Thursday, June 23, 2005

Those God-Fearing Docs

This doesn't surprise me at all:

CHICAGO — A survey examining religion in medicine found that most U.S. doctors believe in God and an afterlife — a surprising degree of spirituality in a science-based field, researchers say.

In the survey of 1,044 doctors nationwide, 76 percent said they believe in God, 59 percent said they believe in some sort of afterlife, and 55 percent said their religious beliefs influence how they practice medicine.

"We were surprised to find that physicians were as religious as they apparently are," said Dr. Farr Curlin, a researcher at the University of Chicago's MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics.

"There's certainly a deep-seated cultural idea that science and religion (search) are at odds," and previous studies have suggested that fewer than half of scientists believe in God, Curlin said Wednesday.

A previous survey showed about 83 percent of the general population believes in God.

But while medicine is science-based, doctors differ from scientists who work primarily in a laboratory setting, and their direct contact with patients in life-and-death situations may explain the differing views, Curlin said.

Clarification: It's not a "deep-seated cultural idea" that science and religion are at odds, it's a "deap-seated Leftist secularist idea." Big difference.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

you're so full of it. you and Ken Ham are getting all kinds of mileage out of the alleged divide between science and religion.