Month: April 2011

So what’s Templeton up to besides giving a wad of cash to Martin Rees for saying “religion is all right I suppose now please excuse me I have better things to do”?

Well, it’s up to asking silly questions like “Is There a Link Between Spiritual Growth and Academic Performance at College?” It’s up to funding people who investigate such questions by way of research on “spirituality in higher education.”

In 2003, we began a seven-year study examining how students change during the college years and the role that college plays in facilitating the development of their spiritual and religious qualities. Funded by the John Templeton Foundation, “Spirituality in Higher Education: Students’ Search for Meaning and Purpose,” is the first national longitudinal study of students’ spiritual growth.

This is one of the ways the Templeton Foundation contaminates or pollutes or adulterates intellectual life. It does it by funding suggestions that searching for meaning and purpose equals “spirituality” which as any fule kno is a synonym or  a stealth euphemism for religion, so the upshot is a suggestion that atheists don’t know from meaning and purpose and atheism is sterile and a path to futility.

It is our shared belief that the findings provide a powerful argument for the proposition that higher education should attend more to students’ spiritual development, because spirituality is essential to students’ lives. 

Assisting students’ spiritual growth will help create a new generation who are more caring, more globally aware, and more committed to social justice than previous generations…

So we learn that atheists are less caring, less globally aware, and less committed to social justice, funded by the Templeton Foundation, thank you very much.

The dear Templeton Foundation itself knows why it gave the gong to Martin Rees. It’s because he is

a theoretical astrophysicist whose profound insights on the cosmos have provoked vital questions that speak to humanity’s highest hopes and worst fears, has won the 2011 Templeton Prize.

Insights, which are more spiritual than research, or equations, especially when they’re profound insights. And if they speak to (what? what does that mean?) humanity’s highest hopes and worst fears (what do they say when they speak to them?) then those insights are a red-hot ticket to Templeton’s version of the genius grant.

But what does it actually mean? How do his “profound insights” about the universe speak to our hopes and fears? Is it just…you know…the universe is very big and full of surprises so…well that’s it really – ? Or is it something more…definite. If anybody knows, fill us in.

In turn, the “big questions” he raises – such as “How large is physical reality?” – are reshaping crucial philosophical and theological considerations that strike at the core of life, fostering the spiritual progress that the Templeton Prize has long sought to recognize.

What theological considerations? How are the questions reshaping them? How do the considerations “strike at the core of life”? How does that striking “foster spiritual progress”? What is “spiritual progress”?

This all looks, to the untutored observer like me, like pure bullshitting. It looks like empty word-spinning that means simply nothing at all. I think if it actually meant something they would have managed to say a little about what that was.

Sean Carroll is not bowled over.

Dan Jones, also in the Guardian, also reacting to the atheist reaction to the Templeton prize, is slightly less belligerent than Michael White. Only slightly though.

Unlike Coyne, however, I don’t see a bogeymen round every religious corner, and I don’t feel compelled to denounce the Templeton Foundation as a enemy of science.

Only very slightly. It’s not a matter of bogeymen and it’s not every corner.

I say to Coyne: “Show me the money!” – where is the evidence that the mere existence of Templeton, and the facts of its funding activities, have corrupted science in any sense?

I offered some evidence in a comment.

Take a good close look at Templeton-funded BioLogos, for a start. Or the Templeton-funded “Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion,” which is “part of the Theology Faculty at the University of Oxford.” Or the Templeton-funded and created “Faraday Institute for Science and Religion” which is based at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge.

Templeton money has done a lot to create a pretend “discipline” of “Science & Religion” (never Religion & Science, because that would give the game away) which in turn has done a lot to create new dogma about how compatible the two have been through history and still are today. Check out The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion, edited by Peter Harrison, director of the aforementioned Ian Ramsey Centre. Harrison says in the intro that the book is about the compatability of the two and that incompatibility won’t even be addressed in the book, because that notion has been so thoroughly rejected.

We talked about all this last October. We talked about that Cambridge Companion, for instance, and Harrison’s claim that the “conflict model” of religion and science is totally out of fashion and stale and icky.

This kind of thing does look like corruption to me – not necessarily in the criminal sense, but in the sense of spoilage, taint, pollution; an admixture of something alien that undermines or destroys the host substance. I don’t think the scholars doing it are corrupt, but I think what they’re doing tends to corrupt the subject. I think they have an agenda, whether they know it or not, and I think Templeton money makes it possible for them to forward that agenda. I don’t think that’s a good thing. I wonder what Dan Jones would think if he were aware of any of this, which he pretty clearly isn’t.

Well one good thing is, the Templeton prize is being treated as controversial. The Guardian, the Independent, Radio 4, Science – they all treat it as controversial. That makes a change!

The critics have gotten through at last. That makes a change, and a very good one.

Jerry Coyne is a little tired of being the go-to dissenter. Hmph – too bad. It’s his duty. He’s good at it, so that makes him the go-to guy, so it’s too late to be tired of that now.

Do listen to Lewis Wolpert and Peter Atkins and the matey Today presenter whose voice I don’t recognize, talking about the Templeton Prize. It’s just Wolpert and the presenter at first and it’s all quite cozy, with Wolpert agreeing that religion is fine as long as it doesn’t interfere, and saying that he doesn’t know enough about the Templeton Foundation to know if it’s a problem or not. But then at the end Peter Atkins joins in and it becomes a matter of Atkins and Wolpert agreeing while the presenter gets all squeaky in the voice.

“The Templeton Foundation is an insidious foundation which is trying to insert itself into all kinds of rational bodies,” says Atkins.

“But,” the presenter says squeakily, “what’s insidious about it? It’s quite open about it, it’s trying to promote its cause, that’s what any foundation would do, I can’t see what’s insidious about it.”

“It’s trying to undermine rationality,” Atkins replies firmly.

“But,” squeaks the presenter even more squeakily, “but does all religion, does all promotion of religion necessarily undermine rationality?” “Oh, absolutely,” says Atkins, and Wolpert seconds him, with “That’s the whole point of it.”

And that’s why we hates it, Precious.