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According to a chapter in the forthcoming book, The American University in a Postsecular Age, about the secularization of universities in America, professors in American institutions aren't nearly as anti-God as they're often portrayed. Make no mistake, as a group professors are more atheistic/agnostic than the American public, but the numbers aren't terribly lopsided. According to the chapter in the book by Gross and Simmons, their survey found 23.4% of professors are atheist or agnostic, compared to roughly 7% in the general US population. The percentage of atheists is higher in elite institutions (37%), but so is the percentage of those professors claiming to believe in God (33%) or "Believe in Higher Power or God some of the time" (29%). The rate of professors who believe in God is higher at community and 4-year colleges. Interestingly, professors in my own field of Psychology have the highest percentage of atheists/agnostics along with Biology (61%). Frankly, I expected to see Philosophy up there, too, if not higher. Not surprisingly, the disciplines with the highest rates of belief in God are the non-scientific ones like accounting, finance, elementary education, criminal justice, nursing, etc. 

I was able to find a draft of the chapter by Gross and Simmons (the latter is from George Mason, by the way) describing this survey and its results. There was a short summary published in Harvard Magazine this past summer (Gross is from Harvard). 

I guess I'm a rare bird to be a Psychology professor who believes in God. 

**I'd love to post the figure of results, but I'm pretty sure it'd be a copyright violation.**

It has been a week since my last post. I was in Stevenson, WA (in the Gorge) for the 2007 Driving Assessment Conference. The conference was great, as was the setting. Before returning to the Portland airport (PDX), my travel companions and I headed to the world famous Powell's Books in downtown Portland. There were nearly as many books as there were tattoos in the joint.

I now have a week at home and work before heading out for a 7-night Eastern Caribbean Cruise with my wife. I'll do my best to post several times before next Saturday afternoon when we depart.

The new moleskine PDA worked well during the conference. I'll continue to post updates on my progress with the it.

BTW, any comments on the trial new blog name?

Here's a brief video (Quicktime required) of our new driving simulator in action. As noted before, the yaw (rotation) movement is a novel feature on a simulator this scale. I didn't have any students available to help me that morning, so I had to shoot it myself.

This video was shot with an iSight and captured with a demo version of iVeZeen.

Our new driving simulator at GMU is finally fully operational as of yesterday. It can now rotate 90º to the right and left, hopefully adding some strong motion-cues to participants when they turn. This feature is truly unique, let alone for a simulator this size. There's a small pitch-motion system as well to give drivers a sense of acceleration and braking feel.

A video of the simulator in action will be available soon. It's very cool! Now it's time to dive in with some experimental studies.

My lab got a short write-up in Mason's Gazette today. My student David and I did the photo shoot on Friday.

I'm a scientist; I believe in God.

I encourage you to read the brief commentary by Dr. Francis Collins linked above. He's the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, author of The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, and former atheist. I nearly included his book on my list for 2007, but went with John Polkinghorne's book instead.

As a scientist, academician, and Christian, I'm always interested to read about other believing scientists and philosophers. Especially those that speak openly about their faith. It's far more common to see this boldness with senior scientists (hence the title of this entry) because faith is shunned so much in the sciences, and especially in my field of Psychology.

Let me just say how refreshing to read his statement about Evolution:
Yes, evolution by descent from a common ancestor is clearly true. If there was any lingering doubt about the evidence from the fossil record, the study of DNA provides the strongest possible proof of our relatedness to all other living things.

It's time for evangelicals to embrace evolution and common decent much like the Catholic Church (eventually) adopted Copernicus's heliocentric model of the solar system. As Collins says, "I find no conflict here." However, it is not my intent to delve deeply into the Evolution-Creation debate with this post. That'll have to wait for another day.

Quick update:

I'm still off fast food, as long as Pizza Hut doesn't count.

I've been busy at work overseeing the installation of my new driving simulator.

I'm way, way, way behind in my reading for the year.

My wife and I have been busy getting our house ready to sell. Our first open house was this past Sunday.

My friend William started a blog.

I knew what I was doing when I signed up to teach History and Systems in Psychology, a required course for GMU Psychology majors. I'm the only tenure-line faculty member to teach a section of History and Systems this semester. Most faculty avoid it. I find the history of psychology interesting, mostly because of the development of the study of mind/brain into a science. However, one of the perks for me is living out my fantasy of being a Philosophy professor, if only for a few weeks. The history of Psychology begins with ancient philosophical explorations of epistemology, the mind-body problem, and early hints of naturalism. The Roman Period and Middle Ages were largely void of significant contributions to philosophy, but things quickly picked up with the Renaissance (pronounced re-NAE-sense by one of my undergrad professors, much to the chagrin of my roommate of the time). I'll be covering the Rationalists (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, etc.) and the Empiricists (Locke, Hume, Berkeley, etc.) in the coming week.

After some light snow yesterday and heavy sleet and freezing rain overnight, GMU is closed for the day (along with pretty much all area school districts). I should be able to catch up on some blog posts in addition to work today. Stay tuned...