Evangelicals In Science

Rod Dreher, reviewing Elaine Howard Ecklund's book Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think:

Evangelicals are vastly underrepresented among the elite scientist population, relative to their size in the general population, while Jews, Buddhists and Hindus are heavily overrepresented. (Caveat: 75 percent of Jewish scientists call themselves atheists, and see their Jewishness as a cultural and ethnic category). Interestingly, Ecklund found that even when scientists fit the traditional description of an Evangelical, there was "considerable reluctance" among them to use that term as a self-descriptor. That Evangelical scientists don't want to be called Evangelical strikes me as significant.

First, the real issue here is one of discourses, I think.  

A person might have good reasons (that is, reasons satisfying to himself) for holding a religious conviction, and even one that is "evangelical" (that is, intended to be intellectually viral).

But it's not necessarily the case that such reasons will be up to the rigors of a scientific discourse in which reasons must be "transferable" from disinterested mind to disinterested mind.

It's appropriate therefore that Christians should be a little reticent about their faith in their professional discourse.  In worst cases, it's a nervous recognition that they aren't disciplined enough to abide by the "rules" of their professional conversations and their requirements.  In best case scenarios, it's a recognition that to be "evangelical" is to be a pain in the ass for truth or error, and one hasn't the rational chops to present that "truth" (or error) among people who demand a careful accounting of one's reasons.

Dreher quotes Ecklund:

I talked with a chemist at a Big Ten university who said that questions about why we are here and the purpose of the universe are simply uninteresting to him. (To his mind, these are the kinds of questions about which religion is generally concerned.) What did matter to him was what could be tested by scientific experiment. If the answer to a question could not be found through science, then why ask it at all?

...Over and over, from school to school, I discovered sentiments similar to those raised by [atheist scientists]. These scientists found questions addressed by religion so utterly insignificant that they did not want to waste time thinking about them. For them, science had superseded religion. It was not restricted to doing experiments in their labs but offered a pervasive worldview, a way of conceptualizing and talking about life.

Well, it seems like a valid point of view to me.  Science's brief is limited, and there's no more reason to ask scientists to take an interest in (or have a respect for) questions beyond the realm of science than there is for asking evangelicals to let laymen rewrite the Bible around their own experiences.  Why should outside discourses, and foreign questions, dictate the conversation?  By the rivers of Babylon, and all that.

Second, I think that the "reluctance" to self-designate as evangelical shows a frank and honest recognition about the distance between faith's reasons and "reasons" as it obtains in public or scientific discourses.

Putting it more simply, I might be totally persuaded of the reasonableness of my faith; but the higher up I rise in the realms of "disinterested" discourse, the more interested (and therefore personal) my faith seems.

Dreher / Ecklund rightly refer to the anti-religious discrimination of the academy:

Ecklund writes that her research findings lead her to conclude that scientists who want to advance the cause of science should work harder to talk to a more diverse cross-section of people, not just scientists. They need to open their eyes to the fact that religion is not going to go away, and that religious diversity is real; it's simply untrue that all religious people are fundamentalists, or are even alike (scientists' stereotypes about Evangelicals cannot be sustained by the evidence either). 

 But this takes place at a couple of levels: at the level of the non-scientist, I think this just amounts to saying, "Add good teaching to your bag of tricks."  

At the level of professional collegiality, though, it's like referring to the anti-pagan discrimination of an evangelical church.  If you don't come talking the language, it's just impolite to talk loudly.

Evangelical reticence then is a sign of damned good manners.

Comments

[Touchstone]

I am not a scientist, but knowing and working with many, I agree that the "big questions" lose a lot of their draw for scientists, as they have for me (for much the same reason, I expect). But while this is regularly portrayed as some kind of philosophical Philistinism on the part of scientists, I think scientists in that position are just misunderstood; the big questions are as big and compelling as ever, but science as an epistemology frames those questions as... intractable.

These questions remain, but science sheds new light on just how unknowable, and unapproachable those questions are. They are interesting in that we want want answers. They are "uninteresting" because we just can't even get a foothold on them in practice.

I think that also fuels some of the "anti-religion" in science. From a scientific standpoint, religious convictions must create a kind of dissonance for those watching: Did you just forget all about epistemology? How else do you do what we do as scientists and then drop it all to arrive at your religious beliefs?

It's no surprise that the religion that *is* found in the scientific community tends to be "liberal". Conservative Christianity is epistemically quite ambitious in its claims, and flaunts/fights scientific epistemology at many more points than do the more tentative, less ambitious positions of liberal Christianity.

-TS

[Touchstone]

And -- forgot to say -- I'm hoping Dreher will repond to what you posted on his blog. ;-)