David Masci writes about a recent Pew poll, in which scientists registered their views of god:
According to a survey of members of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science, conducted by the Pew Research Center in May and June this year, a majority of scientists (51%) say they believe in God or a higher power, while 41% say they do not.
Furthermore, scientists today are no less likely to believe in God than they were almost 100 years ago, when the scientific community was first polled on this issue. In 1914, 11 years before the Scopes “monkey” trial and four decades before the discovery of the structure of DNA, psychologist James Leuba asked 1,000 U.S. scientists about their views on God. He found the scientific community evenly divided, with 42% saying that they believed in a personal God and the same number saying they did not. Scientists have unearthed many important fossils since then, but they are, if anything, more likely to believe in God today.
[…]If a substantial portion of the scientific community is made up of believers, why do so many people think evolution and religion are incompatible? It may be because some of our most famous and prolific scientists, such as American evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould and British physicist Stephen Hawking, were or are atheists and agnostics.
Read the full article here.
The conclusion of the Pew poll is full of poor reasoning: http://www.examiner.com/x-11447-LA-Science-and-Tech-News-Examiner~y2009m12d10-Are-todays-scientists-more-religious-LA-Times-allows-Pew-researcher-to-misstate-poll-results.
Interestingly, in the nation’s most elite and prestigious scientific body, the National Academy of Sciences, atheism is almost total:
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/news/file002.html.