Hi all,
I was very surprised to discover that only 10% of the Nobel prize winners are atheist:
This info contradicts everything I’ve heard before, that there is a strong negative correlation between intelligence and religiosity.
For example:
Here at minute 1:45.
Here at minute 16:00.
How do you explain this?
Link #2 answers your question pretty well.
“Link #2 answers your question pretty well”
Can you please summarize the answer?
This article is too complicated.
Interesting question. To my surprise you’re 10% turns out to appears fairly accurate.
Now of course, we have no clue about how much religiosity it took to qualify for that list?
How many of those scientists were raised in a church going household and held on to that affliction every time they had to fill out that line on the form, for personal and professional self-preservation. I mean write Atheist on that line and you’ve just painted a bullseye on the back of your head.
The more telling question would be how many of those “religious” Nobel Laureates accepted God as some sort of notion out there somewhere, a shadow play of something beyond our understanding, something that can give comfort and support through our trying days.
Compared to how may were really religious - like thinking only their God is the key to some everlasting bliss of some imagined nightmare Heaven or Hell.
That would be the much more interesting number (fraction) to ponder.
Was going to fix something up there, but hell it fits too well so I left it.
affliction = affiliation 
@ Daniel: Link #2 answers your question pretty well”Can you please summarize the answer?
This article is too complicated.
Wikipedia gets the numbers from a single source:
Shalev, Baruch Aba (2003). “Religion of Nobel prize winners”. 100 years of Nobel prizes. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers & Distributors. pp. 57–59. ISBN 9788126902781.
This book is rather obscure, has only 1 review on Amazon.com for instance. Smells fishy. It has 19 citations on Google Scholar as of writing, but the numbers are quite widespread online, probably as a function of the Wikipedia page. The author seems to be a pretty unknown Israeli geneticist, but quite obscure as well. The book wasn’t even on on libgen, but a copy was obtained.
So, we look at the relevant pages, and: …
“Link #2 answers your question pretty well”Can you please summarize the answer?
This article is too complicated.
In the modern days of things being available, and the fact that you found it shows it’s available, if it is not being used by other people in similar disciplines, then it’s probably not a good source. The burden then falls on you to come up with evidence for why it is good. You could post this around and maybe someone will take the time to explain why it is not, but really, is that how you want to live? Just waiting for anonymous strangers to explain things to you? Learn the skills. Use them. Be informed. Feel like the world is not a mysterious place.
The pie chart data in the links, seem to have “Jews” as a “believers” category. However it has been estimated that 1/2 of Jews are atheists or at least doubt the existence of God.
the devil is in the details
What percentage of Nobel Prize winners are physicists? There are many scientific fields which are not affected by the scientist’s religion.
However, subjects like physics and biology are directly contradicted by scripture and I am willing to bet that in those specific disciplines the percentages are reversed.
Scientists and Belief
A survey of scientists who are members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press in May and June 2009, finds that members of this group are, on the whole, much less religious than the general public.1 Indeed, the survey shows that scientists are roughly half as likely as the general public to believe in God or a higher power. According to the poll, just over half of scientists (51%) believe in some form of deity or higher power; specifically, 33% of scientists say they believe in God, while 18% believe in a universal spirit or higher power. By contrast, 95% of Americans believe in some form of deity or higher power, according to a survey of the general public conducted by the Pew Research Center in July 2006. Specifically, more than eight-in-ten Americans (83%) say they believe in God and 12% believe in a universal spirit or higher power. Finally, the poll of scientists finds that four-in-ten scientists (41%) say they do not believe in God or a higher power, while the poll of the public finds that only 4% of Americans share this view.
So, don’t let skewed statistics fool you into believing that scientists who deal with origins believe in Scripture which contradicts mainstream science.
A counter argument can be made that The Pontifical Academy of Sciences in the Vatican and 2 popes have declared evolution to be fact, effectively destroying any scientific basis for scriptural acounts of origins. Scripture is not a scientific doument. No one has seen fit to nominate it for a Nobel Prize. yet
The pie chart data in the links, seem to have “Jews” as a “believers” category. However it has been estimated that 1/2 of Jews are atheists or at least doubt the existence of God.That is because the word "Jew" has 2 definitions and people often don't seem to realize the very big difference between the two meanings. "Jewish" describes both the ethnicity and the religion. You can be one, both or neither. The chart is talking about those of Jewish faith where you are imagining those of Jewish ethnicity, I think.
from Wikipedia, “jewish atheism” > “Liberal Jewish theology makes few metaphysical claims, and is thus compatible with atheism on an ontological level.”
So there are religious Jews who believe all of the supernatural nonsense, and there are some who follow some of the rituals of the religion who are atheists. There are Jews who are Jews simply because their mother was Jewish. Their are Jews who, above all of this, simply claim Jewishness as their cultural tribal identity.
I don’t know which group of Jews were referred to in the pie charts, but I suspect that it included a large base of agnostic/atheistic Jews. Possibly as many as half.
