Do Philosophy Professors Believe in God?

Did you even read the OP above? I went out of my way not to “beat my chest” or claim to have scored a “big victory”. I indicated that the survey results only support one of my points and that a much fuller documentation would need to be provided to document the others. The point of the OP is to begin documenting what Art Hunt said was completely lacking in documentation. I have made that beginning. Whether Art will concede the point is up to him.

A point I never saw him dispute. If you can show me where he did I will gladly retract my comment.

I have to agree, and I can’t be the only one to have noticed that this phenomenon has a strange habit of rearing it’s ugly head in almost every thread where Eddie participates.

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Can you show where he actually did that? I’d just like to know who is telling the truth here.

Yes, both Art and Herman said it, directly or indirectly. Or, if you want to get sticky, they said or implied that their outsider’s knowledge was more accurate than my insider’s knowledge on the points in question. Art said that helping his kids look for universities and programs and occasionally interacting with Arts colleagues and so on gave him sufficient knowledge of Arts programs at universities that he could safely contradict a number of my claims about the religious beliefs and attitudes of Arts professors. Herman, with similar anemic levels of involvement with the actual details of Arts curriculum, Arts classroom teaching, took a similar line. As if Art’s looking through university calendars with his kids could reveal the percentage of faculty members in the various departments that agreed with conventional religion! (That information is not contained in calendars.) As if Herman’s occasional participation on college committees with Arts colleagues would give him insight about the way jobs in religious studies are constructed and advertised, or about the sort of detailed political and ideological struggles within such departments when new hirings are being done!

If I contradicted a number of your claims about what goes on in Math departments, based on the fact that I helped my kids look for Math programs, or had chatted with Mathematicians now and then when sitting on university committees with them, or the like, you would rightly ignore my claim to knowledge about Math departments. You would rightly say that before I could affirm or deny your claims about the leanings and attitudes of Math department professors, I would need much longer and much more up close and personal involvement in the daily life of Math departments. There is simply no reason why I should take the bluff and bluster of Herman and Art seriously. Why so many of the biologists who post here have to try to give the impression that they can speak authoritatively not just on biology but on just about anything – from global warming to the attitudes of Arts professors – is beyond me.

Fair enough. There are some data points that support @Eddie’s assertion.

@Eddie, are you going to answer @Rumraket’s question? Or is my answer accurate?

@Eddie, you have no idea - zero - of my experience. Best you drop these baseless assertions.

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Thank you. I guess miracles do happen. :smile:

I will come to your question in another post.

Oh, yes, and of course I’m the only one responsible for it. The reflexive attacks of Roy, Tim Horton, Faizal Ali, etc., on virtually anything I post make no contribution to the overheating. Right.

And the fact that my interactions with Joshua, Daniel, Michelle, Anjeanette Roberts and others here produce different results than my interactions with the confirmed atheists, that does not strike you as possibly illuminating?

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Thanks for answering the question that I had asked @Eddie . OK, so we can accept that there is good reason to believe you were wrong in denying that more philosophy profs to not accept traditional religious beliefs.

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They just have the patience of a saint. I’ve always had respect for you and thought you were a knowledgeable guy. But you’ve been pretty ridiculous on this topic. I don’t even know what to respond to anymore. You keep switching between academia In general and art departments. Personal beliefs and biases. It’s kinda a mess.

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See Art’s admission above.

The way I read your comment was they don’t ACCEPT those beliefs. As in they don’t tolerate them. Not that they don’t hold to them.

How did you read it @art?

The bolded parts of the quote I made above make this pretty clear. Which is, I suspect, what led to @Rumraket’s question.

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That may well be true, but when undergrad students take philosophy courses, it isn’t always courses in philosophy of religion that they take. In a typical undergrad philosophy program there aren’t that many undergrad courses on philosophy of religion. The students are far more likely to be exposed to the philosophers who aren’t theists than to those who are. And philosophers’ ideas about God can appear in all kinds of ways in a lecture or conversation with a student, even if the class topic is not philosophy of religion.

And I’m not saying there is anything wrong with a conservative religious student taking a course from an unbeliever. I think conservative students should do so. I think it’s a good thing to broaden one’s horizons. But the overall departmental leaning or intellectual culture regarding God is a reality that we can’t pretend does not exist.

Not only do I not pretend that it does not exist. I am delighted that it does.

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I am now able to answer Rumraket’s question, which should make both Rumraket and Art happy:

By “prejudiced” do you mean merely “have an intellectual leaning against atheism”? Yes, they would be “prejudiced” in that sense, as Democrats could be said to have a “prejudice” against Republican ideas, as libertarians could be said to have a “prejudice” against Marxist ideas, etc.

Or by “prejudiced” do you mean, “would be inclined to treat the arguments of atheists unfairly”? Or “would be inclined to treat atheist students unfairly?” Or “would be inclined to make unfair hiring decisions that unjustifiably favored theists”? If you mean the latter, that could only be determined by observing the behavior of such professors in such a counterfactual world. But I assure you that if there were a prejudice of that kind, I would be standing up for balance for atheist views just as I now stand up for balance for theistic views. And if university faculty were 75% Republican rather than 80% or more Democratic, I assure you that I would be questioning that disproportion to the views of the general population just as I now question the disproportion that favors the Democrats.

My own observation, as an insider in the world of academic religious studies, is that there are definite prejudices that cause faculty to act in empirically detectable ways. Job advertising, hirings, curriculum changes, etc. quite often reflect the ideological or religious preferences of faculty members. I do not have a problem with religious studies professors being religious liberals, agnostics, atheists, New Agers, etc. I do have a problem when their leanings cause them to be unjust in the way they behave toward more conservative people and views with which they disagree.

Once you add that “indirectly” you admit that you are reading them as saying something that they did not actually say.

“On the points in question” is very narrow. Your earlier charge “they know lots and lots about undergrad Arts education” was very broad.

As for the title question – “Do philosophy professors believe in God?” – why should we even care. What should matter is how they teach philosophy and, at a research university, the quality of their research in philosophy. There private religious beliefs should not affect their teaching or their research.

Yes, I know you are. One thing that I like about your postings is that at least you never pretend that you are completely neutral and objective. You frankly admit that you have subjective and ideological preferences and you champion those preferences. I don’t agree with your preferences, but I would rather have someone who is proudly not neutral than someone who pretends that he is the only one without an agenda, the only one who is supremely objective, as opposed to all those other guys, who aren’t objective and have agendas.

Not exactly. I don’t think that universities should do public opinion polls and then hire their faculty so as to exactly match the composition of public opinion. I think faculty should be hired on merit – research competence, teaching competence, and so on. So it might well happen that in a merit-based system, from time to time, the composition of departments would be out of synch with public opinion. That is in itself does not worry me. But when there is a decades-long trend in virtually all departments (outside, perhaps, Business or Engineering or one or two other subjects) that is wildly out of synch with public opinion, the possibility of systemic bias has to be considered, especially given that university professors do the hiring of their faculty colleagues.

So it wouldn’t bother me if 55% of religion, philosophy, English, etc. profs voted Democratic rather than Republican, or, to use a Canadian example in your honor, voted Liberal rather than Conservative. That could easily happen without systemic bias, just by the vagaries of hiring and retiring schedules. But if for decades 80% or more of faculty in virtually every department are more left-leaning than the general population, it is reasonable to ask what might be the causes of that and whether that situation is justifiable. It is reasonable to ask whether faculty, in making new hirings, are consciously or perhaps unconsciously taking into account more than research and teaching excellence, but are indicating a preference for colleagues who tend to think as they think. If this is happening, it can only lead to a reduction of diversity of opinion at the university, and I think this is a very unhealthy thing for the university.

The lifeblood of the university community is discussion and debate over competing ideas. If anything like ideological conformity takes hold of the university, the university becomes a political rather than a truly academic organization. As one committed to the classical notion of the university as a place of open-ended disputation, I see this as dangerous, both to the university and to the society in which the university exists.

As it has recently been implied by someone here that I am a primary cause of heated and rancorous exchanges, I hope you find my remarks to you here calmly stated, orderly, and rational and constructive in intention.

Fair enough. From time to time we all write too broadly. I concede that I could have narrowed it more. But you now seem to know to know what I meant, so hopefully we have straightened that out.

This is not obvious, when the subject is philosophy. Philosophy is not chemistry or math. It is much harder to separate the person from the subject matter in philosophy. This is also the case for many other social science and humanities subjects – which is the whole point of my line of inquiry.

I agree that a chemistry professor should not be trying to turn his students into Republicans. But should a philosophy professor who has arguments for or against the existence of God not present those arguments to his students? Should a philosophy professor who thinks that socialism is a better system than capitalism not present his personal view (albeit accompanied by argument) to his students?

I can understand why many of the scientists posting here may have some trouble in absorbing what I am talking about here. When a biology department is looking to replace a retiring geneticist, it isn’t secretly plotting how it can make sure that the next geneticist hired is socially or politically liberal, or holds liberal religious views, etc. It is looking for the best faculty member it can find. I think scientists imagine that this is the procedure in Arts departments as well.

And nominally, of course, it is. No one in an Arts department openly says that in hiring we should make sure we maintain our ratio of 4 Democrats to one Republican, or we should hire only people who are opposed to capital punishment and in favor of same-sex marriage, or we should hire religious liberals and avoid religious conservatives, etc. Everyone talks the language of objective scholarship, departmental needs, etc. Yet mysteriously, the deconstructionists rather than the Leavisites dominate English departments, liberal Christians and Jews rather than their more traditional or orthodox counterparts are more numerous in religion departments, atheists are consistently dominant in philosophy departments, it’s almost impossible to find a conservative of any kind in a Sociology or Women’s Studies department, etc. It’s a little suspicious that purely objective hiring process, concerned only with research excellence and good teaching, would systematically produce this kind of skewing.

In a science department, this matters much less. Even if there were a deliberate attempt to make sure the composition of physics or biology departments was politically left-leaning, most of the teaching and research would be unaffected. You can’t tell from a model of nuclear structure whether the physicist is left or right, believer or atheist. But in Arts departments the personal values and ideologies and philosophies of the professors affects everything – from curriculum to pedagogical approaches. A professor who thinks the university has a social mission to change the world in a leftward direction will make teaching and hiring decisions, and decisions about what to research, and judgments about articles he is asked to review, consonant with that sense of mission. A professor who thinks the university should stay away from promoting grand social missions and should present the clash of great ideas, with the purpose of making students more intelligent, leaving students to decide for themselves what social missions they will adopt on graduation, will do things very differently.

Marx once wrote something like: the philosophers have hitherto been concerned with understanding the world; the point, however, is to change it. I profoundly disagree with Marx. I think the purpose of philosophy, and more broadly, of university study, certainly in the Arts anyway, is to understand the world, not to change it. I don’t think Arts departments should be places where leftists and feminists train the future shock troops for their social transformation programs. Nor should they be places for training the shock troops of the right for their agendas. They should be places where the great books and the great ideas about ethics, God, society, government, etc. are presented, discussed, analyzed, and debated, in an atmosphere of perfect intellectual freedom, free from pressures of political correctness. This is best accomplished when the faculty displays the widest range of political, social, and religious leanings. It is inhibited whenever the thought in particular departments or disciplines becomes monolithic or “orthodox”. Those of us who know the Arts departments up close and personal, in a much more intimate way than some of the people here know them, have long been aware of a tendency toward monolithic or orthodox thinking in the Arts departments. So we continue to fight that tendency. I don’t ask any scientist here to join me in the fight – though it would be nice if some of them did, in the name of academic freedom – but I do ask them not to pretend that the phenomenon is not occurring, or is occurring only slightly and not enough to be much worried about, based on their very imperfect knowledge of what goes on in departments and disciplines that they know only in a superficial manner.

Maybe so. But it does show universities are hiring Christians and conservatives. Maybe if more conservatives were philosophers of science there would be more conservatives in arts departments.