Does physics make you less religious?

I'm sure that this has never crossed your pure and innocent minds, but as a godless physicist, I fit into a sort of godless physicist stereotype.  But is there any truth to the stereotype?  Does studying physics tend to make you less religious?

Nope!  At least, not undergraduate physics.  According to this longitudinal study, studying biological or physical sciences has no overall effect on the religiosity of students.  Humanities and social sciences have a negative effect.  Education and business have a positive effect.  Or that's what the summary says.

I looked at the paper too, and as you'd expect there are a few more wrinkles.  It seems that studying physical sciences does have a slight negative effect on the self-assessed importance of religion, but no significant effect on religious attendance, whether the church should have less influence, or other religious measures.  For some reason engineering causes people to think the church should have less influence, and that less should be left up to God, but there was no significant effect on other measures.

This is in addition to a larger background trend where average religious attendance declines 12% in the 5-6 years after high school.  It also ignores the selection effect where the kind of people who enter into certain majors are more or less likely to be religious in the first place.

The study does not report raw religiosity scores in different majors (presumably it was reported elsewhere), but it does discuss how religiosity affects what majors students switch into.  Higher religiosity scores predict a higher probability of switching into education, humanities, biology, and a lower probability of switching into social sciences.  There appears to be no significant affect on switching to physical sciences.  Higher religiosity also increases the chance that people will go to college.

So on average, science doesn't make people less religious, and we have the evidence to show this.  If it seemed otherwise, that was an illusion caused by your limited and biased sampling of reality.

Liberationism in atheism?

On my other blog, I wrote about the liberationist/assimilationist distinction in LGBT politics.  Basically, we have the choice of emphasizing that LGBT people are the same (assimilationism), and thus deserve equal rights, or emphasizing that LGBT people have the right to be different (liberationism).  For those of us who don't live in the land of politicking and soundbites, it's obvious that there's no contradiction between the two messages.  But when it comes down to the overall message of the movement, and funding priorities, there's a lot of conflict.  For instance, a lot of people question the prioritizing of same-sex marriage, when it's basically only important to LGB people who want monogamous relationships which conform to current marriage norms.

So I was thinking about whether this distinction is useful in other movements as well... say the atheist movement.  Are there atheist liberationists and atheist assimilationists?

I enjoy drawing parallels between different social movements that I participate in, but in this case my answer is no.

Emphasizing similarities and emphasizing differences are two strategies for achieving social acceptance and equal rights.  But my sense is that this isn't really all that vocal atheists fight for?  Sure, it's partly about fighting for social acceptance, but it's also about criticizing religion, fighting for the acceptability of criticizing religion (which should be no more taboo than criticizing political beliefs), and fighting against policies and social values that are boosted by religious beliefs.  Instead of arguing over different possible strategies to gain social acceptance, atheists instead tend to argue the priorities of their different goals.

 I suppose that this is the blogging equivalent of publishing negative results even when they're less interesting.  But maybe there's more to say about this?

The primary distinction drawn in atheist circles is the militant/accomodationist distinction (I use pejorative terms for each side because there is a lack of neutral terms).  Might this be mapped to liberationism and assimilationism somehow?  Assimilationists argue that accepting LGB people provides a large benefit for a rather minimal change to the status quo, while liberationists argue that a large change to the status quo is called for.  You could say that "militant" atheists want to change the status quo more drastically than "accomodationist" atheists.

This could mean nothing, but my sympathy for the "militants" grew when I learned more about queer politics.  I saw people like PZ Myers and Greta Christina applying their "pull no punches" attitude equally to religion and to queer and feminist politics.  By contrast, Friendly Atheist has been more equivocal about feminism and assimilationist in its queer coverage.  My views assimilationism/liberationism are mostly moderate, but the "moderate" views of queer people tend to be much more liberationist than the "moderate" views of straight people.

Eh, I don't know.  The connection seems weak.  Any thoughts?