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Majority of philosophers describe themselves as atheists

post #1 of 6
12/11/09 at 5:21am
Thread Starter 
A survey was carried out inquiring about the beliefs of 3,226 philosophers, including "931 from the target group of 1974 philosophers from 99 leading departments, 872 other philosophy faculty and/or PhDs, 829 graduate students in philosophy, 217 undergraduates in philosophy, and 377 with no listed affiliation". Most of the questions aren't for those uninitiated into philosophy but one of general interest was "God: theism or atheism?"

A condescended version gives the general results from the faculty surveyed:

Accept or lean toward: atheism 678 / 931 (72.8%)
Accept or lean toward: theism 136 / 931 (14.6%)
Other 117 / 931 (12.5%)

And a more detailed breakdown can be found by fidgeting with the Response Details setting:

Accept: atheism 576 / 931 (61.8%)
Lean toward: atheism 102 / 931 (10.9%)
Accept: theism 99 / 931 (10.6%)
Agnostic/undecided 51 / 931 (5.4%)
Lean toward: theism 37 / 931 (3.9%)
Reject both 16 / 931 (1.7%)
The question is too unclear to answer 16 / 931 (1.7%)
Skip 9 / 931 (0.9%)
Accept another alternative 8 / 931 (0.8%)
Accept an intermediate view 7 / 931 (0.7%)
Other 5 / 931 (0.5%)
There is no fact of the matter 5 / 931 (0.5%)

Note: the numbers change somewhat depending which subgroup's results you're looking at. These are the results of the target faculty members and doesn't include non-targeted PhDs, graduate students, and undergrads who also took the survey.
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post #2 of 6
12/11/09 at 5:27am
If you have ever been familiar with a philosophy department run in the western world during the last sixty years, this shouldn't surprise you. The Analytic/Cambridge tradition that kicks off with Wittgenstein and Russell's work inspired the logical positivism movement, which put forth that all religious statements are essentially meaningless. While that movement has come and gone, the analytic tradition is still the main force in Western philosophy and the people who self-identify with that movement are still argely atheists.
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post #3 of 6
12/11/09 at 6:00am
Well, duh.
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post #4 of 6
12/11/09 at 4:54pm
I really hate it when people argue that philosophy lacks merit in The Real World. And then they bring out a Bible. Or even something by Richard Dawkins! Nice twist, I know, but it's true.
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post #5 of 6
12/11/09 at 6:11pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cuchulain View Post
If you have ever been familiar with a philosophy department run in the western world during the last sixty years, this shouldn't surprise you.
See, I was thinking maybe because they deal with the abstract and metaphysical (including the tradition of explicitly dealing with the question of God's existence), they'd be more noticeably sympathetic to the concept than, say, scientists. But, apparently, not really.
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post #6 of 6
12/11/09 at 10:51pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by PMR View Post
See, I was thinking maybe because they deal with the abstract and metaphysical (including the tradition of explicitly dealing with the question of God's existence), they'd be more noticeably sympathetic to the concept than, say, scientists. But, apparently, not really.
Until very recently, professional philosophy in the West was extremely hostile to the field of metaphysics. Most people in the field, when dealing with the proofs for the existence of God, engage those ideas as episodes of interest in the history of philosophy and not much more. Specifically at, say, Berkeley's department, most professionals identified the Problem of Evil as a "knockdown argument" against the existence of God.

The relatively few philosophers who are open to the existence of God usually are open to the conception of God that theologians refer to derisively as the "god of the philosophers," which is more or less the Spinozan conception of God (an impersonal, pantheistic deity that is the source of all modes of existence). Spinoza's concept of god is also known as the "god of the scientists" given that people like Einstein seemed to actually endorse it and public and popular skeptics and enemies of the church, like Carl Sagan or Daniel Dennet, at least don't write it off.

There is a minority of philosophers who endorse the traditional concept of God, but you pretty much have to be involved with a Catholic university or a divinity school to study ontology, metaphysics, and related fields from that perspective.
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