Are You There God? It’s Us, Scientists (Infographic)
Today's entry was written by the BioLogos Editorial Team. You can read more about what BioLogos believes here.
Note: The BioLogos Forum is pleased to present this infographic about religious belief among scientists. The graphic, titled "Are You There God? It's Us, Scientists," uses data from the Pew Research Center, Rice University, and some quotations from scientists assembled in a recent Huffington Post article. For details on the source material go here. We encourage you to share the graphic with anyone and everyone, but please be sure to link back to this post as its source!
(Click image for full resolution)
A Note from President Darrel Falk:
In his BioLogos post, "Come and See", Mark Noll writes the following:
Classical Christian orthodoxy as expressed in the creeds that summarize the Scriptures begins at the beginning: nature owes its existence to and is sustained by Jesus Christ. From this starting point several important ramifications follow naturally.
One is the implication that the best way of finding out about nature is to look at nature. This implication comes directly from the Christological principle of contingency (see above, 49-55). As described in the Gospels, individuals who wanted to learn the truth about Jesus had to “come and see.” Likewise, to find out what might be true in nature, it is necessary to “come and see.”
The process of “coming and seeing” does not lead to infallible truth about the physical world since there is no special inspiration from the Holy Spirit for the Book of Nature as there is for the Book of Scripture. But “coming and seeing” is still the method that belief in Christ as Savior privileges for learning about all other objects, including nature. This privileging means that scientific results coming from thoughtful, organized, and carefully checked investigations of natural phenomena must, for Christ-centered reasons, be taken seriously.
If this is true, then it behooves us to ask the question: why is there such an under-representation of Christians in the academy following the Christological mandate to “come and see?” In the study reported in the accompanying infographic, evangelical Christians are represented in the sciences at one seventh of the frequency of their representation in American society as a whole. In the nation’s most elite institutions, the situation is even more extreme. Elaine Ecklund’s recent study shows that evangelical Christians are fourteen fold under-represented in the sciences in the nation’s most elite universities.
Either Noll has the mandate wrong, or we conservative Christians are not doing a very good job of following it.
In an age that will be increasingly dominated by new biological technology, the much needed well-informed Christian scientific voice is all too silent. BioLogos exists to show that the two far-too-separate voices (Christianity and science) can speak as one—in harmony.