Engineers more likely to be creationists?

[ShadowRider77]

While surfing the sources of FSTDT posts, I stumbled upon this blog:

Evolved and Rational

I had never heard of it, so I started skimming through it, and found this post:

The Salem Hypotesis

Being an engineer myself, of course this struck me negatively.

I would like to point out (though it is not the focus of my questions) the fact that the blogger appears to be drawing conclusions by what herself admits are unverified assumptions, as well as generalizing that a group people claiming to have engineering credentials who are members of a creationist group are supposed to somehow represent all engineers...which doesn't strike me as particularily 'rational'.

Anyway, the above aside, this post pushed me to pose two questions:

1) in your experience, did any of you notice a a somewhat higher incidence of creationists among engineers, as opposed to other technically or scientifically prepared people?

2) Assuming that the above is true, is it possible that an engineer's forma mentis makes for him easier to fall for creationism?

My answers...

1) among the engineers I know (or knew back in uni), I didn't notice a particular incidence of fundies and the like. Of course there were many churchgoers (although less than the general populace...actually, many of the atheists I know, I met at university...), but most of them didn't subscribe any of the fundie nonsense (actually, I suspect many of them did realize, at some level, that what they studied contrasted with the beliefs they were filled with from infancy, and simply chose to ignore the problem...). Actually I remember just one fundie, a very peculiar young man indeed. He was a brilliant student, meaning that he easily passed exams with top ratings, but he was in great difficulties anytime he was supposed to relate together notions from different courses, and apply them to real-world problems (a friend of mine used to call him something like "water-tight man"...) and, also, he subscribed to pretty much all the catholic dogma you can imagine: biblical literalism, papal inerrancy, transubstantiation, all the like. Once I tried discussing with him about religion, but every time I got him cornered he simply said "God is not limited by logic [or human moral]" and refused to discuss the topic anymore...Anyway, he stands up in my memory right because he was so atypical in that environment. So, as far as I am concerned, I didn't notice a particular incidence of creationists among the engineers I know...

2) This, I dont' think is true. For once, Engineers actually DO have a physical and matemathical preparation, meaning that they can (at least, have the means to) see easily through many creationist inventions, like the "violation of 2nd law of therm." or the "statistically impossible". Also, some may say that Engineers, being designers, may have a tendency to see design where there is not. This could be true, but the problem is that Engineers are trained to make efficient, economical, intrinsically redundant and robust designs. Even a superficial look to many complex living beings (chief among them the supposed 'pinnacle of creation', human beings...) quickly reveals that their 'design' does not match any of the above criteria...meaning that, as Darth Wong repeatedly stated, if there is a designer, it is not a good one...

Anyway, this is my view. What do you think about it?

[bobalot]

Of all the engineers I work with, I only know one religious one. But he keeps his religion to himself, and I quite sure isn't of the fundamentalist variety.

All the others seem to have a fair skepticism when it comes to religion.

I have never heard the claim that engineers are more likely to be creationists. Sounds like a load of bull to me.

[PeZook]

Dude, the "Salem Hypothesis" is an obvious joke, based on the fact the Internet allows anybody to claim any credentials they like, and the idiots most often claim to be engineers to bolster their cred.

So it's not that engineers are more likely to be creationists, but that creationists on the Internet are more likely to claim to be engineers.

[ShadowRider77]

Dude, the "Salem Hypothesis" is an obvious joke, based on the fact the Internet allows anybody to claim any credentials they like, and the idiots most often claim to be engineers to bolster their cred.

So it's not that engineers are more likely to be creationists, but that creationists on the Internet are more likely to claim to be engineers.

Are you sure it is meant to be a joke? After I found the post I did a quick net search about the Salem Hypotesis, and I got the impression that it was taken somewhat seriously.
See for ex. this post on pharingula:

Pharingula: The Salem Hypotesis

Or the relevant Wikipedia voice:

Salem Hypotesis

To better explain myself, seems to me that, while some comment humorously on the causes or significance of the hypotesis, its premise (that engineers are more likely to be creationists than other scientifically educated people...or, if you wish, that creationists with higher learning turn out to be mostly engineers) seems to be taken as matter of fact. Am I wrong?

Also, nowhere I found mention of the whole "claiming false titles" issue. Frankly, it seems to me not related with this issue. While it is true that often creationists on web discussions like to pad their curriculum, I understand that the Salem Hypotesis is based on actual titles held by identified, active creationists. Also, I see no particular reason for posing as an engineer in a debate that fundamentally involves biology. In fact, if I was a creationist with no scientific preparation and I wished to claim a title I don't hold, to support myself in a discussion, I would claim to be a biologist, a doctor, even a zoologist, rather than an engineer...

The post on Evolved and Rational, in itself, didn't strike me as ironical or satyrical, and when I added to this the fact that others spoke of this Salem Hypotesis in what seemed to me a quite serious way...well, I took it seriously myself.

Anyway, if it was a joke, so much the better. Shame on me for not getting it...

[PeZook]

Well, the hypothesis seems like a joke because it makes an oh-so-scientific analysis based on people's claims on the Internet. But now I am confused

Then again, there may be something to it - but it would require a serious attempt at research, rather than using discussion on a web-based discussion group to draw such sweeping conclusions from it

[ShadowRider77]

Well, the hypothesis seems like a joke because it makes an oh-so-scientific analysis based on people's claims on the Internet. But now I am confused

Then again, there may be something to it - but it would require a serious attempt at research, rather than using discussion on a web-based discussion group to draw such sweeping conclusions from it

Yeah, if you read just the first post I linked, the one from E&R, looks like it is based only on web forums and the like, and I was inclined to ignore it...but when I noticed there was something else, more reality-based, I began to doubt myself and I tought of opening this topic...not as an attempt for serious research, that's for sure, but at least to get some opinions and experiences...

[Darth Wong]

The claim that engineers are more likely to be creationists is like the claim that there are no atheists in foxholes. It's an assumption, based on religious peoples' ignorant prejudices and beliefs. They assume that engineers, who are extremely familiar with the concept of design, must surely attribute intelligent design to the natural world. It's not as if anyone has ever done a survey on this; it is simply a made-up claim which has been repeated by so many creationists that it is taken as fact among them.

I would believe that engineers are more likely to be creationists than, say, biologists, who specialize in the relevant field and have a virtually insignificant rate of creationism as a result. However, they would be much less likely to be creationists than the general population, just as anyone with any kind of scientific background is.

The fact that engineers are "prominent" among creationist movements has a simple and obvious explanation: in any creationist movement, they will inevitably promote awareness of the people whose (claimed) credentials look most impressive. One could just as easily say that scientists are prominent among creationists, because most of the top creationists claim to be scientists (see Dr. Kent Hovind).

Frankly, Patterson's claims sound like utter bullshit (notice that it says he "presented" his claims at a scientific conference; it does not indicate that any other researchers bothered investigating his claims or confirming them). He claims that engineering associations have no ethical code in place (a completely false claim) and he actually cites engineers' understanding of thermodynamics as a cause of their supposed affinity for creationism, even though creationists horribly butcher thermodynamics in their arguments. An engineer who made those idiotic "2nd law" arguments is either professionally incompetent, a liar, or not an actual licensed engineer at all. Considering the number of creationists I've run into who claimed to be engineers but clearly had no idea what they were talking about, I'm inclined to think that option #3 is very common on the Internet.

[Alyrium Denryle]

In my personal experience having just gone through undergrad work, there is a higher incidence of creationists in the engineering department. Whenever I encounter a creationist who has scientific/technical training in the university, 9 times out of 10 it is an engineering student. The other time, it is a premed student.

I find that the mentality and training of engineers does tend to lead to being more susceptible to creationism, or at least there are fewer conflicts that may lead a creationist who likes science to become an engineer. one of the two. The main part of this as far as I see it is that engineering does not concern itself with ultimate causation. There is nothing in engineering that asks the question "what is the ultimate mechanism for X" it is all proximate.

In addition to this, an engineer is trained not only to design...things... but by extension to detect design.

[Lagmonster]

Profession, natural talents and inclinations aside, is a decision one makes for ones' self as an adult. Fundamentalism, on the other hand, is usually something thrust upon people as children. This is almost a necessity given the fact that religious belief is a hell of a lot easier to swallow if you learn it before you even learn basic math.

As an extension, the only people I know who choose a profession based on their religion have been charity workers, priests, and medical professionals. Most people don't slide into a profession based on their beliefs or vice versa. I'm more likely to see people adopt a profession and then try to protest and sue anything that stops them from refitting it to their pre-held beliefs (see fundie pharmacists and birth control, fundie teachers and evolution, fundie scientists and anything, etc.). I'd hate to wake up the morning an engineer decides to factor in the love of jesus when designing, say, a bridge - "...And right here is where the cars drive across the soft hands of baby angels".

[Darth Wong]

In my personal experience having just gone through undergrad work, there is a higher incidence of creationists in the engineering department.

Compared to the pure sciences, of course. Not when compared to the general population, which is what creationists are wont to claim. The reason is simple enough: questions about the origin of life have absolutely no relevance to engineering practice whatsoever, so it is possible to have massively wrong-headed ideas about such questions without flunking on your way to a degree. It's a lot more difficult to believe in six-day creation and man being made from a lump of clay and still get a degree if you're a biologist, geologist, paleontologist, astrophysicist, etc.

Let's be realistic about this: people become creationists before they ever set foot in a university. A lot of the selection bias here is that young creationists are taught by their church elders to fear, hate, and mistrust scientists.

[Timotheus]

In my personal experience having just gone through undergrad work, there is a higher incidence of creationists in the engineering department. Whenever I encounter a creationist who has scientific/technical training in the university, 9 times out of 10 it is an engineering student. The other time, it is a premed student.

I find that the mentality and training of engineers does tend to lead to being more susceptible to creationism, or at least there are fewer conflicts that may lead a creationist who likes science to become an engineer. one of the two. The main part of this as far as I see it is that engineering does not concern itself with ultimate causation. There is nothing in engineering that asks the question "what is the ultimate mechanism for X" it is all proximate.

In addition to this, an engineer is trained not only to design...things... but by extension to detect design.

Odd but possibly relevant question. What backgrounds were most of the engineering students?

I only ask because engineering is a very popular major for Middle Easterners and the odds of a student of engineering from Syria not being a creationist would probably be pretty low.

[Alyrium Denryle]

In my personal experience having just gone through undergrad work, there is a higher incidence of creationists in the engineering department. Whenever I encounter a creationist who has scientific/technical training in the university, 9 times out of 10 it is an engineering student. The other time, it is a premed student.

I find that the mentality and training of engineers does tend to lead to being more susceptible to creationism, or at least there are fewer conflicts that may lead a creationist who likes science to become an engineer. one of the two. The main part of this as far as I see it is that engineering does not concern itself with ultimate causation. There is nothing in engineering that asks the question "what is the ultimate mechanism for X" it is all proximate.

In addition to this, an engineer is trained not only to design...things... but by extension to detect design.

Odd but possibly relevant question. What backgrounds were most of the engineering students?

I only ask because engineering is a very popular major for Middle Easterners and the odds of a student of engineering from Syria not being a creationist would probably be pretty low.

Oh, I excluded them. I am referring to white, christian creationists. I almost take the creationist tendencies of those from the middle east as a given unless they were raised here or in Europe.

[Fire Fly]

My experience has been that medicine has a disproportionate number of creationists, although I did once have a Christian fundamentalist physics TA. Perhaps surprising but I also find that physics and chemistry have a higher number of people who are conservative compared to biology (I'm talking about academia). However, it might just be chance that I have yet to meet conservative biologists.

[Darth Wong]

My experience has been that medicine has a disproportionate number of creationists, although I did once have a Christian fundamentalist physics TA. Perhaps surprising but I also find that physics and chemistry have a higher number of people who are conservative compared to biology (I'm talking about academia). However, it might just be chance that I have yet to meet conservative biologists.

As I mentioned earlier, a lot of this is probably selection bias. Kids often have surprisingly stubborn political views before they even get out of high school, thanks to political movements which increasingly target kids with the explicit goal of poisoning the well before they get to university.

Ergo, a lot of kids will choose a major with the deliberate intent of ensuring that its content will not directly conflict with his pre-conceived notions.

[Lagmonster]

My experience has been that medicine has a disproportionate number of creationists, although I did once have a Christian fundamentalist physics TA. Perhaps surprising but I also find that physics and chemistry have a higher number of people who are conservative compared to biology (I'm talking about academia). However, it might just be chance that I have yet to meet conservative biologists.

As I mentioned, medicine does see an awful lot of religious types, such as the missionary nuns and charity clinic nurses. Helping the sick is a virtue pasted over Christianity like a skin on an apple. I've known a lot of people who wanted to be more Christ-like gravitate to medicine.

[Surlethe]

... and he actually cites engineers' understanding of thermodynamics as a cause of their supposed affinity for creationism, even though creationists horribly butcher thermodynamics in their arguments. An engineer who made those idiotic "2nd law" arguments is either professionally incompetent, a liar, or not an actual licensed engineer at all.

Hell, my father-in-law, probably the most ardent creationist I know, agrees that the "2nd law" argument is bullshit. He also, as it so happens, is an engineer.

Is there a personality type associated with engineering? I have this vague notion that, on the whole, engineers tend to be more stubborn and dogmatic, so they'd be more likely to hold on to their political and religious beliefs -- another form of selection bias. But then, I really have no idea whether that's true or not.

[Alyrium Denryle]

My experience has been that medicine has a disproportionate number of creationists, although I did once have a Christian fundamentalist physics TA. Perhaps surprising but I also find that physics and chemistry have a higher number of people who are conservative compared to biology (I'm talking about academia). However, it might just be chance that I have yet to meet conservative biologists.

I cant find them. They just... are not there. I have met a lot of biologists and the closest they get to conservative is libertarian and even that is sickeningly rare because they know that they depend on government for research funding.

[Darth Wong]

Political conservatism in engineering is actually really easy to explain. There are a lot of conservative engineers because engineers are industrialists, and industry is conservative. Also, engineering has an intrinsically conservative mindset in the sense that you have to be absolutely sure that a new idea is going to be safe for the public before you implement it, because your ass is on the line for the new idea, whereas sticking to convention is relatively safe.

But that doesn't mean engineers have any special affinity for religion (specifically referring to the fundie variety); it's just that there is less inherent hostility toward religion in engineering than there is in science. It's all relative.

The way to get an engineer to be more open to change is to educate him on social issues he hasn't bothered researching, so that he is confronted with the fact that the current situation is not working, hence it is not the safe "assumed to be working fine" choice.

[Cecelia5578]

There also seems to be a large number of IDers (as opposed to more traditional creationists) in computer science and math, as there's a little bit of a crossover there with philosophy and hence theology-William Dembski would be a prominent example there. Michael Behe is a biochemist, but his arguements seem to veer toward the metaphysical, i.e rubbish.

[CaptainZoidberg]

Well, I took some pre-engineering classes at my High School, and EVERYONE there was a very right-wing conservative, and the teacher was a big Ron Paul fan who thought FDR was the devil.

And that can't entirely be a sampling bias. In my calculus and chemistry classes, there were quite a few liberals. But oddly enough, all of the future engineers were fundies and interpreted the bible literally. Everyone I knew in my class who was going into a Computer Science major was an atheist.

My guess is that people who are drawn to engineering are pushed into the field by financially conscious parents who also are more strict and anal about pushing religion down their kid's throats. Neither of my parents told me that I'll have to major in engineering, but they have basically told me that I can't major in any of the alternatives (Computer Science, math, etc.)

[nickolay1]

I've seen this myself. Many of the white students I know in my department (ECE, Georgia Tech) are very ardent fundies. Not really surprising, given the location of the university.

[MichaelFerrariF1]

A lot of the engineering students I know are religious (Christian, Muslim, and a few Jewish students), but most of them aren't fundies. They don't take every word in the Bible (or Koran) literally, they don't bother with Genesis, and they don't buy into the 6 day creation or the 6,000 year old Earth.

Only one of them believes in a "young earth," but even he doesn't live by a restrictive code or think that many the religious laws of the Old Testament have a place today.

Everyone has their own beliefs, so I guess it just depends on who you know.

[Darth Wong]

Well, I took some pre-engineering classes at my High School, and EVERYONE there was a very right-wing conservative, and the teacher was a big Ron Paul fan who thought FDR was the devil.

And that can't entirely be a sampling bias. In my calculus and chemistry classes, there were quite a few liberals. But oddly enough, all of the future engineers were fundies and interpreted the bible literally. Everyone I knew in my class who was going into a Computer Science major was an atheist.

My guess is that people who are drawn to engineering are pushed into the field by financially conscious parents who also are more strict and anal about pushing religion down their kid's throats. Neither of my parents told me that I'll have to major in engineering, but they have basically told me that I can't major in any of the alternatives (Computer Science, math, etc.)

That sounds reeeally American protestant white. I know plenty of Chinese students who went into engineering and computers because of overbearing parental pressure, but it had nothing to do with religion.

[Superman]

This makes sense to me. I've read a couple of studies in the past which concluded that you tend to find a lot more Christians in fields which relate directly to mathematics. You tend to find a lot more atheists in biology and anthropology.

[CaptainZoidberg]

That sounds reeeally American protestant white. I know plenty of Chinese students who went into engineering and computers because of overbearing parental pressure, but it had nothing to do with religion.

Well, I'm not saying that the parents push their kids because of religion, but that the parents who are strict and push their kids into a given job field are more likely to push their kids into the parent's religion.