Author: Ophelia Benson

I skimmed The Observer’s profile of Karen Armstrong yesterday, but I must have done a sloppy job of it, because I failed to notice something that if I’d really been properly skimming, would have jumped out at me. I never would have known about it if Nicholas Lawrence hadn’t told me.

But like Kissinger, Armstrong has enemies. Many devout Catholics quietly accuse her of treachery, while professional theologians despise her for emphasising the opposition between rationality and faith. Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom have accused her of being a religious apologist who covers up inconvenient texts to bolster the idea there is no conflict between modern morality and religion in matters, for instance, of gender and sexuality.

Well now I call that handsome! I should send Vanessa Thorpe a box of chocolates. Really – many devout Catholics, and professional theologians, and JS and me. Pretty select company, do admit. The sum total of Karen Armstrong’s enemies (by which is meant, people who think Karen Armstrong is wrong about some or many things), and I get to be in that august company. I even get to be named. I think that’s pretty exciting.

Mind you, she could have plugged the book while she was at it, but one can’t have everything.

I’ve said more than once that I don’t have a firm opinion about who is more right (or wrong) in the dispute between the Center for Inquiry and its founder and former director Paul Kurtz. I still don’t, but one thing I do think is that when the dispute gets into a major media outlet, the reporting is incomplete.

I have an opportunity to rectify that a little, because I saw something Barry Karr said on Facebook this morning that clarified or expanded a couple of points. I got his permission to quote him, and asked two questions of my own. Karr is the Chief Financial Officer of CFI and Executive Director of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

Here is the Facebook comment:

PK can be in the building M-F 9-5 anytime he wants and for any events. He is quite aware of this. In fact he was in here Friday afternoon, in his office, talking on the phone, chatting with employees, etc. He was in here Wednesday and Thursday as well. And this was AFTER his allegedly being barred from the buidling. He wasn’t, not true, and he knows it. I find it amazing actually that you think he should have unfettered access during weekend and non business hours. Regardless of what you think of his new organization, he is actively contacting CFI donors asking these people to give to his new organization. And he should have free reign of the building? Huh? that would be irresponsible of us to say the very least.

And here are my questions and Barry’s replies:

OB: Is CFI worried that PK’s solicitation of funding could be in competition with CFI’s?

BK: I think there is some concern. On one hand, if you are doing your job well, you count on the donors to want to support your efforts and activities. We have a great many projects and programs originating with the Center and we believe we are offering our donors many good reasons to continue to support these efforts. We feel our donors are aware of the good things we do and will want to continue to support us. On the other hand, given these difficult economic times, and the constant pressures from multiple sides, there is the possibility of donor fatigue from requests from an increasing number of worthy groups and foundations.

OB: Do you think the Times did an adequate job of seeking out all the relevant facts and of presenting them?

BK: I was a bit disappointed. I think the reporter should have taken the opportunity to talk to Ron about Kurtz’s comments regarding the Center allegedly changing the direction of its mission. It hasn’t. It also strikes me as a bit odd that the reporter could travel up here to visit Paul at his home, but was unable to find the time to visit the Center itself.

———-

There. All fair points, I think, and points that the Times really should have been able to find for itself.

Update October 5: Ron Lindsay posted this comment at WEIT:

Let me comment briefly on the key issue. I must say I find it perplexing that some appear troubled that CFI management would not issue a key to Paul Kurtz after we decided to change the exterior locks. (The locks were not changed primarily because of Kurtz, but that’s another issue.)

Paul Kurtz resigned from all his positions with the Center for Inquiry and its affiliates in May, 2010. Since then he has launched a competing organization, solicited CFI donors, repeatedly sought access to confidential information by questioning our staff, and worked with others to denigrate CFI. Were I to allow unrestricted after-hours access to our facilities to such an individual, then the board of directors should terminate me for incompetence.

And it is worth emphasizing that unrestricted after-hours access is the only privilege that Kurtz does not now have. He can visit CFI’s facilities any time there is a staff person there with whom he wishes to talk. Not only that, CFI allows him to use his former office and his reserved parking spot—the only person to have such a parking spot.

Rather than wondering why CFI has not issued Kurtz a key, I think a more pertinent question is why Kurtz is so bothered that he can no longer be in the building when no staff member is present.

The New York Times could have done a better job of providing that view of the matter, I think.

Update 2: October 5: This is a comment on PK’s Facebook page, last Saturday, by Ed Beck.

Dr. Kurtz is allowed into the building during normal hours, just like anyone else. I, an intern there, let him in twice on Thursday, personally. If it’s what you’re referring to, he staged his photo-op during a return trip later in the day, before anyone knew he was at the door (he didn’t ring the buzzer that time). I opened it as soon as I saw him — although I quickly realized he was posing, not trying to enter.

The first comment on that thread (which is on the Times article, linked by Paul) is also quite…interesting.

Anthony Appiah says something in his review of Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape that I don’t get – it looks wrong to me, but Appiah’s a philosopher and I’m not, so help me out here. Maybe he spoke in haste, or maybe a sub changed his wording, or maybe I’m just wrong.

Harris means to deny a thought often ascribed to David Hume, according to which there is a clear conceptual distinction between facts and values. Facts are susceptible of rational investigation; values, supposedly, not. But according to Harris, values, too, can be uncovered by science…

I thought the point was that facts can’t, as a matter of logic, get you to values. That doesn’t make values not susceptible of rational investigation, surely. Does it? It makes them not straightforwardly susceptible of empirical falsification, perhaps, but there are other ways of rationally investigating things – aren’t there?

Answers on a postcard.

To re-cap: we have The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion, edited by Peter Harrison, director of  The Ian Ramsey Centre for science and religion in the University of Oxford, a Templeton-funded outfit whose previous director won the Templeton Prize. Harrison says in his introduction that this Companion gives short shrift to the view that science and religion are in fact incompatible.

We also have a BBC article by Thomas Dixon saying, in a roundabout sort of way, that science and religion are compatible. Dixon wrote the Oxford University Press Science and Religion: a very short introduction. Under “About the author” on that page we learn that

Thomas Dixon is Lecturer in History at Queen Mary, University of London. A member of the International Society for Science and Religion and an expert on modern intellectual history…

So, all agog, we look into what the International Society for Science and Religion might be – and we find out.

 the Society has now grown to over 140 members, including many of the leading scholars in the science and religion field. Indeed the last two presidents, George Ellis, a theoretical cosmologist and Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town, and John Polkinghorne, are both recipients of the Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities – the world’s best-known religion prize, awarded each year to a living person to encourage and honour those who advance spiritual matters.

We find that it’s really about Religion and science, not Science and Religion; that it’s by and for and about theism and theists trying to connect their theism to science; that it’s nothing to do with scientists as scientists trying to connect to religion. We find that it’s what looks very much like a stealth Templeton outfit giving an appearance of an extra splash of prestige to authors who write books about Religion and science.

If we dig around a little more we find one of Templeton’s grants to the International Society for Science and Religion:

Through this project, the International Society for Science and Religion will select an essential reference library for the field of science and religion. Upon selecting some 250 books, a companion volume will be prepared with short summaries and critical evaluations of each book. The project will distribute approximately 150 sets of these books through a competitive program to establish new science and religion libraries throughout the world, particularly in India, China, and Eastern Europe.

Why – that sounds like missionary work, or like cold war propaganda, or both. It certainly sounds like yet another brick in the edifice of this new discipline “Science and Religion” which, thanks largely to Templeton, is eeling its way into major universities in the UK and the US.

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.

From Joe Hoffmann’s Three fewer things to say about atheism:

Just as not all atheists are humanists (and vice versa), atheists will differ about the role of the arts, and they will usually do so by asking a “utility” question: what are the arts good for? Does painting get you to the moon? Does poetry or theater improve life-expectancy? The answer to both questions is that a basketball scholarship will get you into Purdue, but not into Phi Beta Kappa.

Heh.

I have one or two more quibbles with Matthew Reisz’s diatribe about atheism and science.

The notion that religion is perniciously simple-minded and locked in an eternal fight with science has been powerfully argued by a number of atheist thinkers, many of them based in the academy, with the charge led by Richard Dawkins in his 2006 best-seller The God Delusion. But what counts as evidence for such a claim?

It’s not really reasonable to give a simplistic version of a “notion” that you claim has been argued by “a number” of people, “many” of whom are academics, and then demand what is the evidence for your own simplistic version of a putative notion that belongs to no one named or quoted or linked. That’s a gotcha rather than a question. In any case, the evidence that various clerics and other religious people have tried to interfere with science is not at all difficult to find; one could start by looking up stem-cell research, or the Texas school board.

Particularly in a society as religious as the US, scientists who are keen to reach out and share their work risk alienating their audience if they are openly contemptuous of religion.

If that’s true, it is some evidence that religion is “locked in an eternal fight with science.” Some scientists are openly contemptuous of religion because the “ways of knowing” of science are so different from those of religion and because scientists cannot count on being free from religious interference. If audiences blackmail scientists by threatening to flounce away in a huff any time scientists are not sufficiently deferential to religion, that is a kind of fight – the kind under discussion in this article, certainly. It is the kind of fight that two different ways of inquiring into the world have when they are incompatible. Historians would have the same fight if religionists were always trying to shut them up or re-write their books for them.

“There is no truth in the idea that being a scientist means being a crusader for atheism, and even many atheist and agnostic scientists are opposed to Richard Dawkins for making their life more difficult,” Giberson adds.

Maybe, but there again, this is a kind of blackmail, and also a self-fulfilling prophecy. Giberson spend a lot of his time writing about atheism and science in such a way as to make the lives of atheist scientists more difficult. He’s always picking fights with atheist scientists (one in particular), and telling them off for not agreeing with religious claims, so he can’t pretend it’s just Richard Dawkins who makes life more difficult for atheist scientists. The fact is, Giberson does that too, and he does it on purpose.