(October 16, 2018 at 1:04 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote:Quote:Highly educated Americans also are less inclined than others to say they believe in God with absolute certainty and to pray on a daily basis. And, when asked about their religious identity, college graduates are more likely than others to describe themselves as atheists or agnostics (11% of college grads vs. 4% of U.S. adults with a high school education or less).
Pew Research Center || In America, Does More Education Equal Less Religion?
Thank you, Jörmungandr. These look interesting. I'm looking forward to looking them up later and especially looking at the methodology.
I once saw a really badly designed study in which the researchers pre-selected a series of out-of-context sentences as meaningful or not. Then they had the test subjects rate the sentences, and declared that those who agreed with the researchers were good thinkers and those who disagreed were bad thinkers. It was kind of shocking.
At any rate, people are complicated, and we are good at fooling ourselves. I think that when people leave home and get into a social situation (some colleges) where "critical thinker" becomes an image that gains social respect, and it's assumed that atheism will be the result of critical thinking, any number of people may become atheists for social reasons. And such motives would be very hard to discover in a survey, because of course respondents would self-describe as believing what they do because of critical thinking.
People are funny. Simplistic explanations call for skepticism. In my opinion.
