Atheists in America – Part 2

April 20, 2013 By 66 Comments

This is a continuation of my series on atheists which is based on a book I have coming out, co-written with David Williamson, titled There is no God: Atheists in America (Rowman and Littlefield). In the first blog I discussed how I collected data on atheists. Now I can dive into the findings. The first finding I want to explore is how atheists perceive science.
In the first blog, I noted that atheists tend to use science to legitimate their beliefs. I am not just talking about their beliefs about the possible existence of the supernatural, but also their beliefs about themselves and what is important in life. This is reasonable given that atheists, for obvious reasons, cannot use religion to justify their concerns. Atheists tend to see science as the way to create a better world and religion as the barrier to that better world.
In contemporary society there is a tension between science and religion. While there may have always been a tension between science and religion, it is not clear that science and religion have to be seen in conflict with each other. In fact, there is solid philosophical work arguing that science and religion do not contradict. Perhaps most famous is the argument of “non-overlapping magisterial” by Gould which suggests that there are areas where science reigns supreme and areas where religion reigns supreme but that those two areas are distinct from each other. Regardless of arguments such as this one, it is clear that science-religion conflict is seen as normative today. In that conflict atheists envision themselves on the side of science. The image of science as a rational methodology for understanding reality appeals to the average atheist’s own sense that he/she bases his/her actions on rationality instead of on emotionalism.
It is not surprising that atheists see religion as incompatible with science. For example, one of the atheists we interviewed, let’s call him Ralph, is especially confused at the idea that scientists can be religious. For Ralph science and religion do not mix as he sees science as “based on the idea of experimentation involving knowledge and change of knowledge” while religion is “fundamentally based on faith and I don’t see particularly how they (science and religion) can coexist.” Accordingly, Ralph contends that for individuals to have religious beliefs they must be ignorant of science. When the topic of religious scientists came up he made it clear that he had a hard time understanding how a highly educated scientist is able to retain religious faith. In fact, one of the last statements he made at the end of the interview was “ …it would be an interesting conversation to have somebody highly intelligent, you know well educated person that has a religious belief that might be a conversation I will undertake, it is going to be really curious to see how they can reconcile that.”
In Ralph we see the belief of the incompatibility of religion and science. His interpretation of this conflict is religion being conflated with ignorance and irrationality while science is connected to a rational approach to life. Another one of our interviewees reinforces this perspective:
Science is about finding the best way of doing things, the best knowledge that we can acquire. Religion has nothing to do with either of those, absolutely nothing. They’re not compatible ‘cause they’re going to ignore the facts. You can’t be a scientist. If you wanna be a scientist you can’t be religious. They don’t fit together. Oil and water.

This was a common theme in both the interviews and online responses. This perception establishes the relationship of religion to science in the eyes of the atheists. It also plays an important role in the social identity atheists have developed. Atheists clearly define themselves as not religious and since they do not see themselves as religious, they perceive themselves as not having the problems they associate with religion, such as the inability of the religious to understand scientific truth. For many respondents, being an atheist is akin to being a lover of science and a lover of truth.
For many atheists, science is the way to discover truth. Our atheist respondents were rarely nihilists who state that there is no truth. Perhaps the belief that truth cannot be discovered is more common among agnostics or those who are spiritual but not religious. But atheists contend that truth can be discovered with the proper application of science. They see people of faith as afraid to seek out truth since finding that truth may mean the end of their faith. In the example below, note how this respondent is sympathetic to her friend but envisions her friend as hiding from the truth through religion:
For some people, they may not be willing to question things or are happy where they’re at. I know someone who’s very, very strongly a Christian, mostly because she has found happiness in religion, so to her, why upset that? Because she doesn’t feel that truth has its own intrinsic value. She feels that the search for happiness has its own intrinsic value, and so it has a lot to do with your values, your personality, of course your upbringing and how you’re been taught to question things and think about things.

Atheists see themselves as clear thinkers in comparison to their religious peers. They do not limit this perception to their ideas about social and political activism, but also envision their decisions in their everyday lives as the products of clear thinking.
Humans have a need to create a social identity that supports their self-esteem and one which they believe leads to the right values. This is true across different cultures and sub-cultures so it is not a surprise that atheists create a social identity that meets such social needs. In light of their need for a social identity that builds esteem, we can make more sense of the atheist claims of understanding reality in a superior manner to religious individuals. This confidence leads to the development of an atheist social identity based on the perception that their personal and social decisions are centered in “rational” science as opposed to “irrational” religion. For some atheists it is not just that religion is illogical. Religion is also problematic to society. This is particularity the case when religion threatens to interfere with government. Because atheists tend to have a dichotomous vision of science being logical and religion illogical, they tend to see the intrusion of “illogical” religion into government as troublesome. In a future blog I will look more at the sort of solutions atheists suggest for our society, but obviously those solutions will include less religious influence in the government and our general society.
Atheists envision the priority of science as a key component of their social identity. Science is not merely a social tool to many atheists, but it is also an important way they conceptualize a vision of their place in our society. Understanding an atheist social identity is important for comprehending why certain individuals become atheists. Given the centrality of science in the creation of the atheist social identity, there is little wonder that atheists are overrepresented in elite positions in scientific fields. But it is not the only element of an atheist social identity. In my next blog I will look closely at another important element of that social identity.

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Atheists in America – Part 1

April 6, 2013 By 29 Comments

This is the start of a series on atheists. I am not sure how many blogs I will write on them but it is connected to a book I have coming out titled There is no God: Atheists in America (Rowman and Littlefield). It is a book I co-wrote with David Williamson. Being a Christian, I believe it to be important to understand those who do not agree with me. Furthermore, atheists have been understudied, and I love doing research on understudied topics.
A disclaimer or two is in order. Although I do not share the beliefs atheists have, this series, and my book, is not a critique of atheism. That critique has been made by smarter people than I. My work is intended to describe atheists, not atheism. It is about the community in which atheists sustain their social reality. On the other hand, whenever a researcher looks at a social community, one usually sees strengths and weaknesses. I do not intend on describing atheists in a particularly negative or positive light, but if some of the findings create those impressions then so be it. I know that many atheists see themselves as marginalized, and there is research backing their claims. I have no desire to add to that feeling, but I am not going to fake a glowing report on atheists just to be politically correct.
This entry will help to set up the rest of the series. I basically want to discuss how we did our research. The findings I will talk about in the rest of the series are based on that methodology. Actually our idea for this research emerged when we did research on cultural progressive activists. We used an online survey with open-ended questions to gather their ideas about the Christian Right. Our sample was 61.7 percent atheists, which is an incredibly high percentage for a group that is 3-5 percent of the population in the United States. We ran some preliminary tests comparing the atheists to the other cultural progressive activists and knew that we had the potential to do interesting research.
But it was research that needed to be augmented. To do this David and I decided to interview about fifty atheists. We wanted to see if atheists have a different experience when they lived in a highly religious region of the country as compared to a more secular region. As a result, we interviewed half of the atheists in an area in the Bible Belt and the other half through an atheist organization located in a less religious region of the country. The atheists we found in the city in the Bible Belt were found through networking contacts we found in a small atheist group. There was no large formal organization we could use to find respondents which is likely a feature of the lack of a non-religious presence.
Our research question focused on why individuals became atheists, how they logically justified their atheism, their perceptions on religion and the sort of society they want. We developed a questionnaire to address those issues. We asked about our respondents religious background, how they became atheists, their logical reasons why they became an atheists, what they saw as the benefits of atheism, their concerns about religion and what their ideal society looked like.
It is worth telling why we spent time trying to learn how atheists logically justify their beliefs. We had learned that rationality was a core value with cultural progressive activists (See our book What Motivates Cultural Progressives by Baylor University Press). The atheists in our previous research consistently argued that religion is illogical, and atheism is logical. So we wondered what sort of arguments atheists used to justify such confidence in their claims. Thus, we did ask them for the most powerful argument that supported their beliefs in atheism. I will provide you the answer for that in a future blog (this is my nerd version of a teaser).
Over the next few blogs I will summarize some of the findings from our work. But to understand those results, it is important to consider who atheists are. In our sample, we had a high percentage of individuals with college and post-graduate degrees. This is reflective of the reality that atheists have higher levels of education than others in our society. We also interviewed more men than women. We even made an attempt to interview more women but still interviewed almost three men for every woman we interviewed. Research has shown that men are more likely to be atheists. I wished we had interviewed more women so that we would be in a position to look at possible gender differences between the atheists and non-atheists. Our respondents were also highly likely to be white which also matches what national probability samples have indicated about the racial makeup of atheists.
The educational, racial and gender status of atheists suggests that this is a group with a relatively privileged societal position. As I pointed out earlier, many atheists feel marginalized, and there is research indicating that atheism is less accepted than other religious beliefs. In fact, I have done some of the research showing that atheism generates more relative animosity than other religious beliefs. So it is true that as it concerns religious status, atheism is a marginalized position. But in other ways, atheists are not so marginalized. Being more likely to be white, male and educated means that they have advantages in society that offset the disadvantages their beliefs about religion can bring them.
It seems to me that the term status inconsistency applies here. It is a term developed by Max Weber that describes the fact that status indicators such as wealth, power and prestige are not perfectly correlated to each other. A gangster may have a lot of wealth and power but that person does not have a lot of prestige in our society. Likewise, someone like Mother Teresa has a lot of prestige and even some power but not a lot of wealth. People living in status inconsistency are in a position to use their status advantages to compensate for their status disadvantages. So a gangster may not be able to enjoy status but the ability to enjoy wealth and power helps that gangster to feel good about him or herself even with this low status. Status inconsistency is part of what makes atheists fascinating. They generally have educational, racial and gender advantages to help compensate for their religious disadvantages. I believe that some of the findings to be presented in the next few blogs are connected to this attempt to manage status inconsistency. For example, in the next blog I will look at the values atheists place on science. Using science as a way to legitimate their beliefs is logical for some atheists to work towards a society where their education, rather than religion, becomes a source of status. Hope you come back in a couple of weeks to check out that

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Video Madness

March 16, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Normally I do not use my blog to send readers to another blog, but I am preparing to do a series on atheists and I am not yet ready to begin it. This blog by Hoffmeister substantiates an argument I made a while ago about needing a holistic solution to gun violence. Forget the business about the Huffington Post and look at his discussion of video games. With so much concentration on gun control I fear that we are forgetting about video games which I believe to be a greater source of the gun violence problem. Please enjoy this blog and come back in April for the start of my series on atheists.

http://peterbrownhoffmeister.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/on-school-shooters-the-huffington-post-doesnt-want-you-to-read-this/.

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Embracing Tolerance and Rejecting Narrow-Mindedness

March 2, 2013 By 2 Comments

I decided to take a page from Mark Regnerus and look at some old data to give it a new twist. Sometimes looking beyond the original intent of the data can provide interesting findings. For example, a couple of years ago my book Compromising Scholarship came out and documented academic bias against religious and political conservatives. It is mainly based on a survey I sent to academics in several disciplines. You can find the details of the survey in the book and how the findings support my contention that a real bias exists against conservative out-groups in academia.
But that is not the issue I wish to blog about today. I want to look at the general idea about tolerance, or accepting those who see things differently than us. My personal experience is that often the people who talk about how important tolerance is are often the most intolerant people I encounter. They are quite tolerant towards those they agree with, but that is not a good measure of tolerance. Real tolerance only becomes relevant when we encounter those we disagree with. It is here that a lot of people who like to talk about tolerance fail. So many times I hear such individuals talk about tolerance one minute and the next minute they are stating some of the most uncharitable stereotypes about their political and/or religious out-groups. My experience is that they are often political and religious progressives who do not see that they are as intolerant as they imagine conservatives to be.
But that is merely my experience. That experience can be corrupted by my own bias. For example, although I am a political moderate, I may be more sensitive to these observations among political progressives since I encounter so many of them in academia. I am more religiously conservative than the vast majority of my colleagues and that may also bias my observations. Until I conducted the research for my book I had to be content with having this observation with no data to support or refute it. But in that survey I asked academics about the qualities they want and those they don’t want in the people they work with. “Tolerance” was on the list of the qualities that academics were asked about wanting in a colleague and “narrow-mindedness” was on the list of the qualities that academics were asked about not wanting in a colleague. I did not report on this question in my book as it was not the focus of my investigation, but in this exploration of measuring the open-mindedness of those who preach tolerance the question is very relevant.
Unfortunately, I did not ask the respondents about their political and religious beliefs. To explore the tolerance of the respondents, it is important to know the out-groups of the respondents. However, past research indicates that academics are highly likely to be political progressives, or radicals, and to be irreligious. It stands to reason that such academics would tend to see religious and political conservatives as out-group members. I will use this assumption as a way to operationalize tolerance even though I know that there will be a small, but unknown, number of respondents who are religious and political conservatives and thus would not see these individuals as out-groups. But this operationalization is strengthened by the findings in my book that it is the religious and political conservatives rejected by the respondents as acceptable colleagues.
I also asked the respondents about their willingness to hire job candidates from different religious and political groups. In theory those who value tolerance or who do not want “narrow-minded” colleagues would not exhibit those qualities. Thus, they would be more open to hiring members of their out-groups, which would be those who are religious or political conservatives, than those who do not value tolerance or who accept narrow-mindedness. The willingness to hire those from one’s own out-groups seems to be a valuable way to express open-mindedness. In the table below I show the correlations coefficients of measures of wanting tolerant colleagues and not wanting narrow-minded colleagues with the propensity of those respondents to be willing to hire individuals from certain religious and political social groups.

  Tolerant Narrow-Mindedness
Democrat -.003 .075
Republican .016 -.114
NRA Member -.003 -.113
ACLU Member .029 .154
Atheist -.025 .09
Fundamentalist -.035 -.154
Evangelical .003 -.125

This table can be read in this way: those who were likely to state that tolerant was important to them were very slightly less likely (-.003) to be more willing to hire someone who is a Democrat. Those who were likely to state that narrow-mindedness was something they did not want to see in a colleague were slightly more likely (.075) to be more willing to hire someone who is a Democrat. These correlations are not huge, but the ones under the narrow-minded variable were statistically significant at least to the at p < .01 level. None of the correlations coefficients under tolerant variable are statistically significant. An observation worth making is that under the narrow-minded variable, with the exception of accepting ACLU members, the negative scores of rejecting out-group members are more powerful than the positive scores of accepting in-group members. It may be human nature to be more likely to reject our enemies than to accept our friends. I am curious about whether there is other research that would test the relative strength of hatred of enemies as compared to love of friends.
But more important than this tendency to reject our enemies is the qualitative difference between the valuation of tolerance and the opposition of narrow-mindedness. Once again making the logical assumption that most of these respondents are irreligious and politically progressive, the valuation of tolerance is not connected to rejection of out-group members or even support of in-group members. But those who reject narrow-mindedness also concentrate on rejecting their out-group members and offering support for their in-group members. Approving tolerance, or focusing on promotion of a positive quality, is not linked to rejecting others but focusing on negative qualities, such as narrow-mindedness, does lead to such rejection.
One may argue that such a position is not hypocritical. After all it may be the respondents’ opinion that the groups they reject are narrow-minded and thus they are justified in rejecting them. But it not lost on me that these respondents are stating that people they do not like should be hindered from fairly obtaining a job in academia. Such a response does seem to be a type of narrow-mindedness that should be resisted by fair-minded people. I am of the opinion that our religious and political opinion should not factor in an academic hiring decision, with the obvious exception of institutions with a religious mission. That attitude is a broad-minded approach to including people that I may not agree with in my workplace. An opposite approach of rejecting those with different religious and political opinions for employment seems to be narrow-minded to me.
These results emerge from a sample of academics, which is not representative of the larger society. Furthermore, I only selected certain disciplines and there may be a response bias influencing these results. So I am very careful about generalizing this to the rest of society. I rather think of these results as something that can be instructive and maybe someone in the future will design a study that has more far ranging implications. But even given these limitations I am still comfortable stating that at least among these academics, rejection of narrow-mindedness is correlated with rejection of out-group members in what I would argue is a non-tolerant manner.
My expectation that those who talk about how tolerant they are often end up being intolerant does not seem to be true, at least not with this sample. The problem may be with my memory and possible confirmation bias on my account. Perhaps previous friends and acquaintances talked more about the intolerance of others but I remember them as touting their own tolerance. I may have remembered what I perceived as hypocrisy but confused it as their claim that they are something that they are not when in fact those I interpreted as hypocrites assert a hatred for something that they were. If this is true then it is one more reason why we should not just rely on our own personal experience, but should seek out data to confirm or refute our social beliefs.
I take from this that seeing tolerance as a positive value does not lead to being intolerant. But focusing on the “narrow-mindedness” of others is correlated to having elements of that intolerance ourselves. The larger lesson here may be that looking at the negative qualities in others may reflect problems we ourselves have. Someone once told me that the characteristics people hate the most are the ones they themselves tend to have. For example, the person who hates gossip often has problems gossiping his/herself. I know from personal experience of individuals who do not tend to trust others often do so because they themselves are untrustworthy. This data may reveal another case of this aspect of the human psyche. Those who focus on the narrow-mindedness of others may do so since they see it in themselves and do not like what they see.

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