Edwin Diller Starbuck.

Edwin Diller Starbuck was born in Guilford Township, Indiana, on 20 February 1866. His family were Quakers, though by early adulthood he had developed a highly critical view of traditional Christian teaching. He grew greatly interested in discovering why and at what age people became Christians.

In the late 1800s, Edwin Starbuck conducted ground-breaking studies on conversion to Christianity. With some exceptions, scholars have generally agreed with his findings. So most of his research is generally considered to be valid.

From his studies we learn two significant things:

1. At what age people turn to Christianity.
2. What leads them to do so.

Starbuck noted that the average age of a person experiencing a religious conversion was 15.6 years. Other studies have produced similar results. In1979, Virgil Gillespie wrote that the average age of conversion in America is 16 years.

1. fears
2. other self-regarding motives,
3. altruistic motives,
4. following out a moral ideal,
5. remorse for and conviction of sin,
6. response to teaching,
7. example and imitation,
8. urging and social pressure.

Recent studies reveal that people still become Christians mainly for these same reasons.

What conclusions can be drawn from this information?

First, the average age of conversion is quite young. Once late teens have passed the chances of one becoming a Christian reduce remarkably.

Second, the reasons people become Christians appear to have at least as much to do with sociological factors as with purely "religious" factors (for example, conviction of sin).

James H Leuba in 1916, set out to test the hypothesis that the more people were educated, the less likely they were to believe in God. In a classical survey, he asked 1,000 American scientists their beliefs and his results confirmed the idea that scientists as a group are much less likely to believe in God than the general public. In his book (The Belief in God and Immortality), made into the proportion of believers and unbelievers amongst undergraduates, ordinary professors, and more distinguished professors affords very striking statistical evidence of this. As one rises in the scale of age and culture, the believers shrink from eighty to ten percent, the unbelievers grow from twenty to nearly ninety percent.

Edward Larson, a science historian, and Larry Witham, a Washington Times reporter, attempted to replicate Leuba’s study as closely as possible in an article called "Scientists are still keeping the faith" published in Nature in 1997. Larson and Witham did not feel compelled to mirror the original research that closely, but they considered the same number of scientists, divided among biologists, physicists, and mathematicians, and got their sample from the same source used by Leuba, the directory published in American Men (and Women) of Science.

The result was that scientists have not changed their opinion much. Physicists have supplanted biologists as the leading group of atheists, but pretty much the same percentages were found by Leuba in 1916.

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In 1934, Leuba separated scientists into ones noted for their originality and success, and journeymen practical scientists. Half of the journeymen believed in God compared with a third of the prominent ones, and two thirds of the journeymen believed in immortality compared with just over a third of the famous ones. It is surprising enough that a third of deep thinking successful scientists still believe in God and life-after-death, and it shows what a psychological grip these fancies have even on great thinkers, but the trend is nevertheless clear. The deeper the scientific thinker, the less likely they are to be enslaved by nonsensical beliefs. Leuba also studied psychologists and found that famous psychologists were the least religious of all, only one in seven believing in God, compared with one in three journeymen psychologists.