Correct, but since “spirituality” may be defined that way or several other ways, the term is so unambiguous as to make such a statement useless. X% of atheists believe in an afterlife would tell me something. X% of atheists believe in souls would tell me something. X% of atheists are “spiritual” tells me nothing.

As for mathematicians (I’m stats wonk in cancer genetics), some of them don’t have to face the evidence that humans are related by descent to yeast very often (I use that “fact” almost daily), and are less likely to be aware of neo-darwinist work on altruism (also seems true of some famous molecular biologists though), and such stuff, that are irrelevant in algebraic topology or number theory.

Here’s an online philosophy encyclopedia entry on your very question:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nothingness/#WhyTheSomRatThaNot

i think the culture of natural scientists is different from mathematicians. also, the sample sizes here are pretty small.

High IQ has a down side.

i assumed chris’ reference was the NAS study, which gave a really high number for non-theism. it’s certainly quoted around the atheist blogosphere. as i implied, reference point matters. eminent scientists aren’t that atheistic if you think that atheism necessarily follows from great science. they are if you accept the “nonoverlapping magisteria” position. IOW, the answer to the question “depends.”

I’m not criticizing you, Razib, because the description is in common use now, but describing Dawkin’s as “militant” completely white-washed the meaning of the term.

OK, then – how about a “theory of atheism”?

I’d assert that there is no evidence supporting theistic belief. Therefor it is my “theory” that no gods exist.

Can you offer anything at all that would disprove my theory? Does ANYTHING ever happen in this world that cannot be explained without adding supernatural influence? No, it does not and no scientific experiment ever expects otherwise. Therefor, my theory of atheism is accepted by all scientists – even if they insist otherwise.

re: “leading scientists” survey (NAS), 72% atheist, 20% agnostic, the rest theists.

http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/sci_relig.htm

Ecklund seems to think unbelievers self-select to do science and so are over-represented. I might guess that there is a common cause for both instead, but that might just be self-flattery. Not sure I can cook up tests.

i’ve seen other data which suggest that the irreligiosity and liberalism of scientists are matters of self-selection, not something that develops during their educational process.

Would there likely be a difference in god belief or spirituality between hard scientists and social scientists?

i believe ecklund has presented data that suggests hard scientists are more irreligious. but often the data goes the other way as well (psychologists and sociologists are often quite irreligious, but that might be a function of their liberalism).

I couldn’t help noticing that her 2008 book, Korean American Evangelicals: New Models for Civic Life has no reviews on Amazon.

many monographs don’t have reviews. academic books are not often widely read, in large part because the general public is not intelligent enough to be interested, and the intelligent often have narrow interests.

also, not to be a dick, but assertions of the truth of atheism aren’t really adding much to the discussion. i’d prefer that we try to avoid too much normatively rooted chatter and try and stay empirical. you know, scientific

Which is to say, it has no evidence supporting it.

Would scientists start to, ever so slightly, relinquish confidence in the ability of science to “explain everything?” Does the feeling that all is explained by science, rest partly on the fact that science has been so successful *recently*, and we therefore give it the benefit of the doubt as to whether it will eventually explain every last thing that any person could possibly consider yet-unexplained?

I guess what happens depends on how you define atheism. I once read an insightful argument about this. The author wanted to point out that many agnostics should consider themselves atheists. A scientific agnostic (as imagined by this author) has no positive evidence of the existence of leprechauns, yet he can certainly never disprove their existence completely, pushing the odds of their existence down to “absolute zero.” But he does not say he is “agnostic on leprechauns.” Technically, he is. But in that sense he is agnostic on all things. But the odds of leprechauns existing is so low that it is totally impragmatic to address it in any way. Likewise he should consider the odds of god existing to be, not absolutely zero, but absolutely negligible, and should not consider himself agnostic on god, or, pragmatically, consider there to be any chance at all that god exists.

I don’t see it that way, though. The mysteries I noted in my above post, such as qualia, intuitively open my mind to the possibility that god or some other transcendental power might exist. I wouldn’t necessarily say that qualia constitute “evidence” for this possibility. That word seems a little strong. But those mysteries do prod me in some way. In contrast, when it comes to leprechauns, there aren’t any mysteries out there that te existence of leprechauns could possibly shed any light on, the way I see it. So the existence of the divine seems more plausible to me than the existence of leprechauns.

Next on the docket: awareness/qualia. Why and how do we have it? I am not too terribly resistant to the hypothesis that it is an epiphenomenon with no causal efficacy on matter whatsoever, though I do not necessarily believe that that is true. But I have a very hard time understanding why anyone thinks it could ‘emerge’ from any known properties of matter. Therefore I consider it a big mystery, and really, one drop of recalcitrant mystery, in an otherwise-explicable world, equals a recalcitrantly mysterious world. I understand a lot about parts of the world, but I consider my degree of overall, systemic-holistic understanding of the world, to be pretty much zero. I don’t understand it at all.

On the other hand I am pretty thoroughly distrustful of religious intuitions, primarily because they are easy to explain, at least within the biological context: it’s trivially easy to see how they could be fitness-enhancing.