Religion Leads to Education

One thing that the parts of the study you list doesn't mention is the odds of going into science given religiosity... The lack of affect of science may have something to do with selection bias...

I know of a chemistry professor who chose that field over biology, in part, because he wanted to avoid some of the "tough questions" that working toward a degree in biology might impose on his and his family's strong religious beliefs.
He's a great guy, so I withhold judgment :)

Does 'college' here include Bible college?

I think the most interesting part of the Inside Higher Ed write-up is the quote of the authors at the end that a post-modernist world view is more antagonistic to religiosity then a scientific world view. Perhaps I missed something, but I thought post-modernism was based on science, at least in part.

Someone in the SCIBlogs universe needs to pay the $5 and get the pdf. This is really intriguing, especially in ligt of the debates going on elsewhere on relgion and science.

Soc.Sci and Humanities students are exposed to a lot of other belief systems in their education, which erodes the concept that the system(s) they grew up in are natural or obvious or inevitable. Anthropologists and sociologists in particular see a lot of different shades of spirituality. So that part makes sense to me.

I can see the business students getting more religious, given the importance of socialising and inter-personal relationships to succeeding in management. Religious services have historically been important venues for extra-familial socialising.

The education and biology trends puzzle me, though.

-- Steve

I suspect the science trend is like #1 said, people going into a science degree tend to be self selected as those who already give religion less importance. Not literalists, in other words. They may be atheists or 'liberal' religious who are either good at compartmentalizing or sanction off their god into untestable realms.

That atheistic high school students tend to not go for higher education doesn't surprise me one bit. In my (anecdotal) experience, people who are atheists in high school tend to be atheists for rebellious reasons, not intellectual reasons. The same group wouldn't go to college for the same reason.

I think the article's comment on postmodernism may be pretty insightful. Science and traditional religious belief may disagree in some cases as to the form of objective reality, but at least they agree that some objective reality exists. So despite the sometimes bitter arguments over details, perhaps this more fundamental shared foundation makes them more compatible than religion and majors with a postmodern viewpoint.

Religion is not about getting facts right, it is more about giving a meaning to a merciless world. Religion is an answer to anxiety and not due failure of the educational system. If you want more atheists kill the Wall Street God, literaly.

"The odds of going to college increase for high school students who attend religious services more frequently "

I'd like to see that statistic controlled for social marginalization.

A model of inspired education, Sunrise School strives to develop young adults who are confident, responsible and creative builders of their futures. Sunrise School will provide a challenging and inclusive education with an emphasis on the whole child and on learning in a cooperative, community-centered environment.

It is interesting to read this article, the way it is written. Whether it is religion or science they are all for the benefit of the society, for improving morale and ethical nature of the pupil. As you are well aware that arts is intertwined with history and geography of the origin. And it is also noted that most of the arts are developed around churches, temples and etc. Most of the cases it is for the entertainment or to give a glimpse of what happened in the form of poetry or arts or prose.
Where as science is for the material comforts one has got as benefit, over the inquisitive nature of how life might have evolved.
Here it may be noted that biblical or qouronical or mythological philosophy starts with the term god as supreme who has started the life on this earth. Where as science believes in evolution theory.
Just take them the way they are spiritual studies gives rise to morale and ethical society, which always good for the society, people live in harmony, peace and serenity. Science for the better life on this earth and not for who is great or who is to boss.

The idea of religion or God, if you will, is simply a belief in a higher, absolute order which supossedly transcends the the classical one we see and feel around us. Science itself basically seeks a higher order (GOD). Think about it!! As an aside; If I had but one choice of rules or laws to use in investigating the universe around me, micro and macro, I would choose thermodynamics and Newton's laws of motion. This set will still be essential thousands of years from now in deciding if any new theory can pass muster.

I wouldn't be surprised if it's not the religion itself, but the church community that encourages people to go to higher education. If you grow up around a lot of people that you feel a need to impress, you are going to try harder to impress them.

I would also like to put out there that Judaism actively encourages its members to be as educated as possible. The disproportionate number of Jewish doctors and lawyers is not a coincidence.

I think the emphasis on fellow church-goers "nagging" people into college misses the point. It's that religion can be a disciplining force in general. Religious people internalize certain codes and expectations and can adhere to them with an unwavering ardor (sometimes, infamously when it is simply irrational still to cling so hard.) So the religious person *nags* him or herself to adhere to certain values and in religious institutions, religious people get those values pummeled into their heads on a weekly basis so that their religious impulse to commit gets linked with those values.

I don't buy the whole "post-modernist" line. Outside of literature departments I don't see what is especially postmodern about the rest of the humanities and the social sciences or why the specifically post-modernist-deconstructionist elements of the humanities and social science would be any more or less likely to draw people a way from religion than the modernist-Enlightenment elements would.

In my experience, there are many religious people who glom onto the irrationalism of post-modernism as a means to justifying their own irrationalism ("the modern project of indubitable truth is just another form of faith! the rationalists are therefore no more rational than explicitly faith-based thinkers! the aporias in knowledge make us rediscover the wisdom of negative theology! post-modernism has shown that all thinking occurs in communal narrative contexts, so there is nothing wrong with accepting the barriers of our particular religion's narrative and worldview!").

On the other hand of course, post-modern criticisms of meta-narratives and absolutes also at the same time threaten those Christians who want to claim that their truths are part of a unique and absolutely truthful revelation of God through the course of history. And post-modern deconstructive approaches to texts would totally undermine inerrantist and literalist interpretations of the Bible---unless one were to twist deconstruction's search for that which the text marginalizes and what it does not realize it's saying into some version of revelation in which through deconstruction we can find hidden things God planted there (like some traditional schools of rabbinic thought apparently have thought is the case, turning them into elaborate code-breakers.)

On the other hand, much of the religious rhetoric of "absolute truth" and religious attacks on atheists' supposed "lack of foundations" for truth or morality betray a modernist obsession with foundations for beliefs. Inerrantists and literalists cling to such far-fetched theses because of a sort of Cartesian recognition that if the texts are imperfect at any point (even in tiny details), they could be undetectably reliable on any point (even in major matters). And they recognize that it is logically inconsistent to recognize anything that is imperfect to be the handiwork of (or evidence indicating) a perfect being. So, these sorts of concerns for epistemic foundation for absolute truth and consistency between their doctrine of a perfect God and the notion that he revealed himself is what leads them to their more ridiculous attempts to cling to inerrancy theories and fundamentalism in the teeth of counter-considerations of all sorts.

And, of course, modernism is also a great historic enemy of religion that moves people away from it by teaching them Enlightenment values such as the need to provide publicly accessible reasons for one's views, to employ self-critical and culturally-critical standards when evaluating evidence, to question tradition, to challenge dogmatic claims to authority, to interrogate all texts with standards of scholarship and not to exempt sacred texts, etc., etc.

So, in sum, the humanities and social sciences are not monolithically post-modern by any stretch. I am not even convinced that true post-moderns are even close to a majority or that many who think they are "post-modern" would not betray plenty of modern methodologies and assumptions in practice. Secondly, there are religious modernisms and religious post-modernisms and there are post-modern and modern reasons for rejecting religion.