You seemed to suggest at one point, puzzlingly, that they must have fired him because he was Christian. Please explain the logic of this, since the majority of US scientists are actually Christian.
LindaLou, your statement is just preposterous and flies in the face of all logic and reality. Either you are seriously mistaken or perhaps you're trying to make your argument look more credible by trying to downplay the obvious discrimination against Gonzalez.
This should help clear up any confusion you might have on the subject of Christianity among U.S. scientists. This article was published in the international weekly journal of science,
Nature.
Leading scientists still reject God Our latest survey finds that, among the top natural scientists, disbelief is greater than ever — almost total. Research on this topic began with the eminent US psychologist James H. Leuba and his landmark survey of 1914. He found that 58% of 1,000 randomly selected US scientists expressed disbelief or doubt in the existence of God, and that this figure rose to near 70% among the 400 "greater" scientists within his sample [1]. Leuba repeated his survey in somewhat different form 20 years later, and found that these percentages had increased to 67 and 85, respectively.
In 1996, we repeated Leuba's 1914 survey and reported our results in Nature [3]. We found little change from 1914 for American scientists generally, with 60.7% expressing disbelief or doubt. This year, we closely imitated the second phase of Leuba's 1914 survey to gauge belief among "greater" scientists, and find the rate of belief lower than ever — a mere 7% of respondents.
This quote below from the same article is quite telling of the mindset of U.S. scientists (or scientists in any country for that matter). I would submit to you, LindaLou, that this mind-set is a much more accurate description of the mentality of the
majority of scientists:
Leuba attributed the higher level of disbelief and doubt among "greater" scientists to their "[color:"red"]superior knowledge, understanding, and experience [/color]" [3]. Similarly, Oxford University scientist Peter Atkins commented on our 1996 survey, " [color:"red"]You clearly can be a scientist and have religious beliefs. But I don't think you can be a real scientist in the deepest sense of the word because they are such alien categories of knowledge [/color]."
But of course, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) knows that encouraging the teaching of evolution in taxpayer-funded
public schools is
an ongoing source of friction between the scientific community and some conservative Christians in the United States. (I just love the oh-so-veiled contempt for Christians in this sentence...)
So, they make sure their
president reminds the readers of Nature that...
"There are many very outstanding members of this academy who are very religious people, people who believe in evolution, many of them biologists."
Right. Even the researchers conducting the study didn't buy that one. Their response?
Our survey suggests otherwise.
I've seen you say several times in discussions on this forum that
many scientists are Christians. Well, it seems that the
majority of scientists don't agree with you.
Then again, maybe these same scientists who profess not to believe in God are really Christian at heart and they just don't want to openly admit it for fear of losing their jobs, their tenure, or their respect among "greater scientists".
But then that would mean that discrimination against religion really does exist in the scientific community. Unless you want to go so far as to suggest that any scientist who is a Christian is just a poor scientist and not capable of performing his/her job satisfactorily.
