Choice in Dying

I haven’t said much about Elaine Ecklund, the Templeton funded “researcher” who tries to show in a paper and a book and in interviews and online snippets and tidbits that science and religion are not so opposed to one another amongst scientists at elite US universities as the public has been led to suppose. Indeed, in her latest sally into the battle she brings up her reserve, supposing to deal atheists who oppose the accommodation of science and religion a knock-out blow. The schwerpunkt of the attack is directed towards atheists with children who go to church and sit alongside religious believers. One thing that should be noticed about Ecklund’s strategy is that, while she keeps bringing her reserves into the fight, the original data set (more about that in a moment) that she is working with consists in 275 interviews with “elite scientists” taken in 2007. That’s a full four years ago, and she’s still bringing “new” insights to bear even now, four years later, based on the original dataset! Templeton certainly got its money’s worth out of Elaine Ecklund, but did Ecklund contribute anything genuine to the issue of the relationship between science and religion? This we have cause to doubt.

As the blogger Sigmund says, in a post guested by Jerry Coyne over at the website “Why Evolution is True“:

 … Ecklund has continued to hammer on at her dataset, determined to prove that it is not quite the mortal blow to science-religion compatibility that her own figures suggest. One cannot, however, fault her for sheer determination, or indeed imagination, in how she tackled this dilemma.  After deciding that belief in God is not a critical point, nor indeed is adherence to traditional religious practice, Ecklund recently settled on the idea that it is the question of “spirituality” that proves the compatibility of science and religion.

As Sigmund points out, very clearly, even Ecklund’s dataset does not support her conclusions, and if you factor in the fact that Ecklund chooses to talk about spirituality rather than about religion as such, it is unclear just what conclusions can be said to be supported by the evidence she provides.

To take one example, consider the following understanding of ‘spirituality’ that Jason Rosenhouse found lying so innocently in Ecklund’s data. Here a political scientist explains his understanding of spirituality:

I spend a lot of time in my course preparations.  I could spend a lot less time and invest more time in my own writing and publications.  But I feel an obligation to be responsive to students who are struggling … My part of making the world better is helping those individuals succeed.  And so I’m not able to cut myself off from my interactions with those students on a one-to-one basis.  I feel a certain kind of spiritual obligation to help in the best way that I can, which in that sense is teaching them, trying to figure out how to reach them so that they understand.  [I do this] in ways that I know some of my other colleagues don’t.

As Rosenhouse points out:

It’s funny how people use language.  This person, a political scientist, describes his desire to help his struggling students as the manifestation of a spiritual impulse.  Personally, I call it doing my job.

As would any sane person, but Ecklund thinks that it bespeaks the person’s spirituality, and therefore closes the supposed gap between science and religion. That really is grasping at straws.

But, as Rosenhouse points out in a second post, after he had the chance to read Ecklund’s book, it gets worse than this. From the following statistics:

34% chose “I don’t believe in God,” while 30% chose, “I do not know if there is a God, and there is no way to find out.” … An additional 8% opted for, “I believe in a higher power, but it is not God.” …   9% of scientists (compared to 63% of the public), who chose, “I have no doubts about God’s existence.” … An additional 14% of scientists chose, “I have some doubts, but I believe in God.” … the final option was “I believe in God sometimes.”  That was chosen by 5% of scientists …

Ecklund comes to this conclusion:

As we journey from the personal to the public religious lives of scientists, we will meet the nearly 50 percent of elite scientists like Margaret who are religious in a traditional sense…. (p. 6)

As Sigmund says, “… a scientist who reads this series of papers can only despair at what passes for peer review in the field of sociology.”

But now she is on a completely new kick. We are told, in an article at physorg.com, that “Some atheist scientists with children embrace religious traditions”:

The researchers found that 17 percent of atheists with children attended a religious service more than once in the past year.

Now, if she’s still using the original dataset — and the article in question gives us no reason to suppose that Ecklund has done any new research — this information (if information it is, which we may doubt) is already four, going on five years old.  And, while the title of the article may not be down to Ecklund herself, it is consistent with other misleading claims that she makes. Embracing a religious tradition is more than just going to church or attending a religious service. Embracing a religious tradition includes accepting, adopting, agreeing with, sharing, and no doubt other ways of assimilating to a religious tradition.

But this is not what Ecklund herself says. She gives several reasons for atheist scientists attending more than one religious service — notice how this claim itself is misleading — amongst them being spousal influence, the urge to expose their children to “all sources of knowledge (including religion)” (which covers a multitude of sins), and desire for community. In many places social community is monopolised by religious entities. But not one of these reasons shows a willingness to embrace religious traditions. Indeed, as Rosenhouse points out (in the post written after having read the book), scientists who do consider themselves religious tend to find themselves at the liberal end of the scale. In Ecklund’s own words:

…along a continuum of religion from liberal to conservative, a seven-point scale on which 1 represents extremely liberal religious beliefs and 7 represents extremely conservative, most of the scientists I interviewed saw themselves as measuring around 2.  This means that when they are religious, scientists tend to see themselves as religious liberals.

And religious liberalism, notoriously, is definitely not a matter of embracing a religious tradition, but choosing from amongst religious options those that are least traditional and more a matter of personal choice.

In the video attached to the physorg.com article, Ecklund explains her “findings”:

According to YouTube this was uploaded by Rice University four days ago, and Ecklund is still talking about a piece of research which she “recently” did. But notice also the background, showing someone meekly kneeling with hands pressed together in prayer. While I have not read the book, it seems to me that using a church as a setting for this clip, as well as showing figures at prayer in the background, is deliberately misleading, especially in light of the kinds of reasons that scientists give for attending religious services “more than once” in a year. Ecklund, as I suggest in the title of this post, is carrying on a very deliberate campaign which, given the paucity of evidence, is structured in such a way as to be in many ways like a military operation, keeping forces in reserve, never letting the “enemy” know what you are going to do next, camouflaging every movement that you make, etc. This strikes me to be deeply dishonest and misleading in a context where findings are supposed to be available to all, so that reasonable assessments can be made by others as to the reliability of the claims that are made on the basis of them. Ecklund is acting in every way like a religious believer and not like a scientist, and is living proof, if that were needed, that science and religion do not mix, and are strictly incompatible.