No, Really? Scientists Find Anti-Christian Prejudice in the Science World
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer
January 31, 2020, 12:44 PM
No, Really? Scientists Find Anti-Christian Prejudice in the Science World | Evolution News
I suppose there's some value in demonstrating the obvious.
Writing in the journal PLOS ONE, four academics from Arizona State University ask, "Are scientists biased against Christians?" I could have told them in a word:
Yes! Clearly, there is significant, overt prejudice against Christians in the science world.
Aggressive atheist biologists like Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, and P.Z. Myers may not be typical of their profession in how much time they have spent verbally attacking religious believers, Christians in particular, but neither do they seem to have experienced much criticism for it from colleagues.
Three Studies
To be specific, the bias is not directed, for the most part, at mainline Protestants or Catholics, but
rather at Evangelicals. And that is just what M. Elizabeth Barnes, who studies Biology and Society, and her colleagues from the Biology Education Research Lab at ASU confirmed. They conducted three separate studies: ....
...
What's in a Word
The statement that "scientists call" this group "fundamentalist and/or evangelical" makes it sounds as if that is an objective, scientific label. After all, scientists are our culture's preeminent objective truth tellers, are they not? Not quite. If you Google the phrase "fundamentalist Christian" to see how it's used in the media, you will not find many Christians affixing it to themselves. The word has a history, but "fundamentalist" today
functions mostly as a term of mockery or reproach....
...In other words, they found that "most frequently," scientists, unlike "scholars of religion,"
freely and contemptuously use a term intended to denigrate a large swath of Christians, dismissing them as "rigid and unchanging in the light of new information," "discourag[ing] diversity of viewpoints," and "intrud[ing] on the domain of science." If that is not
gross prejudice, what is?
Add It Up
I mentioned that there is value in confirming the obvious. But how much value?
The four authors note at the end, "This project was supported by the National Science Foundation," followed by three grant numbers. The grants, which I assume went to other things besides the studies reported here, are in the amounts of $9,800,382, $292,767, and $423,003.
That's right, a total of more than $10.5 million dollars from the Federal Government. Apparently, documenting what everybody already knows pays pretty well. I think I'm in the wrong business!