea Party did not send the GOP to D.C. to negotiate the terms of our surrender to socialism.)
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To: Matchett-PI

Dr. Francis Collins is doing what religious people do more often than not: Move the goal posts in such a way that their idea of a ‘God’ fits neatly in the gaps. The God of the Gaps. In other words, the usual fallacy of conjuring up a Golem of sorts that is based on nothing other than sophism.

Dr. Francis Collins is a political appointee. Never forget that.


36 posted on 08/17/2011 3:54:48 PM PDT by belzu2010
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