Which College Majors Make You Less Religious?

My sweeping generalization: learning the humanities challenges how you think about the world more than the hard sciences. Often times you just spit out the info they give you for the hard sciences, while you must learn how to form and express a cogent thought or argument in the humanities.

Education and business. Many cynics would go “Hah!” at the business major results, believing religious people are truly greedy under the skin. Maybe so, but to themselves, they are often go getters who see a way to provide for their family in a big way. Getting out into the world and doing something appeals to many religious minded folk because, well, you don’t have to think that much. You just do. And some do it extremely well.

Education is a tougher picture to frame. I’ve already heard people who believe it to be part of a religious conspiracy to indoctrinate our children in an easy environment. To some people, this is true. To most, they just see education as a prime way to fulfill any religion’s request to serve others. What easier way to serve others than to get a teaching degree and get placed right in a school? Of course, service turns to evangelism in the most highly publicized cases

This is exactly in accordance with my experiences. I was a computer science and biochemistry major, but the straw that broke the camels back was my social psychology class, which convinced me that, yes, it is possible for billions of people to be so wrong. Biology is only a problem for people who think evolution disproves god, which really isn’t the case for most people.

There’s nothing better than an intro philosophy of religion or ethics course to give fuel to destroy many mainstream religious arguments (my intro to philosophy professor actually used Pascal’s Wager to show us how to destroy a weak argument). the thing about philosophy is it is based on logical argument and, if you really look, a lot of religious arguments are just plain bad.

A find this post rather interesting, as before college I was an apathetic Catholic. I majored in history in college while taking a lot of philosophy classes. Being exposed to so many thoughts and ideas changed how I viewed the world insofar as people, especially conservatives (I think) tend to view the world black and white and that did not jive with what I was reading and learning in college; existentialism, Plato, Socrates, Marx, Descartes, Hume, Derrida, and Foucault.

It was not a sudden change but a gradual one of 4 years and I am never going back! Marx and Camus are my favorite as they are proponents of changing the world, that one has power to do so, not through an invisible intangible force (insert metaphysical being here). My love of history and philosophy led me to atheism, and my live has been enriched immensely because of it. The world opened its doors of ideas and complexity and I left the intellectually stunted church behind (not that I cared much about it anyways, hadn’t been to church since I was confirmed in 8th grade).

The study measures change in religiosity during college, so perhaps biologists and astronomers and engineers already were non-religious before starting at university; and perhaps humanities people weren’t.

I agree. Strongly religious people probably steer clear of science altogether. Engineering, being the practical application of scientific knowledge, may not challenge beliefs and may not be a causal factor in changing people’s mind.

I can see how philosophy, religion, ethics, and humanities classes could make religious people think about things that they never thought about before….

For me Philosophy and Victorian social history moved me from apatheist to atheist. Discussing Determinism and trying to reconcile these ideas with how we treat criminals, children, the mentally ill and other groups differently really made me think about how we are. We aren’t made in the image of some perfect being but develop based on our biology and our environment. From there the more I found out about everything the less likely I was ever to catch the religion meme.

I became an atheist during my time at college, during which I majored in both Religious Studies and Philosophy, so I fit the pattern.

I would also like to see a study that measured religious changes against the amount of time that students spend overseas – especially in cultures that don’t have the same predominant religion as their own.

I have a friend who majored in the sciences, stayed very religious, and then was stationed in Japan. He said that it’s difficult to keep believing the rigid teachings of Christianity when you live next to a shrine for two years. He seems mostly agnostic now.

People in the sciences are less likely to view religion as important, but are not likely to lose their religiosity during that time. The logical implication is that of the people who choose science majors, more of them are less religious. Might this relationship be causational? Perhaps religiosity discourages study in science. On the other hand, study science does not seem to discourage religiosity.

So let’s just keep in mind the nature of the conflict between science and religion. It’s not that science discourages religion, but that religion discourages science.

I find it pretty cool that my major, music, is on the list that makes you less religious. It’s really interesting to me since so much of the music we study, especially Bach, was written “for the glory of God”.

Speaking as a biology undergrad, I know far too many biology majors who don’t believe in evolution, or believe in “theistic evolution” bullcrap. I’ve met more biologists who said learning about the complexity of life brought them toward God, rather than away from him. The thing is, unreligious evolution believing biology undergrads are the ones who go on to be professors and academics, while the religious ones all become doctors or forest rangers or lab techs. So by looking at professors you may expect Biology to be a heathen mecca, but it’s not in the undergrad world.

Atheism or non-religiosity tends to be a factor in whether a person majors in a scientific field rather than exposure to scientific evidence being a reason that people become atheists.

As a science major myself, there are a reasonable number of cases where religiously-related ideas were actually better than more atheistic ones. (The Big Bang and the assertion that complex life cannot arise, in a matter of days, from non-life to name just two.)

Theistic creation of the universe (though not necessarily a belief in miracles) is at least as predictive as atheism if not moreso in a scientific context.

I’m surprised there aren’t any English majors speaking up. I did have an intellectual interest in religion and social sciences and could have minored in both, but my big focus was literature. And since the Bible is a great big set of books, it’s really not strange that I began applying critical thinking to each story in the Bible, keeping in mind many forms of literary criticism.

My own personal experience was one of enrolling in a hardcore fundamentalist Evangelical Christian college as a hardcore fundamentalist Evangelical Christian and through the study of philosophy and religion coming out an atheist.

Draw whatever conclusions you will 🙂

I just graduated with a BA in Anthropology with a minor in Religious Studies, before that I was a Biology major. While a biology major I could mentally separate my faith from my science.(I actually don’t think I made any connection between the two believe it or not)

When I started taking classes in anthropology and religious studies that ended pretty quickly. It just felt hypocritical not to apply the knowledge I gained through these classes to my own life. I also think that eventually I learned far too much about religion to ever believe in it.

Two points: First, correlation is not causation. In other words, it may be more reasonable to say the data shows the choice of majors of people from different backgrounds, rather than presuming a change in college.

The second and more important point is that research shows that a small amount of education just increases conformity. Americans with only a grade school education are more likely to make up their own minds. As people here get more educated, they become less and less likely to think independently, and more likely to conform to the majority opinion. This phenomenon peaks with undergraduate education. After the bachelor’s degree, the trend reverses again, and people with more graduate education are more likely to think independently. While getting a PhD and becoming (say) a biology professor does make one less likely to correlate with being religious, it is not 100%. It is only at the highest levels (e.g., National Academy of Science) that education and/or life stability and self-confidence are high enough that we see the maximum independence from such trends as religious views.

So I would expect that graduate education in biology or astronomy or geology would begin to show some effects due to correlation with specific major field. But before the graduate level, I think both religiosity and choice of major are both merely reflecting degree of conventional upbringing. But then, I’m just guessing. But it makes sense to me to see it this way.

I think there’s probably a fairly simple explanation.

Here’s one conjecture:

Consider that people contemplating tertiary studies are all across the spectrum in religiosity, but the ones who are most likely to lose religious belief by doing (say) biology (because their strict interpretation of the bible is at direct odds with basic biology) are keenly aware that this is a likely outcome, so they’re more likely not to consider it in the first place.

They don’t realize that many other subjects can have the same effect…

The only reason I can think of as to why music might lead to someone being less religious is maybe it’s going back to that whole argument from beauty Dawkins referenced in The God Delusion? When Dawkins was arguing against it, he made the point that maybe people who used this argument were just jealous and were using God to explain why somebody could make such beautiful music but they couldn’t. So maybe when they go to music class and learn how to play an instrument themselves, they realize that the beauty comes from the person themselves and not from God and they can make beauty too, so they realize the argument from beauty no longer makes sense? Or maybe it’s just that when you take a music class, they spend so much time practicing their instruments for concerts that they don’t have the time to think about religion and so their belief just gradually falls away from lack of interest?

World Religions and Anthropology are what did it for me.

I majored in Business, though, and have to admit that I see what they mean. I encountered some very conservative attitudes there, such as to conform, to trust in the “invisible hand”, and it was basically pounded into my head that America was a great place that helped other countries out, which was the complete opposite from what I was being told in some of my liberal studies classes.

Luther said: “What about going to Seminary or majoring in Religion?”

I know, for myself anyway, that studying other religions is what guided me towards atheism. I’ve tried a few religions and they all seemed too alike to me.

I grew up Mormon, and during high school I was urged to attend seminary classes every morning. Yup… I got up at 5:15 every weekday to attend. We’d study a book of scripture every schoolyear: Book of Mormon, Old Testament, New Testament and then Church History including the lesser-known LDS scriptures, the Doctrine and Covenants and The Pearl of Great Price the final year. I credit those years with urging me towards atheism, too, or else I wouldn’t have learned as much as I did about the Bible and the LDS scriptures and church history.

Many Christians will say that atheists never read the Bible, and that if they would, they’d all have a change of heart. That’s not true at all. I know lots of atheists who study that book hard, and many of them say that reading it is what contributed to them finding out for themselves that there is no God.

Also, in regards to Education and Business leading to an increase in relilgiosity? Could it have anything to do with “Please GOD make my students behave!” or “Please GOD bring me customers!”

Incidentally, today I saw a lot of little small businesses owned by Asians that have those lucky cats in them. I don’t know if that’s a cultural thing or a superstition. They’re cute, but do people actually believe they’ll bring in more customers and more money? *scratches head*

As an engineering major, the sciences keep me busy with scientific thought and most of my professors are atheists/agnostics/humanists. But as a a religious studies minor I am surrounded by Christians who don’t know a damn thing. My reason for my minor is to understand more than just the few half dozen religions that I know and to really understand the basis and history of the worlds religions. But Hemant is right. The reason I left Christianity was because I found flaws in the religion I had too much faith in upon studying it.

I’m with you. I have a hard time believing that the physical sciences doesn’t take people farther away from religion and god. For me Astronomy just crushed the remaining sliver of possibility in my mind that someone creator could actually watching over our little planet when we are merely a sand speck in infinite space. Astronomy is mind opening.

Based on Godel’s theorems, it’s not possible to have a complete and consistent explanation of everything. And just b/c professional scientists can’t explain everything doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use our own brains to figure things out, instead of relying on given explanations, religious or not.

Tina’s post is an example of this phenomenon: when humans don’t perceive supposedly scientific explanations to be useful enough, their brains automatically turn to other explanations they’ve been exposed to, unless they’re philosophers or non-professional scientists who’ve done their own analyses (see Science and God: An automatic opposition between ultimate explanations).

Similar to the results of the study on college majors and religiosity are the results from an analysis of Al Qaeda terrorists (w/ a note added by me):
“Three-quarters were professionals or semi- professionals. They are engineers, architects, and civil engineers, mostly scientists. Very few humanities are represented, and quite surprisingly very few had any background in religion. The natural sciences predominate. [Note: practices based on findings from science; such as engineering, architecture, or medical care; are not the same as scientific study.] Bin Laden himself is a civil engineer, Zawahiri is a physician, Mohammed Atta was, of course, an architect; and a few members are military, such as Mohammed Ibrahim Makawi, who is supposedly the head of the military committee.”

It seems that when a person doesn’t understand humans (including himself/herself) in light of what humans have learned through the sciences or humanities, the person’s brain is more likely to accept and think in terms of given religious/political memes.

I’m a sociology major in my second year of University at the moment. I was actually an Fundamentalist, Evangelical Christian until around the time I was starting my senior year of High School.

However, I wasn’t a very informed non-Theist. I still had very little knowledge of scientific principles and for the first year or so, I retained the belief that Intelligent Design “Theory” and Naturalistic biology were a legitimate scientific controversy, thus I relied on logic and philosophy to use in debates. (Which still worked quite well, long story short I once embarrassed my still-evangelical dad at a party where we made a spectacle of debating the validity of the Christian religion, but I digress.)

Once I got to college however, I began learning about European history, world religions, the natural sciences that I was until then very ignorant of, the philosophy of humanism and so on. Now instead of acting like the angry little dissenting teenager who hated waking up early on Sundays regurgitating old (although effective) atheist philosophy, I felt like I could actually think INDEPENDENTLY on these subjects, and has increased my atheism ten-fold.

I chose to major in sociology for a multitude of reasons, one of the biggest being understanding religious fundamentalism as a social structure so I could come up with some idea on how subvert the dangerous ideas that are taken so seriously by people in the United States and elsewhere. Such as that Global Warming isn’t happening, or that the destruction of the earth is a good thing because it signals the return of the messiah to judge the earth. (I’m generalizing I know, but it is honestly what my parents espouse.) Thanks for reading, I realize my comment is long I just had a lot to say. =]