According to a landmark survey by the Pew Research Center, about 51% of American scientists believe in a higher power. Just 33% believe specifically in God, and 18% believe in a "higher power" or a "universal spirit."
Meanwhile, demographic studies by the Pew Research Center show that roughly 76% of the global population officially identifies with a specific religion. In America, a Gallup poll found that 81% of Americans believe in God. That's down from 87% in 2017 and a peak of 98% in the mid-20th century.
So scientists are pagans or heathens, "playing god" because they don't believe in a Supreme Being, and look down on people of faith as inferior. Right?
That's what I thought until I read this article from Catholic University Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institutional Flourishing Lab, Brandon Vaidyanathan. He and his colleagues surveyed more than 3,000 scientists over five years, interviewing more than 300 of them. What he found altered my perception of scientists and what psychologists call "spiritual intelligence."
Vaidyanathan defined "scientific intelligence" as "DEF."
(1) Domination: the imperative to control and master
(2) Extraction: the impulse to reduce everything to means-ends calculation.
(3) Fragmentation: the reflex to break wholes into hyper-specialized parts.
I would add that these elements afflict not just "scientists," but anyone in academia in any discipline. It seems that the new definition of "intelligence" is to reduce an argument into incredibly small parts and master that particular micro-specialty. In this way, we learn nothing, gain nothing, and understand nothing.
But the academic is lauded for it and gets tenure.
"For most scientists, inquiry does not disenchant the world; rather, it deepens their sense of enchantment," writes Professor Vaidyanathan. "While scientific intelligence helps us understand how things work, there is a different mode of intelligence that orients us to why things matter," he adds.
Psychologists describe “spiritual intelligence” as "the capacity to recognize meaning and intrinsic value, to integrate that recognition into a coherent understanding of self and world, and to translate it into wise and constructive action," Vaidyanathan says.
For example, a medical doctor choosing how to navigate a difficult, terminal diagnosis with a patient. Instead of viewing the patient merely as a collection of failing organs or a complex medical case to be solved, the doctor recognizes the patient's inherent dignity, humanity, and the emotional weight of their remaining time. The physician connects their technical medical knowledge with a deeper philosophical understanding of human mortality and purpose.
This kind of "spiritual intelligence" might not be "godly," but it connects the physician to something outside of himself. Vaidyanathan found three facets of this kind of intelligence shared by many scientists:
Reverence, Receptivity, and Reconnection, which counter DEF logic.
Reverence: "More than four in five scientists we surveyed tell us they regularly experience, in their work, a profound sense of respect for what they learn," claims Vaidyanathan.
Receptivity: Another 80% of scientists believe that "Receptivity is not passivity or sentimentality. It is the discipline of letting the world give itself to us—allowing questions to emerge and deepen before we rush to convert them into utility," writes the professor.
Reconnection: "Reconnection knits back what fragmentation tears apart. It helps us recognize that we are part of nature, we belong to it, we are deeply connected to it, he writes.
But even in the best circumstances, while individual scientists may find reverence, receptivity, and reconnection personally meaningful, their institutions rarely value them. The DEF Logic still governs the publish-or-perish treadmill, corrodes lab culture, and licenses the misuse of science. Our broader economy runs on the same logic, which also propels the acceleration of AI systems. One of the leading AI companies defines intelligence as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.” Intelligence collapses into productivity; questions of meaning and value are rendered externalities.
The danger here is that spirituality gets confined to private wellness hacks while “real” decisions obey DEF imperatives. Worse, spiritual intelligence itself could be co-opted—turned into another metric like IQ or EQ, harnessed to evaluate and control.
"The scientists I’ve studied make clear that the choice we must make is not between science vs. spirituality," says Vaidyanathan. "Instead, the choice is between which posture toward reality we adopt: one that exploits the world as raw material, and another that receives it as a gift."
Receiving the world "as a gift" is probably part of almost all religions. So perhaps "spiritual intelligence" isn't just about faith. It's about perspective. The real question for the future of science isn't whether we have the power to master nature, but whether we still have the humility to be inspired by it.
