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Post by turoldus on Apr 14, 2011 18:36:42 GMT
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Post by ignorantianescia on Aug 24, 2013 8:45:38 GMT
Big bump. I've just read the book, accessible online through Oxford Scholarship, and I thought it was both excellent and very interesting. It is mostly based on Ecklund's own research, interviewing 275 scientists and having a survey under almost 1700 scientists (both natural scientists and social scientists but no mathematicians, which snubbed Rosenhouse). All of them had positions at 21 elite research universities.
Scientists with religious views tend to view themselves as more compassionate than their irreligious colleagues and in general more concerned with ethics. So you get examples of informing their students/assistants of the whole process of the superior's research, trying to help them even improve their prospects if that means leaving their current position and similar things. It's hard to know whether there is any justice to that perception but it does tell an important story about self-image, doesn't it?
A similar mechanism is at work among irreligious but spiritual scientists, who consider themselves more ethical than the non-spiritual non-religious as well. The environment seemed to be a common theme here, which was a focus for much spirituality, whether atheistic or not. They generally regarded religion as fairly oppressive.
But really, if anything leaves me gob-smacked about the book's contents it is just how strongly entrenched the warfare thesis still is at these top-rank universities among scientists. By some of the interviewees you get served a lot of these starry-eyed clichés about pure reason or science that must not be polluted by dangerous religion, though it has to be said that this extreme example seems to be very much a minority view. There's a lot of warfare thesis mongering overall, though. Ecklund draws some interesting parallels on this point with Mary Douglas's and Basil Bernstein's theories.
A recurrent thread among non-believers was that they tended to associate religion with the Fundamentalist varieties that get agitated about evolution, the age of the world and the age of the universe. Very genuine concern about keeping such influences out of science, also kindled by the works of populists like David Horowitz, had led to indiscriminate and in my opinion unjustifiable standpoints about religion, although to be fair only a (vocal) minority of scientists was hostile to religion.
Overall I think there is something very tragic about the situation described in this book. On the one hand you have irreligious academics who are very much the norm in their workplaces but are among one of the most reviled groups (especially atheists) in American society while the number of religious students at such universities increases so they get more exposed to religion. On the other hand religious scientists are accepted in broader society (though they are sometimes closeted as scientists within their faith community), but are generally closeted within academe and few do any science outreach among religious students. Obviously something is amiss if not rotten there.
Now I can see why a New Atheist like Rosenhouse would find many things in this book to dislike. The book doesn't advance the conflict thesis, much less assume it a priori, and notes that it is out of favour within the relevant discipline, though it actually treads quite carefully on this subject. It recommends Numbers's and Marsden's works fairly often, with Ronald Numbers and John Polkinghorne among the many people who commented on the work, so New Atheists may dislike that enormously too. Finally, the research was enabled by a grant from the Templeton Foundation, which generally makes people a quisling from the perspective of many New Atheists. I think Rosenhouse is doing a bit of a godfrey with respect to "religious in a traditional sense", nowhere does Ecklund imply that this means orthodox, but rather in the sense of belonging to a religious tradition (opposed to spirituality). And apart from that, he interprets the figures with his sacred dogma of the conflict thesis in mind.
All in all this book by Ecklund is an impressive study that demonstrates a very wide erudition displayed by her references from The Sleepwalkers to The Creationists, from Thomas Kuhn (of paradigm notoriety) to Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism, from Newberg to Denis Alexander, from Bad Religion to Kanye West to Cornel West. Okay, the latter three are perhaps hardly erudite, but the other points stand. If you can access it from a library I would strongly recommend reading it, otherwise it's not expensive (the retail price is $27.95 at OUP) so it might still be worth to buy.
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Post by fortigurn on Aug 24, 2013 15:10:31 GMT
Nice summary, thanks.
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Post by wraggy on Aug 25, 2013 4:48:49 GMT
The page specified on Rosenhouse's blog cannot be found via your link. |
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Post by ignorantianescia on Aug 25, 2013 5:19:07 GMT
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