Hello Patrick, thanks for responding.
You said:
“Considering that there are only 4% atheist in the general population, 10% atheists in scientific fields is statistically significant.”
Remember the issue in contention, my friend: you asserted that religion likes the uneducated.
If this was true, you would expect to find very, very few Christians innovating scientifically. You would expect to find them at the dregs of intellectual society, not being the creative, dynamic, inventive thinkers that comprise Nobel laureates.
Or to say it more directly: a majority of the brightest and most innovative thinkers on the planet are Christians.
Recall that the Nobel Society is not pulling only from America. This is not a reflection of the American population, but the global population.
For a country like the United Kingdom, which is only about 40% Christian, the number of atheists is far LESS representative of their society as a whole.
You said:
“Currently, it appears that 60 to 80% of scientists (Nobel laureate or not) in the hard sciences, are either atheist or non-denominational. Only about 30% are Christians.”
I’m not sure where you’re getting this data, but it doesn’t seem to match my research. This 2009 survey indicates a majority of scientists are theists: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2009/11/05/scientists-and-belief/
You said:
“In the United States, you have about 40% of the entire population who thinks the earth is about 10,000 years old or less. Among those hard-core Christian fundamentalists, almost none of them are physicists, biologists, geologists, or any of the other hard sciences. Because they base their entire worldview on biblical literalism, they cannot be geologists, for example. Or any other science which shows the earth to be billions of years old and life to have evolved.”
My friend, you don’t provide sources for any of your claims, which makes them very hard to take seriously.
Further, I personally know several geologists who believe the earth is young. There is a huge group of scientists who are what you would call, “Christian fundamentalists.”
You might think that their beliefs clash with their science, but they don’t.
You said:
“So when it comes to people in the top of their field, in the hard sciences, they are not Christian fundamentalists. They can be moderate Christians, or atheists, or agnostic, etc.”
Again, you have no sources or statistics. You just assert this into the void as though it’s supposed to mean something.
But there are plenty of Christians at the top of their scientific fields who do believe the Bible literally.
You can look at the statistics yourself: https://www.infogalactic.com/info/List_of_Christian_Nobel_laureates
A few highlights:
Overall, Christians have won a total of 78.3% of all the Nobel Prizes in Peace, 72.5% in Chemistry, 65.3% in Physics, 62% in Medicine, 54% in Economics and 49.5% of all Literature awards.
Although Christians make up over 33.2% of the worlds population,[8][9][10][11] they have won a total of 65.4% of all Nobel prizes between 1901 and 2000.[6]
