Four or five degrees of separation

I was at the bookstore browsing for nothing in particular, and I spotted The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion and took it down for a look. There were other Cambridge Companions listed in the front and back, and they were all religious – which is not surprising, since I now see on the CUP site that it is in the series Cambridge Companions to Religion. Not Cambridge Companions to Science, but Cambridge Companions to Religion. Not Cambridge Companions to both religion and science, but Cambridge Companions to Religion – despite the fact that Science gets top billing in the title.

Well that seems to confirm an impression I’m always getting from this Sci&Relig stuff, which is that it’s a religious endeavor, period. The outreach is all on one side. Science doesn’t have any interest in yoking the two, or in trying to create a discipline in which the two are yoked; but religion apparently has an enormous amount of interest in that. Religion, apparently, wants to try to siphon off some of the prestige of science for its own more dubious ventures, and this is one of the wheezes it is currently trying.

I read some of the introduction by the editor, Peter Harrison. In the last paragraph, he says something to the effect that: you may notice that none of the essays defend the idea that science and religion are in conflict; this is not because of any bias but because nobody who knows much about the subject thinks that that idea has any legs.

Uh. Sounds like any bias to me, I thought. So later, I did a little googling – I looked up Peter Harrison. I was wondering, among other things, if I would find any mention of the Templeton Foundation anywhere. Well I won’t keep you in suspense – I did.

Harrison is the Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Harris Manchester College (which I have to admit is a college I’ve never heard of), and also connected in some way to something called “The Ian Ramsey Centre for science and religion in the University of Oxford.” What the hell is that? you may wonder. It’s “part of the Theology Faculty in the University of Oxford. It has the special aim of promoting high quality teaching and research in the exciting field of science and religion.” Aaaaaaaaand

From 1995 to 2003 the Centre was a beneficiary of the John Templeton Foundation through a grant administered by the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, Berkeley.

And on this page we also find that Peter Harrison is the director of this Centre. A previous director, Dr Arthur Peacocke, won the Templeton Prize in 2001.

So Peter Harrison turns out to have a pretty close connection to Templeton.

By that I don’t mean that he’s a creation or a creature of Templeton – from his bio it’s clear that he’s been interested in religion and philosophy and/or science since he was a student. I just mean that Templeton money seems to have a good deal to do with his career, and that that fact is of interest. Templeton money is successfully promoting the idea of a connection between science and religion, so successfully that it has indirectly helped to produce a book as prestigious as a Cambridge Companion on its pet subject, that treats it in the approved way – a way that disparages the “conflict model” of the relationship between science and religion, and puts a high scholarly gloss on the contentious claim that that model is an old piece of crap.

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