Não vou discutir se Físicos são os que "realmente pensam" (minha aposta pessoal é que a idiotice é muito bem distribuída em todos os campos do conhecimento), mas a informação que Ateus são mais comuns em Humanas que Exatas é verdadeira. Citando o Cambridge Companion to Atheismo, pg 309:
A 1989 large-scale survey in the United States (Politics of the Professoriate 1991) found that the percentage of faculty members answering “none” in response to “What is your present religion?” was :
65 percent in anthropology
55 percent in philosophy
53 percent in zoology
52 percent in physiology/anatomy
51 percent in other biological fields,
50 percent in education (foundations)
50 percent in psychology
49 percent in electrical engineering
49 percent in sociology
47 percent in French
47 percent in molecular biology
44 percent in art
44 percent in Spanish
41 percent in English
35 percent in mathematics/statistics,
33 percent in physics
26 percent in medicine.
The lowest percentages (possibly because of the majority of faculty being female were in dentistry (16%), library science(13%), nursing (12%), civil engineering (11%), social work (9%), and home economics (4%).
A explicação para isso, citando a mesma obra:
Lehman and Shriver (1968; Lehman 1974) proposed the “scholarly distance” hypothesis: those in subjects remote from the study of religion, such as physics, were more religious than those whose academic fields studied religion, such as psychology and sociology. Subjects such as education and economics were scored as intermediate. Those at a greater distance were more religious.
The reason, in psychological terms, is that natural sciences apply critical thinking to nature; the human sciences ask critical questions about culture, traditions, and beliefs. The mere fact of choosing human society or behavior as the object of study reflects a curiosity about basic social beliefs and conventions and a readiness to reject them. Physical scientists, who are at a greater scholarly distance, may be able to compartmentalize their science and religion more easily. The same scholarly distance effects were found among students.
One factor may be that of self-selection in terms of unconventionality.Thalheimer (1965) found that the relative secularization of faculty members in the United States took place earlier than their college years. Bereiter and Freedman (1962) found that social science majors take a more liberal and less conventional stand on most issues, while students in the applied fields are more conservative in their attitudes. Jones (1970) also found that among university freshmen, those majoring in natural science were the most favorable to religion, those studying psychology the least. Hoge (1974) found natural sciences university students to be higher on orthodoxy. It seems likely that individuals choose their fields in terms of their own curiosity, whether about nature or about culture.
