One minor quibble is that I don't think the De Cruz study really provided evidence for a causal effect of PhilRel decreasing religiosity. The linked post shows that a greater fraction of survey philosophers of religion went from theism->atheism than the other way around, but because the populations are unequal to start (with theists being overrepresented in that field already), it's not obvious the effect (if there is any effect, one way or another) really goes in that direction. Josh Rasmussen had a post making this observation, but it was equally unsophisticated in my opinion. Neither post satisfactorily deals with selection or attrition...
I've thought about ways to gauge the degree of selection into that field, and while everything is imperfect, one decent proxy measure is the fraction of people who completed seminary/apologetics degrees before doing their PhDs. This is virtually unheard of in other fields, but it's rampant in PhilRel, meaning that many practitioners in that field were heavily invested in their religious beliefs before exploring the best arguments for/against theism in an academic setting.
There are other possibilities, too. It's possible, for instance, that even if studying philosophy of religion was associated with a decrease in religiosity that what we're really seeing is a "lag effect": people with doubts enter the field to sustain their belief but some eventually lose their belief anyway.
It's also possible that general engagement in academia causes a reduction in belief, and that it's not studying philosophy of religion in particular.
I don't think there's any feasible way to readily determine causality here.
Great post, and a super under-appreciated point.
One minor quibble is that I don't think the De Cruz study really provided evidence for a causal effect of PhilRel decreasing religiosity. The linked post shows that a greater fraction of survey philosophers of religion went from theism->atheism than the other way around, but because the populations are unequal to start (with theists being overrepresented in that field already), it's not obvious the effect (if there is any effect, one way or another) really goes in that direction. Josh Rasmussen had a post making this observation, but it was equally unsophisticated in my opinion. Neither post satisfactorily deals with selection or attrition...
I've thought about ways to gauge the degree of selection into that field, and while everything is imperfect, one decent proxy measure is the fraction of people who completed seminary/apologetics degrees before doing their PhDs. This is virtually unheard of in other fields, but it's rampant in PhilRel, meaning that many practitioners in that field were heavily invested in their religious beliefs before exploring the best arguments for/against theism in an academic setting.
That's a fair point. Thanks.
There are other possibilities, too. It's possible, for instance, that even if studying philosophy of religion was associated with a decrease in religiosity that what we're really seeing is a "lag effect": people with doubts enter the field to sustain their belief but some eventually lose their belief anyway.
It's also possible that general engagement in academia causes a reduction in belief, and that it's not studying philosophy of religion in particular.
I don't think there's any feasible way to readily determine causality here.