The Overton Window is the range of “acceptable” public reactions to some issue, based on some mainstream view of what is currently acceptable. The theory is that you can move or expand the Overton Window by coming up with some new idea that is outside the boundaries of what is acceptable, thereby moving some slightly less extreme idea into the acceptable range of discourse.  So, if someone can say, “I’m not one of those radical feminists, but I do believe in equal pay for equal work,” maybe the radical feminists have done their job, moving the window so that equal pay for equal work is a mainstream idea.

The New Atheists are a group people love to hate.  They are inevitably described as “shrill”.  Of the four million Google hits on “new atheists are shrill”, I picked this one at random:

The New Atheists are much too shrill for my decidedly agnostic tastes. In many respects, they are on a hiding to nothing. The religious impulse will always be with us and so will be a belief in the supernatural. But not all atheists are new atheists: It’s also quite possible for an atheist to admire much of the structure, cohesion and sense of tradition that some religions bring to society, not to speak of the happiness they can bring to many of their adherents.

This guy probably hasn’t done much if any reading of the New Atheists, because they are generally more than willing to admire this stuff; their issue is primarily with the truth of religion, not with the solace it brings to its adherents or the benefits it might bring to a society.  Daniel Dennett labels stuff like that “belief in belief.”

But anyway, I have wondered if the New Atheists have succeeded in moving the Overton Window on religion. Theoretically, they might make it easier for someone to say, “I’m not a believer myself, but I’m certainly not one of those shrill New Atheists.”  But that video of Neil DeGrasse Tyson I showed here gives me pause.  Maybe instead they have simply poisoned the term “atheist,” making it synonymous with “an active hater of religion.”  Whatever Tyson’s personal beliefs are, he doesn’t want to be thought of as that.

This came to mind as I started reading Knocking on Heaven’s Door by Lisa Randall, another one of those Harvard professors who published big popular books in 2011.  The book’s subtitle is “How physics and scientific thinking illuminate the universe and the modern world.”  Randall is certainly a spectacularly high achiever — noted theoretical particle physicist, opera librettist, rock climber, blahblahblah.  The book comes with blurbs by Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Daniel Gilbert, and many others.

Alas, so far she isn’t a very engaging writer.  Here’s a grammatical error that someone at HarperCollins should have noticed:

For he and others who thought similarly, science and the Bible couldn’t possibly be in conflict if the words were properly interpreted.

Solecisms aside, her style is just very bland, as if writing were a chore for her.  But her section on religion and science made me wonder if she was benefiting from a shifting Overton Window.  She is very pleasant and understanding about religion.  She quotes Saint Augustine.  She talks about a nice lunch she had with Karen Armstrong.  She acknowledges that you can be religious and be a good scientist.  But ultimately she isn’t buying any of it. She says:

But any religious scientist has to face daily the scientific challenge to his belief.  The religious part of your brain cannot act at the same time as the scientific one.  They are simply incompatible.

She believes Gould’s “nonoverlapping magisteria” do in fact overlap.

A religious or spiritual belief that involves an undetectable force that nonetheless influences human actions and behavior or that of the world itself produces a situation in which a believer has no choice but to have faith and abandon logic — or simply not care.

But she seems so intent on being fair-minded that it takes her almost to the end of the section before she says, almost parenthetically, that she herself is a nonbeliever.  Like Tyson, she doesn’t use the word “atheist”; but she doesn’t stop, as he does, at “agnostic”.  Was she helped by Dawkins and company?  I don’t know.  She’s a member of the National Academy of Sciences, so my theory about their insensitivity to social stigma would suggest that she doesn’t need anyone’s help — she’s going to say what she thinks.

I’ll submit a full report when I’ve finished the book.

In response to my post on whether an atheist could be elected president, reader Jeff points to a Pew poll surveying the level of religiosity shown be members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  This study showed that these scientists were about an order of magnitude less religious than the general American public:

[T]he poll of scientists finds that four-in-ten scientists (41%) say they do not believe in God or a higher power, while the poll of the public finds that only 4% of Americans share this view.

The writeup of the poll mentions that this study more or less agrees with the results of similar polls:

The recent survey of scientists tracks fairly closely with earlier polls that gauged scientists’ views on religion. The first of these was conducted in 1914 by Swiss-American psychologist James Leuba, who surveyed about 1,000 scientists in the United States to ask them about their views on God. Leuba found the scientific community equally divided, with 42% saying that they believed in a personal God and the same number saying they did not.

More than 80 years later, Edward Larson, a historian of science then teaching at the University of Georgia, recreated Leuba’s survey, asking the same number of scientists the exact same questions. To the surprise of many, Larson’s 1996 poll came up with similar results, finding that 40% of scientists believed in a personal God, while 45% said they did not. Other surveys of scientists have yielded roughly similar results.

The writeup doesn’t mention that Leuba did another study in 1914 of the level of belief of “greater scientists,” identified as such in the publication American Men of Science.  For these guys, the level of disbelief was somewhat higher — about 53%.  He replicated the study in 1933, at which point disbelief had risen to 68%.  In 1998 Larson tried to replicate these studies by sending a questionnaire to members of the National Academy of Sciences, which is an elected body of distinguished scientists; the authors believe this sample was probably more selective than Leuba’s samples.  For NAS members in 1998, the rate of disbelief was 72%.  The level of actual personal belief had declined from 27% to 7% (the remainder are agnostics).  The authors write:

As we compiled our findings, the NAS issued a booklet encouraging the teaching of evolution in public schools, an ongoing source of friction between the scientific community and some conservative Christians in the United States. The booklet assures readers, “Whether God exists or not is a question about which science is neutral”. NAS president Bruce Alberts said: “There are many very outstanding members of this academy who are very religious people, people who believe in evolution, many of them biologists.” Our survey suggests otherwise.

So, let’s consider samples of 500 people:

1 out of 500 members of Congress doesn’t believe in God.

20 out of 500 people in the general American public don’t believe.

205 out of 500 regular ol’ scientists don’t believe.

360 out of 500 distinguished scientists don’t believe.

I don’t have anything deep to say here; I just wanted to point out the gap between the religious beliefs of elite scientists and those of the general public — and the chasm between their beliefs and those of members of Congress.

The Ides of March is not a great movie, but it has its moments of liberal porn, where we see presidential candidate George Clooney saying things that we wish liberal candidates knew how to say.  Here is how he responds in a debate to his opponent’s charge that he isn’t a practicing Christian:

I’m not a Christian. I’m not an Atheist. I’m not Jewish. I’m not Muslim. My religion, what I believe in, is called the Constitution of United States of America.

(This is a rehearsed talking point — we see his aide Ryan Gosling reciting it during a sound check before the debate.)

Good enough, I suppose.  But could a presidential really get away with not being a Christian — or worse, being a self-proclaimed atheist?  I mentioned in a comment that Richard Dawkins believes we should judge candidates on their religious beliefs, like the bizarre mythology of Mormonism.  But of course this isn’t likely to happen.  Evangelicals may grumble about Romney, but the mainstream media — and liberals — will both sing from the same hymnal: a person’s religious beliefs are a private matter.  Even if those private beliefs are arrant nonsense.  But what about a candidate’s lack of religious beliefs?

Of course, the problem isn’t likely to come up, because virtually every American politician professes some level of religious belief.  Wikipedia’s interesting article about Discrimination against atheists notes that only one member of Congress — Pete Stark of California — has “come out” as a nonbeliever.  Since the percentage of nonbelievers in Congress is far below that of comparably educated groups, these politicians are probably either self-selecting (atheists don’t even bother going into politics) or lying about their beliefs.

With good reason.  This article states that 52% of Americans wouldn’t vote for a well-qualified atheist to be president — more than those who wouldn’t vote for a Muslim.  The study reported on here puts the number at 45%.  According to the study, atheists are considered about as trustworthy as rapists. Interestingly, atheists also tend to trust religious people more than other atheists.  One of the comments on the article sums up the problem nicely (the spelling is in the original):

The reason people won’t trust an athiest is plain and simple: Athiests have no moral foundation for what they believe in because they do not believe in anything. How can you have faith in someone who has no faith to stand for.

Better to believe in the truth of the Book of Mormon than to believe in science.