Are there any statistics that show how many scientists are Christians or otherwise believe in a personal God?

I wouldn't accept this information as 100% accurate as it was taken from Wikipedia; "Level_of_support_for_evolution", as follows; 'One 1987 estimate found that "700 scientists ... (out of a total of 480,000 U.S. earth and life scientists) ... give credence to creation-science".'

More generally, the following statistic was interesting, as was the accompanying article, "16% of US Science Teachers are Creationists". This article can be found at the following website; www.newscientist.com/.../dn13930-16-of-us-science-teachers-are-creationists.html

However, if you are searching for some fascinating scientific debate for creationism, I suggest viewing Ben Steins's "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" dvd. There are many interviews with respected scientists who believe in Intelligent Design; two of which I have named below and have added a brief biology for each.

David Berlinski
Received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University and was later a postdoctoral fellow in mathematics and molecular biology at Columbia University. He has authored works on systems analysis, differential topology, theoretical biology, analytic philosophy, and the philosophy of mathematics, as well as three novels. He has also taught philosophy, mathematics and English at such universities as Stanford, Rutgers, the City University of New York and the Universite de Paris. In addition, he has held research fellowships at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria and the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (IHES) in France.

Recent articles by Dr. Berlinski have been featured in Commentary, Forbes ASAP, and the Boston Review. Two of his articles, "On the Origins of the Mind" (November 2004) and "What Brings a World into Being" (March 2001) have been anthologized in The Best American Science Writing 2005 , edited by Alan Lightman (Harper Perennial), and The Best American Science Writing 2002, edited by Jesse Cohen, respectively.

Doug Axe
Received his Ph.D from Caltech and did post-doc research at Cambridge University, and published some of his findings in the peer-reviewed Journal of Molecular Biology. He was trying to see whether it is easy or hard to shuffle amino acids randomly in order to make functional proteins. Those JMB publications show that the number of functional amino acid sequences is tiny, compared to the number of possible sequences.

Doug Axe’s research likewise studies genes that it turns out show great evidence of design. Axe studied the sensitivities of protein function to mutations. In these “mutational sensitivity” tests, Dr. Axe mutated certain amino acids in various proteins, or studied the differences between similar proteins, to see how mutations or changes affected their ability to function properly. He found that protein function was highly sensitive to mutation, and that proteins are not very tolerant to changes in their amino acid sequences. In other words, when you mutate, tweak, or change these proteins slightly, they stopped working. In one of his papers, he thus concludes that “functional folds require highly extraordinary sequences,” and that functional protein folds “may be as low as 1 in 10^77.”

You can look at this article: http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/sci_relig.htm, and get a rough idea.

I expect that the numbers will be lower now, in terms of those believing, since so many vocal Christians are so anti-science.

[Summary of a paper that appeared in the 23 July 1998 issue of Nature by Edward J. Larson and Larry Witham: "Leading Scientists Still Reject God." Nature, 1998; 394, 313.]

Larson and Witham present the results of a replication of 1913 and 1933 surveys by James H. Leuba. In those surveys, Leuba mailed a questionnaire to leading scientists asking about their belief in "a God in intellectual and affective communication with humankind" and in "personal immortality". Larson and Witham used the same wording [as in the Leuba studies], and sent their questionnaire to 517 members of the [U.S.] National Academy of Sciences from the biological and physical sciences (the latter including mathematicians, physicists and astronomers). The return rate was slightly over 50%.

The results were as follows (figures in %):

 BELIEF IN PERSONAL GOD          1914   1933    1998

 Personal belief                 27.7    15       7.0
 Personal disbelief              52.7    68      72.2
 Doubt or agnosticism            20.9    17      20.8

 BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY           1914    1933    1998

 Personal belief                 35.2    18       7.9
 Personal disbelief              25.4    53      76.7
 Doubt or agnosticism            43.7    29      23.3 

Note: The 1998 immortality figures add up to more than 100%. The misprint is in the original. The 76.7% is likely too high.