Transcript for Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Section on Religiosity and the Educated American from The Amazing Meeting 6 (Feb 2013)4 min read

Introduction

Neil deGrasse Tyson gave a presentation titled Brain Droppings of a Skeptic at That Amazing Meeting 6 (Feb 2013) which had a section on Religiosity and Educated Americans that I have heard every so often. I created this post so that I could have maintain a transcript of this content for posterity and so I can reference it towards the end of my post Religion, and Overview.

This post is a clean verbatim transcript of that section of his presentation [1:07:32 – 1:12:22], pulling out most a lot of “okay”s and adding in some headers, paragraphs, and bolding.

I. Religiosity and Educated American

I want to make an important point. This is not all people in the world. This is Americans, religious people. It depends on what study you get, it asked… do you pray to a personal God. These numbers vary but they’re high and they’re up around 90%. It might be 85. That’s actually not important. That difference is not important for the point I’m about to make. It’s high in the West, in America, 90%.

What percent of religious… what percentage of educated people are religious? The number drops. I’m talking about graduate degrees here. Among all people with Masters and PhDs the religiosity drops somewhere around 60%, might be 65. The point is it drops with education level. Now, let’s bring in scientists. How about… what percentage of scientists in America are religious? Average over all the branches it’s about 40%, maybe 35%. In there there’s a range of course. Biologists, physicists, astrophysicist are lower. The sort of engineers and mathematicians are higher. So, it averages out to about 40%

So, this looks like, this looks like scientists are 40% down from 90% from the general public. But that’s the wrong. No, it’s 40% down from 60% because all scientists have graduate degrees. So, the graduate degree in any subject gets you halfway there. The science is the increment from the educated degrees, I mean from the all educated people, that takes it down to 40%.

Now you go to the elite scientists, this is a well-known number, 7% are religious claiming a personal God to whom they pray and intervene in their lives.

II. Asymptote of Religiosity?

I submit to you that with the current atheist fervor that has taken on over the past several years… I would say launched the modern atheistic hold launched by the Dawkins book and the Hitchens book, and the Sam Harris book and the like. And I was just in borders recently, couldn’t believe it. I was… I didn’t, I’m sorry I didn’t have a camera… Borders Books, there it was… a section called atheism. It was like I’ve never seen that before. [vigorous audience clapping] It’s like okay there it was… they had enough critical mass of books to make a section.

So, here’s my problem. Here’s my concern. When you’re educated and you understand how physics works and you’re mathematically literate and you understand data and you understand experiment; and you go up to someone who doesn’t have that training and they are religious and you ask them “Why are you religious and believing in invisible things that influence your life? What’s wrong with you?”. That’s unfair. It’s not only unfair, it’s disrespectful for the following reason. Until that number is zero [pointing to the slide showing 7%], you’ve got nothing to say to the general public. These are scientists among us in the National Academy of Sciences who are religious and pray to a personal God and I know some of them.

And you’re fighting the public for their religious beliefs. Figure that one out first because maybe there’s an asymptote. Maybe you can’t change everybody. Maybe that’s telling us something. Maybe there’s something in the brain wiring that positively prevents some people from ever being an atheist. And if that’s the case, in a way, they can’t help it. And you’ll never know it because you’re not one of them.

So, I ask you first for compassion with the public. But you should target your exercise and your experiments on understanding that number, because that’s not zero. Yes, it’s low, but it’s not 1%, it’s not one-half of a percent or a tenth of a percent. It is 7%, 1 out of 14. If This Were the National Academy of Sciences with 900 you’d have a 100 people in here…. Did I do that right? [audience laughing] 7%, 65 carry the two. [audience: 65] 65, sorry, 7 time 9. Yeah, so six, yeah. You have 65 people in here among elite scientists praying to their personal God.