Here’s an old piece from 2013, that was linked to a recent piece that I saw yesterday, by Sean Carroll, author of one of my favorite books, THE BIG PICTURE, which I wrote up here almost 10 years ago.
It’s been noted that, especially in the past 50 years, religion has tried to borrow the imprimatur of science. Religion generally ignores or defies the conclusions of science, yet culture has changed sufficiently enough that religious ideas gain more traction if they’re dressed up in pseudo-scientific terms. Thus Creationism became Intelligent Design.
The Templeton Foundation is a religious organization that seeks the endorsements, mostly implicit, of scientists around the world by awarding them big cash prizes for suitable books or articles they can claim are sympathetic to religion. If you squint hard enough. Some scientists and other writers are happy to take their money, perhaps with a wink. Some aren’t.
Slate, Sean Carroll, 9 May 2013: Science and Religion Can’t Be Reconciled, subtitled “Why I won’t take money from the Templeton Foundation.” (Originally from Carroll’s blog. That blog is dormant; his current site focuses on podcasts, one a week, with other writers and scientists.)
It would be easy for me to spell out in a simple sentence or two why science and religion can’t be reconciled. I think most people understand why but try to obfuscate the issue for the sake of salving their childhood beliefs. But I’ll just quote Carroll.
A few recent events, including the launch of Nautilus and this interesting thread on Brian Leiter’s blog, have brought the John Templeton Foundation back into the spotlight. As probably everybody knows, the JTF is a philanthropic organization that supports research into the “Big Questions of human purpose and ultimate reality,” encourages “dialogue among scientists, philosophers, and theologians,” and seeks to use science to acquire “new spiritual information.” They like to fund lots of things I find interesting—cosmology, physics, philosophy—but unfortunately they also like to promote the idea that science and religion are gradually reconciling. (As well as some projects that just seem silly.) They also have a huge amount of money, and they readily give it away.
Then,
I don’t think that science and religion are reconciling or can be reconciled in any meaningful sense, and I believe that it does a great disservice to the world to suggest otherwise. Therefore, way back in the day, I declined an opportunity to speak at a Templeton-sponsored conference. Ever since then, people have given me grief whenever my anti-Templeton fervor seems insufficiently fervent, even though my position—remarkably!—has been pretty consistent over the years. Honestly, I find talking about things like this pretty tiresome; politics is important, but substance is infinitely more interesting. And this topic in particular has become much more tiresome as people on various sides have become more emotional and less reflective. But I thought it would be useful to put my thoughts in one place, so I can just link here the next time the subject arises.
In brief: I don’t take money directly from the Templeton Foundation. You will never see me thanking them for support in the acknowledgments of one of my papers.
And after a bit, he explains further:
But it’s not, as many people argue, because I am worried that Templeton works in nefarious ways to influence the people it funds. That is pretty unclear; there are some dark murmurings to that effect, with this piece by John Horgan being perhaps the most explicit example, but little hard evidence. It wouldn’t be utterly shocking to find that a funding agency tried to nudge work that it supported in directions that it was favorable to; that’s the kind of thing that funding agencies do. But there are plenty of examples of people receiving money from JTF and swearing that they never felt any pressure to be religion-friendly. More importantly, I don’t see much evidence that the JTF is actively evil, in (say) the way the Discovery Institute is evil, actively lying in order to advance an anti-science agenda. The JTF is quite pro-science, in its own way; it’s just that I think their views on science are very wrong.
The Discovery Institute is evil because they actively lie. Templeton is guilty only of motivated reasoning, having a conclusion in mind and then gathering only supporters for that conclusion. Of which Sean Carroll is not one.
Putting it plainly:
The kinds of questions I think about—origin of the universe, fundamental laws of physics, that kind of thing—for the most part have no direct impact on how ordinary people live their lives. No jet packs are forthcoming, as the saying goes. But there is one exception to this, so obvious that it goes unnoticed: belief in God. Due to the efforts of many smart people over the course of many years, scholars who are experts in the fundamental nature of reality have by a wide majority concluded that God does not exist. We have better explanations for how things work. The shift in perspective from theism to atheism is arguably the single most important bit of progress in fundamental ontology over the last 500 years. And it matters to people … a lot.
Or at least, it would matter, if we made it more widely known. It’s the one piece of scientific/philosophical knowledge that could really change people’s lives. So in my view, we have a responsibility to get the word out—to not be wishy-washy on the question of religion as a way of knowing, but to be clear and direct and loud about how reality really works. And when we blur the lines between science and religion, or seem to contribute to their blurring, or even just not minding very much when other people blur them, we do the world a grave disservice. Religious belief exerts a significant influence over how the world is currently run—not just through extremists, but through the well-meaning liberal believers who very naturally think of religion as a source of wisdom and moral guidance, and who define the middle ground for sociopolitical discourse in our society. Understanding the fundamental nature of reality is a necessary starting point for productive conversations about morality, justice, and meaning. If we think we know something about that fundamental nature—something that disagrees profoundly with the conventional wisdom—we need to share it as widely and unambiguously as possible. And collaborating with organizations like Templeton inevitably dilutes that message.
There’s no question that Templeton has been actively preventing the above message from getting across.
And this is a mission of my own blog. There is a truth out there, and it’s not in your parochial religion.
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Short items.
- Scientific American, Adam Kovac, today: Trump administration cut funding to study hantavirus, the virus behind the deadly cruise ship outbreak
- Subtitled: The Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases were designed to study viruses that could jump from animals to people, including hantavirus, but in 2025 the National Institutes of Health said the work wouldn’t continue
- Part of the suicide of America, led by Trump and MAGA.
- As the climate changes, and the population expands, there will be more and more viruses spreading like this.
- More religious superstition.
- JMG, today: MAGA Pastor: Rob Reiner Was Killed By Satan Because He Criticized Trump And Christian Nationalists
- And Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, yesterday: Lance Wallnau Says Rob Reiner Opened His House To ‘Demonization’ By Criticizing Trump And Christian Nationalism
- The devil did it! No wait, demons did it!
- More rational analysis of that “missing scientists” mystery.
- Scientific American, Faye Flam, today: Math and statistics help explain the FBI’s ‘missing scientists’ cases
- Subtitled: Statistical principles show you don’t need a nefarious plot to explain clusters of missing scientists and lab workers
- Humans are pattern-seeking animals, and prone to detecting patterns even when none are there. Even scientists like Kaku are subject to this bias.
- JMG, today (from Christian Post): Johnson: “Rights Come From God Not Government”
- This is flat-out wrong. Try going to court and defending a client by saying “he’s guilty because God says so” and citing a Bible verse.
- And if God-based, why do rights keep changing, as they have over the past century?
- JMG, today (from Washington Post): Chaos Erupts In Tennessee Capitol After Republicans Vote To Erase State’s Only Democrat-Held Seat
- Why don’t they just pass a law stating that only Republicans can hold office? Why not just declare a religious dictatorship? They would do it if they could, I suspect.
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Listening to soundtrack albums from movies I haven’t seen, bought on the authority of the composer. This only rarely works out. You have to have an emotional connection to the movie, before the music gains much interest.
But this one is pretty interesting. Weird in parts. The link here is first in a series of 27. Will the link work? It’s dicey with YouTube.
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Coming up: I plan to respond to the summary of the Bregman book just posted, to assess what I think I’ve done with my life, that might matter.
And I’m inclined to review the sources of the Pulitzer Prize winners and finalists, to see which kinds of publications are deemed worthy. (Not Fox News.) Analysis forthcoming.
