041074 Belief In Devil Amazes Scientists

By GEORGE W. CORNELL AP Religion Writer

NEW YORK (AP) - The scientific elite were somewhat taken aback on being informed that amid all the m o d e r n technological advances, a new, national study shows people are believing more and more in the active reality of the devil.

When told of it, participants in a recent meeting in San Francisco of the American Association for the Advancement of Science "were absolutely shocked," s a y s Clyde Z. Nunn, a social researcher who reported the findings to them.

"It didn't fit their presuppositions," he adds. "It was mind-blowing for them."

He said the fact that Americans are increasingly convinced of the devils existence runs counter to the scientific community's general assumption of "progressively increasing rationalism as an automatic evolutionary process."

Most scientists "want to believe that society has become so rationalized that it has moved out of the nonrational world," he said. But he added that the newly gathered data reveal an opposite trend at work.

The new study, made by the Center for Policy Research here, found that in nine years the number of people believing in the certainty of the devil has risen from 37 to 48 per cent of the population, with another 20 per cent considering his existence probable.

Altogether, 68 per cent is either sure about it or thinks it likely.

Nunn, the center's senior research associate, linked the upsurge in such belief to "times of great stress, when things seem to be falling apart, when there is great uncertainty in society and limited resources to cope with it."

"It's apparently an attempt to make sense of a world of ambiguities and to explain tne evil in it," he said in an interview. He said it also made for an atmosphere vuln e r a b I e to demagogic promises to hunt out the devil's instruments.

It has the potentiality of "some new round of witch hunting," said Nunn. a University of Nebraska sociology professor before joining the center, which aims to search out trends so social policy can be shaped to deal with them.

The new study, involving a scientifically selected cross section of 3,546 people. was made last spring. Consequently. the results don't reflect the recent movie-stirred interest in demonology but derive from other conditions.

Nunn said the study, by u s i n g identically phrased questions as a parallel survey in 1964, provides the first comparative measurement of shifts in intensity of beliefs about the supernatural.

While the major change was the sharp 11 per cent upturn in those considering the devil's existence "completely true," the 68 per cent total either certain or partly so also rose by 3 per cent.