Quote:
Originally Posted by d2_e4
Whoa there, tiger. I assume you're talking about me. What is this scientific literature I've challenged? The survey?
Yup.
I was arguing against your claim from OP that religious people were incapable of rational thought. I put forward this statement:
Quote:
Originally Posted by me
There are many religious scholars in secular fields, including the sciences. Really, your only way out of this is to draw a weird line about "highly intelligent people" and make the metric something where you explicitly need to include language to exclude the people you want to, but then you would just be guilty of ignoring data.
The context at this point was that it is historically accurate to say that most of the scholarship in the past came from religious people creating and preserving it.
Anyway, I cited a specific article regarding the contemporary view:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amarna..._b_749630.html
And I specifically cited the following statement within it:
Quote:
Originally Posted by article
In a recent article published in Sociology of Religion, sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons use data from a new, nationally representative survey of American college and university professors to test the long-running assumption that higher education leads to irreligiousness. Based on their research, they argue that “while atheism and agnosticism are much more common among professors than within the U.S. population as a whole, religious skepticism represents a minority position, even among professors teaching at elite research universities.”
And here was your response:
Quote:
Originally Posted by d2_e4
Just read this article. It's from publication that I have no issue with, and I have to say I am shocked at the results. So much so, that I think either the survey was biased, or the respondents were lying.
You then proceeded to make a couple nebulous criticisms ("questions") and cast doubt that "meaningful conclusions can be drawn from the study."
The first one challenged the sampling method. The second one is that you questioned whether the surveys were anonymous, as non-anonymous surveys have social pressure associated with them.
In both cases, you could have found your answer by trying to look up the paper yourself and reading their report of the sampling methods (which is a standard thing to do in the academic literature). The idea that the academics would hand-pick who to deliver the surveys to, or somehow fail at some of the most basic types of things associated with academic surveys really just shows a lack of depth of your understanding of how any of this academic stuff works.
It's literally a survey. They're looking at the numbers are reporting them. It's not some sort of deep causal analysis. It's just reporting what the survey found.
You literally dismissed academic work out of hand because it was so different from what you believe.