CEOs and Scientists Religious Views

I compiled a list of the CEOs and their religious affiliations in a spreadsheet I call CEO Religion. My motivation for taking on this project is that I saw a YouTube video put out by a Christian who was stating that privileged people tended to neglect religion, and that this explained how they came to disproportionately populate prisons and experience divorce.

My idea in doing the project is that one claim he made didn't seem to be the most likely explanation. That was that scientists are less likely to believe in a personal god for much the same reason. They tend to come from more privileged backgrounds. While I don't doubt this, I do suspect that the effect of this is not enough to explain the phenomenon. I believe that CEOs on the whole come from an even more privileged background. This provides us with a test. If his explanation tells the story, then the CEOs should be even less likely to believe in a personal god.

Conducting this test is extremely difficult. For most CEOs I was unable to find information about religious preference. However, what I have found confirms my suspicion. Among the CEOs of the top 50 companies in the U.S. 9 have some stated religious preference. Warren Buffet is the sole self-identified agnostic and I haven't found any atheists. This indicates that at least 16% of the CEOs have some religious preference. While that might not seem like much keep in mind that a similar figure for elite scientists was about 10% for belief in God. That would indicate that elite scientists are somewhat less religious than elite CEOs.

Incidentally I think there are explanations for the other figures that put the religious in a more charitable light than you might think. The rate for divorce, for example wasn't really that much higher for religious people. Also since atheists and agnostics tend to marry later, that would help explain this. As for the prison population holding a disproportionately low number of atheists and agnostics, it might be the case that convicted criminals often like to say that they have found religion and turned over a new leaf.

In any case with science I suspect that one factor is that disbelief helps people become slightly better at science. This is because science requires methodological naturalism. That is a scientist is expected to come up with natural explanations for natural phenomena. It stands to reason that if you believe that natural explanations are the only valid ones, that you will have at least a slight edge at this. While it is possible to believe in God and sill confine your explanations to the natural world, there will still be something in the back of your mind telling you that a supernatural explanation is the real one. At least that will be the case for some phenomena.

A slight advantage can go a long way in explaining huge differences at the extreme. The average atheist might not be much better at science than the average believer, but when we are talking about elite scientists we are only interested in those who are extremely good at it.