Thank you for the attribution there.

However, you forgot a step. The physicist asks the matematician, who then has to ask God. ;-)

Life's good at the top. (Just kidding)

I'll let the physicist know of his error. ;-)

Two differences I see between the harder and softer sciences;

Physics has less room for bias.

Also, There have been a few physicists who have switched fields temporarily to work in the biological sciences, and probably a few evolutionary biologists with ideas about psychology. But you never hear of people going in the opposite direction. Psychologists don't make breakthroughs in physics, for instance.

I agree with you Ryan: you probably won't get nearly as many time-honored 'breakthroughs' by 'softer' scientists working in 'harder' fields than vise-versa. For example, it's more like that a physicist might make a valid point about, for example, literary criticism (e.g. the Sokal hoax) than a English major would be to point out something meaningful in physics.

If I may give another example: one of the things I enjoy so much about the work of Rodney Stark are his repeated attempts to apply at least semi-rigorous mathematical analyses to fields (history, religion) where such aren't usually applied.

In Cities of God, in which he traces the rise of Christianity in the mideast (and overturns not a few long-cherished beliefs) Stark has a wonderfully-entitled double-entendre closing chapter, "Why Historians Ought to Count", where he takes historians to task for their ignorance of (and sometimes even pride in) avoiding quantitative analyses.

Sometimes, I wonder if the reason for the disparity is that hard science can have the effect of limiting one's scope of possible beliefs. For example, a mathematician who moved into economics could never have (I hope) sustained Marxist narratives.

Again citing Stark: He points out that in his own discipline, Sociology, his own specialty, Sociology of Religion, is by far the most anti-/non-religious. Lots more atheists there than in the other branches of sociology. And elsewhere he observes that rational choice theory, which has revolutionized other aspects of sociology, is still largely rejected by his peers!

Why?

Looking at, for example, the question of Christian martyrdom, he notes (and cites copious examples) where his peers have been eager to ascribe all manner of ill motive or reason to martyrs -- mental illness, sexual perversity, etc. -- rather than the most obvious one: people were willing to be martyrs because they believed ("rationally", in their religious context) that the afterlife existed and would compensate for or reward such adversity.

As a result, his peers have been sidetracked into endless psychological speculation...

But the point here is that it appears many were unwilling to embrace a bit of 'harder' science which benefited other areas of sociology simply because it would limit their options, and lead to unwanted or unpleasant conclusions -- in this case, that people could embrace religion, and martyrdom even, and not necessarily be psychologically ill or immoral.

And, in parallel, I notice that the Miller-Urey experiments were supposed to have proven that there was nothing improbable about life arising on earth, and thus no need for a God: indeed, that was Sagan's point in using it in Cosmos.

Yet cite some chemist who points how improbable even the simplest self-replicating molecule is (a 'harder' argument imported into a 'softer' field like evolutionary biology), and, I've noticed, suddenly probability tells us nothing about the need for a creator. (And chemists aren't qualified to be making remarks in this particular debate!)

I'm not here to make either argument (either would be fine if not for the other): my point is that I agree with your implication: I also see a lot more "convenience" or "cherry picking" in the softer fields, whereas people in the harder fields are used to just letting the chips fall where they may, and apply the same rules whether they like the results or not.

Which leads me to wonder, as I said above, if perhaps people who like convenience or cherry picking may sometimes be drawn to the places where it may be done more easily: a half-baked political theorist might make more headway in anthropology or sociology than as a statistician or neuroscientist, perhaps?

A few more examples come to mind: "Anthropologist" Margaret Mead certainly had an axe to grind -- and her "findings" revolutionized the outlook of my mother's generation. (She herself remarked on learning about them in school.) And yet I'm not surprised that further research has disproven most of the big things she was alleged to have 'discovered' about sex, children, and society, and seems to point to fraud in her work.

And, again, look at the example of Kinsey, who clearly had not a few sexual skeletons in his own closet. Same end result: we find in retrospect he used very un-rigorous means to arrive at his (apparently) desired conclusions.

If you want to be a missionary of some sort, you'll be much more at home in anthropology, political science, or psychology than chemistry, math, or physics.