When President Barack Obama appointed Francis Collins, a geneticist and evangelical Christian, to head the National Institutes of Health in 2009, a cry went up. The problem? Collins is a theist. A religious believer, the critics said, was not the right choice for the public face of science.1
While the majority of scientists are not evangelicals, there are several well-known scientists—like Ken Miller, John Polkinghorne, and Freeman Dyson—who are engaged in public efforts to persuade believers that they do not have to choose between their faith and science.
What do the country’s leading scientists really think about religion? Scientists have investigated the question, but have asked only a small number of narrow survey questions about religion.
To get a more definitive answer, we reviewed responses from 744 tenured and tenure-track scientists (chemists, biologists, and physicists) working and teaching at the ...
