Brian Leiter reports on a new survey by Chalmers & Bourget that reports 72.8% of philosophy faculty self-reported as atheists.
To start, it’s not a surprise that with 931 responses from target faculty, 72.8% are atheists, and only 14.6% theists. (That correlates nicely, one suspects, with the 13.7% who are libertarians about free will!) On the other hand, when the survey includes another 900 or so philosophers who weren’t among the target faculty, the percentage of atheists drops slightly to 69.7% and the number of theists increases to 16.3%. With 829 graduate students responding, a full 20.8% are theists, while 63.5% are atheists. (And, perhaps unsurprisingly, among graduate students, 19.3% are libertarians about free will!)
I knew there were quite a few of us atheists in philosophy, but I never would have guessed the number to be that high. Guess you learn something new everyday.
