In 2009, David Chalmers organized a massive survey of over 3000 professional philosophers, grad students, and undergrads, asking them questions about all things philosophical and compiling the results. The results are broken down by area of specialization, age, race, gender, and everything else you might be interested in.
Here’s a link to the paper, and here to a listing of all survey results.
This is basically my favorite philosophy paper to read, and I find myself going back to look at the results all the time. I’d love to see an updated version of this survey, done ten years later, to see how things have changed (if at all).
There’s a whole lot I could talk about regarding this paper, but today I’ll just focus on one really striking result. Take a look at the following table from the paper:
What’s shown is the questions which were answered most differently by specialists and non-specialists. At the very top of the list, with a discrepancy more than double the second highest, is the question of God’s existence. 86.78% of non-specialists said yes to atheism, and by contrast only 20.87% of philosophers of religion said yes to atheism. This is fascinating to me.
Here are two narratives one could construct to make sense of these results.
Narrative One
Philosophers that specialize in philosophy of religion probably select that specialization because they have a religious bias. A philosophically-minded devout Catholic is much more likely to go into philosophy of religion than, say, philosophy of language. And similarly, an atheistic philosopher would have less interest in studying philosophy of religion, being that they don’t even believe in the existence of the primary object of study, than a religious philosopher. So the result of the survey is exactly what you’d expect by the selection bias inherent in the specialization.
Narrative Two
Philosophers, like everybody else, are vulnerable to a presumption in favor of the beliefs of their society. Academics in general are quite secular, and in many quarters religion is treated as a product of a bygone age. So it’s only natural that philosophers that haven’t looked too deeply into the issue come out believing basically what the high-status individuals in their social class believe. But philosophers of religion, on the other hand, are those that have actually looked most closely and carefully at the arguments for and against atheism, and this gives them the ability to transcend their cultural bias and recognize the truth of religion.
As an atheist, it’s perhaps not surprising that my immediate reaction to seeing this result was something like Narrative One. And upon reflection, that still seems like the more likely explanation to me. But to a religious person, I’m sure that Narrative Two would seem like the obvious explanation. This, by the way, is what should happen from a Bayesian perspective. If two theories equally well explain some data, then the one with a higher prior should receive a larger credence bump than the one with a lower prior (although their odds ratio should stay fixed).
Ultimately, which of these stories is right? I don’t know. Perhaps both are right to some degree. But I think that it illustrates the difficulty of adjudicating expertise questions. Accusations of bias are quite easy to make, and can be hard to actually get to the bottom of. That said, it’s definitely possible to evaluate the first narrative, just by empirically looking at the reasons that philosophers of religion entered the field. If somebody knows of such a study, comment it or send me a message please! The results of a study like this could end up having a huge effect on my attitude towards questions of religion’s rationality.
Imagine that it turned out that most philosophers of religion were atheists when they entered the field, and only became religious after diving deep into the arguments. This is not what I’d expect to find, but if it was the case, it would serve as a super powerful argument against atheism for me.