Benjamin Cain
2 min readOct 23, 2022

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That fudging of the facts is just gross. Even if the data weren't misleading, they wouldn't prove anything important. And of course it doesn't begin to tackle the problems with Andersen's case. (That's fine since you have no obligation to defend him, of course. I'm just pointing out that there's another side to the story.)

Just regarding the Nobel winners, for example:

"This list of nonreligious Nobel laureates comprises laureates of the Nobel Prize who have self-identified as atheist, agnostic, freethinker, or otherwise nonreligious at some point in their lives.

"Many of these laureates earlier identified with a religion. In an estimate by Baruch Shalev, between 1901 and 2000, about 10.5% of all laureates, and 35% of those in literature, fall in this category. According to the same estimate, between 1901 and 2000, atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers won 8.9% of the prizes in medicine, 7.1% in chemistry, 5.2% in economics, 4.7% in physics, and 3.6% in peace. Alfred Nobel himself was an atheist later in life.

"Shalev's book lists many Jewish atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers as religiously Jewish. For example, Milton Friedman, Roald Hoffmann, Richard Feynman, Niels Bohr, Élie Metchnikoff, and Rita Levi-Montalcini are listed as religiously Jewish; however, while they were ethnically and perhaps culturally Jewish, they did not believe in a God and self-identified as atheists."

So some winners were religious early in their life, when they made their big discoveries, and they may have become less religious as they aged. And lots of Jewish winners were only ethnically religious, which means their beliefs were atheistic. Also, the winners who belong to Eastern religions such as Buddhism or Hinduism should hardly be counted as being religious in the same sense as a literalistic Christian.

The real question is how many scientists think Jesus literally, physically rose from the dead because the source of the universe intervened in the natural course and made that event happen to save humanity from our sins.

And the vast majority of analytic philosophers are atheists. There's no logic at all in citing an exception as though that could discount the rule.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nonreligious_Nobel_laureates

https://gizmodo.com/what-percentage-of-philosophers-believe-in-god-485784336

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Benjamin Cain
Benjamin Cain

Written by Benjamin Cain

Ph.D. in philosophy / Knowledge condemns. Art redeems. / https://benjamincain.substack.com / https://ko-fi.com/benjamincain / benjamincain8@gmailDOTcom

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