Since many of Phi Beta Cons’ bloggers and readers are interested in student religiosity, I thought I would highlight this study, which I found via Kevin Lewis’s excellent weekly social-science wrap for National Affairs. Greater levels of higher education are known to correlate with declining religiosity, and there are also correlations between religiosity and academic specialty. But Prof. Chris Scheitle of U Penn claims to have completed the first study measuring relative decline in religious belief for students of various specific fields over time — that is, controlling for how religious students were at the time they took up a subject. His conclusion:

The analysis shows no evidence that students in the natural sciences show a greater decrease in religious belief compared with students in other fields.

The study could plausibly be interpreted to mean that college students’ progressive loss of religious belief isn’t caused by increasing familiarity with the methods of rational inquiry. If it were, we would expect scientists to show more of a decline in faith than humanists, marketers, etc. It seems more likely to be a function of inculcation into the environment, or the general social milieu of the campus.