Aww, the Templeton Foundation felt the sting

Oh, no, says Scott Walter, the Templeton Foundation has no nefarious or dishonest aims in reconciling science and religion — they bravely encourage and support alternative viewpoints to theirs. Just to show that they really do have empirical evidence that they are seriously considering the issues, he gives an extensive short list of great laughable examples of Templeton bravery.

  • They sponsored a talk by Terry Eagleton, and he’s a Marxist! He may be a Marxist, but you will be hard-pressed to find a more incoherent simpering apologist for traditional religion than Eagleton.

  • One of their trustees is David Myers, who wrote What God Has Joined Together: The Christian Case for Gay Marriage. These guys really don’t get it: we’re not objecting to the conclusions of religion (necessarily), we’re saying that how they answer questions is invalid, and a guy using religion to justify liberal views is just as wrong as the guy using religion to argue that gays must be stoned to death.

  • This is the funniest defense: they have Chris Mooney’s support. What I said about Eagleton up there? Yeah, they found one. I am most amused, however, by the lead-in to the Mooney example: “Further corroborating evidence of Templeton’s good faith can be piled as high as the Tower of Babel.” Do these guys even read their holy book, or what they write? That is a metaphor that suggests that their efforts are both opposed by god and doomed to sow confusion.

  • This is almost as funny: another reason is that Richard Dawkins once spoke at their annual conference. Hint to the Templeton: atheists do not regard Dawkins as our infallible Pope, he will admit himself that he makes mistakes. And this was something that he does regard as a mistake, and has plainly said so. Which, of course, is also turned into evidence of persecution by the foundation.

The guy’s conclusion is ludicrous.

The empirical evidence is clear: The Templeton Foundation is not afraid to have religion and science debated in the same room; in fact, Templeton strains its utmost to achieve the finest and fairest discussions possible, while a few noisy scientists, possessed of all the dispassion of Savonarola, insist on standing outside the room and heckling.

This is simply not true. The Templeton only wants science and religion debated in a way that stacks the deck in favor of god — they want a debate because it gives them an appearance of fair-mindedness, but they also want to be sure that the result of the debate fits their preconceptions. Those heckling scientists are not complaining about the possibility of discussion, they are protesting because we do not trust an organization with evangelical Christian motives to be capable of fair discussion. I don’t think they even know what it means, given the weird examples listed above.

You want a fair discussion, check out the Edge topic on Templeton and the discussion that follows, which includes prominent scientists who favor the Templeton. That’s how you do it: not by dangling large sums of money in front of faith-friendly fellows while making it clear that opponents of accommodation will get diddly squat. The Templeton is an institution poisoned by two corrupting influences, money and religion; it’s a disease, not a cure.

For a similar problem, look at what AAAS has done: they sponsored a science/faith “dialog” that only included pious apologists for religion (Jerry and Ophelia and Russell have more). It never fails that those who are loudest in their praise for faith must always act in bad faith.

Mormons guilty of ethical failure

The good news, first: the Mormon church has been found guilty on 13 counts of lying about their involvement with California’s proposition 8. Mormonism is now officially a faith of convicted liars.

Now the bad news, or more accurately, the pathetic news. The church lied about spending only $2078 on campaigning in California, when they’d actually raised over $30 million, but admitted to spending $190,000, and certainly spent much more than that to influence the election. The penalty for this ethics violation was…

$5538.

The lesson learned, I’m sure, is that when evil religious masterminds are plotting to commit serious ethical violations, they should plan ahead and budget 0.02% of their investment to paying off slap-of-the-wrist penalties.

Weak tea in defense of Mary Midgley

Nick Matzke has taken exception to my criticism of Mary Midgley, and has posted a rebuttal. Well, maybe. Probably not.

Eh, I’ve read most of Midgley’s books and articles, I don’t think you [The Unpublishable Philosopher] or PZ getting her at all.

The short version of what she’s saying is that there is a lot more to life than simply scientifically assessing everything as if it was a hypothesis. The primary reason many people like their religion, despite its obvious problems from a scientific point of view, have to do with things like:

  • providing a sense of community

  • instilling values in children and in themselves

    (And whatever ranting and raving the New Atheists do about the evils in the Bible and the evils promoted by parts of modern religion, an actual fair, non-raving assessment simply has to acknowledge that a large part of religion throughout history, and especially in liberal democracies in the 20th century, has been about providing often-correct moral guidance to the parishioners. For every instance of child abuse or witch burning in history there are probably millions of instances of individuals finding good moral guidance in their religion. Of course there are a good number of cases of people finding poor moral guidance as well, but then you can say this about democracy, scientific leaders, atheist leaders, etc. as well. Religion works for many people much of the time.)

  • providing a hopeful view of their place in the grand scheme of things (the typical atheist alternative is pretty dour and depressing)

  • providing an organizational framework for social action, charity, and/or political action

In these and many other ways, there isn’t much that the atheists offer at the moment that can compare to what belonging to a church offers people. Some people feel fine without it, that’s great, but I wonder if it will ever become a common thing outside of certain professions like academia.

And pretending like these factors don’t exist and don’t matter and that it’s all just a simple matter of scientifically assessing religion based on the worst claims of its craziest proponents, or on the unsupported nature of some very fuzzy theological claims of moderates – which is basically what the atheist campaigners do – is a pretty silly thing to do. This is what Midgley is trying to point out.

The Unpublishable Philosopher and I were not providing a critique of the entirety of Midgley’s writings, but only of a specific article. It’s all well and good to claim that she’s written many smart and sensible things elsewhere, but what would convince me of that is if, say, someone actually cited something insightful from her. There seems to be an Ideal Mary Midgley floating somewhere in the æther that some of her privileged priesthood can reference, but which is inaccessible to the New Atheist rabble, who only get to see the Prosaic Mary Midgley, who is something of a twit.

True confession: Nick could be correct, because I have not read any of Midgley’s books. I’ve read many of her short articles, however, and from those I think it eminently reasonable to conclude that her longer works will be much more of the same, and not worth wasting time upon. I have also encountered many people who differ, though, and say that her books are excellent and interesting…curiously, none of them ever goes on to say why. It’s a very weird phenomenon.

Take a look at that list of thinks Nick says religion provides. How many of those require that we believe in space zombies, magic, or ghosts? Not one. Not one. Those are all social goods, and believe it or not, atheists recognize the reality of society and culture and community. In fact, you could even argue that one of the qualities of the New Atheism is that it provides greater emphasis on exactly the bullet points Nick has made. We’ve been working hard to reduce the stereotype of the atheist as the oddball loner who doesn’t get along well with others.

For an unintentionally amusing counterpoint, though, read this article by John Wilkins, about an atheist who was so annoyed by a Dawkins talk that he decided to call himself an agnostic. What did he discover when Richard Dawkins spoke that was so awful? Why, that these New Atheists were providing a sense of community, instilling values, and talking about beauty and truth in the natural world. He doesn’t cite the idea of providing a framework for social action, charity, and politics, but the Richard Dawkins Foundation is doing that, too. Damned if we do, damned if we don’t.

I’ll also disagree that religion has been about providing moral guidance. It certainly has not. Religion has been about the enforcement of social conformity, which is then conflated with morality. A framework for belief that actually gave instruction in morality would be reducible to a few simple non-supernatural principles — the familiar “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and I’d add “think for yourself” — which would be consistently practiced. Most religions seem to about providing theological loopholes to get around those pesky moral principles, or in some cases, even endorsing morally pernicious practices (for example, the Bible clearly endorses slavery and misogyny — this is one case where religion’s propensity for looking for loopholes actually worked to people’s benefit).

If religion actually were the source of moral thinking, then religions would always be at the forefront of virtuous social change, and we’d actually see some consistency. Look at the civil rights movement, the women’s liberation movement, and gay rights. You can find some people of faith working for the cause of justice, and unfortunately, too often using it as an advertisement for the value of religion — the civil rights movement, for instance, has been retroactively annointed as the workings of liberal religion, when the religious establishment was diligently opposing it at the time. But most often, the majority of religious leaders are out to kill any advances in equality under the banner of ‘morality’.

I do agree that religion works for many people much of the time. It is not because religion is any good, though — it’s because I optimistically believe that most people are good, and you can give them a book full of self-contradictory gibberish and they’d generally work out some way to get along with each other out of it. It’s just too bad that that book of Abrahamic gibberish is most easily interpreted to mean that our strategy for getting along is tribalism and hierarchies of control.

We might as well claim that smallpox is good, because most people survived it, and because it gave them greater immunity to the disease afterwards. Religion is like cultural smallpox — something that most people muddle through, doing as best they can, while a minority have their lives ruined. And of course, as many atheists will tell you, the surest way to become immune to religion is to actually think about what it is saying.

Tired of the World Cup? Move to Somalia!

The mullahs just have to meddle. They can’t simply turn their televisions off, or not own a television — they have declared that anyone watching sports on television is un-Islamic, so now thugs wander about, beating up or killing anyone caught watching the World Cup.

Almost as crazy is the fact that some dedicated fans are still watching. I guess I can sympathize: what a world when watching football becomes an act of blasphemy. I know a few readers here are watching the games — it should give you a little more of a thrill to know that you are being blatantly un-Islamic to do so.

(via Science-ology)

Bill Donohue goes gaga

Bill Donohue was looking awfully silly demanding that the Empire State Building celebrate Mother Teresa’s birthday, so I guess he needed a new cause. He found one. The Catholic League is outraged by Lady Gaga’s new video.

Lady Gaga is playing Madonna copy cat, squirming around half-naked with half-naked guys, abusing Catholic symbols–they’re always Catholic symbols–while bleating out “Alejandro” enough times to induce vomit. Dressed occasionally as a nun in a glossy-red habit, the Madonna wannabe flashes the cross, swallows a rosary and manages to get raped by her S&M boyfriends. Hence, she has now become the new poster girl for American decadence and Catholic bashing, sans the looks and talent of her role model.

Like Madonna, Lady Gaga was raised Catholic and then morphed into something unrecognizable. “So I suppose you could say I’m a quite religious woman that is very confused about religion,” she told Larry King last week.

That she is confused is an understatement. In any event, we hope she finds her way back home. In the meantime, Catholics will settle for her treating us like Muslims.

I’m actually a fan of Lady Gaga (Bill will not be surprised), so I had to zip over to youtube to see this. Here it is. It’s got something for everybody. Just imagine poor Bill Donohue watching it over and over, compelled to document this atrocity, a little bit of saliva drooling from his slack lips, while with one hand he clicks “replay” repeatedly.

Donohue does have a point, I hate to say. I watched the whole thing, with its muscular young men gyrating in jackboots and tight shorts and nothing else, the weird headgear, the sadomasochistic imagery, the black leather uniforms, the flaming homoeroticism, and I was thinking, yeah, all that does remind me of Catholicism. I didn’t think it was Catholic bashing, though. I thought it was a recruiting video.

Republican welfare

Guess who has been the recipient of state funds for their superstition scam? Michele Bachmann and her husband!

Bachmann and Associates, Inc., a counseling center that receives state funds and is owned by Rep. Michele Bachmann and her husband, Dr. Marcus Bachmann, uses counseling methods steeped in fundamentalist Christianity, raising questions about its use of taxpayer money.

Founded in 2003, Bachmann’s clinic has taken in nearly $30,000 in state funds since 2007. Dr. Bachmann has said publicly that God heals people at his clinic and that Jesus Christ is the “Almighty Counselor.”

“We are distinctly a Christian counseling agency here in the Twin Cities,” he told KKMS radio in 2008. “We have 27 Christian counselors, Christ-centered, very strong in our understanding of who the Almighty Counselor is, and as we rely on God’s word and the Almighty Counselor, we have the opportunity to change people’s lives.”

Here’s how the quacks at this place describe their work:

“Jesus as the Son of God is the Savior, Healer, and intimate Lover of my soul,” said one therapist on the clinic’s Web site. “He invites those He calls to join Him on a personal journey to the Cross. Our entire being is healed and restored (body, soul, and spirit) as we surrender ‘our way’ for ‘His way.'”

So this ‘organization’, basically a front for the Bachmann family con game, is getting state money…and on top of that, it’s flamboyantly religious, little more than a church masquerading as therapy.

It’s corruption, plain and simple. But then, that’s what these Republicans do best.

(via Religion Clause)

Donohue vs. Hawking

It’s like Bambi vs. Godzilla, except no one would consider Donohue cute and innocent. In an interview, Hawking talked about gods:

“What could define God [is thinking of God] as the embodiment of the laws of nature. However, this is not what most people would think of that God,” Hawking told Sawyer. “They made a human-like being with whom one can have a personal relationship. When you look at the vast size of the universe and how insignificant an accidental human life is in it, that seems most impossible.”

When Sawyer asked if there was a way to reconcile religion and science, Hawking said, “There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.”

Straightforward and sensible, that’s a scientist talking. Bill Donohue, who is anything but sensible, took exception to all that.

How any rational person could belittle the pivotal role that human life plays in the universe is a wonder, but it is just as silly to say that all religions are marked by the absence of reason. While there are some religions which are devoid of reason, there are others, such as Roman Catholicism, which have long assigned it a special place.

Human life plays a pivotal role in the universe? How? Is the orbit of Mars influenced by human activities, does the Andromeda galaxy, 2.5 million light years away, care in the slightest about a species so remote that they’re still waiting for the glimmerings of light from the fires they used to roast a mammoth? We could wink out of existence right now and the universe would go on, fundamentally unchanged.

I agree that the Catholic church has assigned reason a special place: apologetics. Rationalizing the irrational. Throwing up a smokescreen of scholarship to hide the fact that deep down, they’re worshipping a jealous bronze age patriarchal myth wedded to a howling crazy Eastern mystery religion. But they aren’t any different than any other religion: for instance, the Baptists found universities and pay lip service to logic, too. As Hawking said, science works, and every charlatan in every church dreams of hitching a ride on its record.

It was the Catholic Church that created the first universities, and it was the Catholic Church that played a central role in the Scientific Revolution; these two historical contributions made possible Mr. Hawking’s career.

Reason, in pursuit of truth, has been reiterated by the Church fathers for nearly two millennia. That is why Hawking posits a false conflict: in the annals of the Catholic Church, there is no inherent conflict between science and religion. Quite the contrary: science and religion, in Catholic thought, are complementary properties. Ergo, nothing is gained by alleging a “victory” of science over religion.

The Catholic Church was a religion laced throughout the substrate of Western culture; everyone was Catholic (or alternatively, after the 16th century, some flavor of Protestant), and being anything else was not tenable because the Catholic Church would set you on fire. After centuries of waging war on every alternative that emerged, the Church does not now get to claim, “Oh, yeah, we did that” when a powerful and better way of thinking does manage to rise up out of the foolishness of superstition.

There is an inherent conflict between science and religion. Mr Donohue believes a cracker turns into a slice of god in his mouth; he thinks there is a magic man in the sky who speaks to the Pope; he believes a series of rituals will allow an invisible ghost in his body go to Disneyland in Space after his meat dies. He also believes that one young species of ape on this planet somehow plays a “pivotal role” in affairs on Jupiter. These are irrational, unscientific beliefs — they are anti-science, because he believes in arriving at conclusions because they are what he wishes to be true, or because the dogma has been repeated to him enough times, or because someone claims a supernatural revelation.

Sure, science arose out of Catholicism…in the same sense that plumbing, sanitation systems, and public health policies arose out of sewage.

If BP can’t fix the oil spill, next stop: Magic!

Oh, how sweet. Something good is going to come out of the Gulf oil spill. While the ocean is poisoned, sea birds tremble and die, fish and marine invertebrates are suffocated, work crews labor to contain the spreading oil slick, rescue workers struggle to clean animals tarred with sludge, and BP (we hope) tries to throttle the ruptured pipe, devout Christians gather to stand around, hold hands, and mumble at the clouds. They must have worked very hard to come up with that kind of pointless time-waster.

This is not a protest. It’s not about belly-aching. This is an opportunity for people to come together and show support for each other. It’s also an opportunity to have a moment of silence in memory of the 11 people who passed away in the accident and the people along the Gulf Coast who have been affected, whose livelihoods are gone because of this.

And don’t forget…a chance to parade your piety on the 10:00 news! That’s actually the primary purpose of prayer vigils, because it’s not as if they do anything.

Everyone is so angry and frustrated and we need to unite instead. We’re all tired. We’re all frustrated. This is a chance to just turn it over to someone else for a minute.

Someone else? Who? The people working on the coast or on boats? I think they’ve got enough work to do.

Oh, you mean God. He’s a useless old git who never gets anything done. Why you’d think it would be at all productive to hand off the work to a phantasm is a mystery. Is it because an immaterial nonexistent ghost would be far more productive than any gang of pious sky-mumblers?

Sour old men have new plan to capture the love of Ireland

We all know the Catholic Church has a serious public relations problem right now — they’re hidebound, they’re insensitive to the human needs of their congregations, and, well, sheltering an evil bunch of child-rapers that they shuttle about among unknowing parishes like a buggerymobile or a penis-on-wheels program doesn’t help. You would think that someone would realize that maybe some substantial reform is in order, and they have—but it’s not the kind of reform rational people might have imagined. Instead, the church is planning to crack the whip in Ireland and insist on more dogmatism.

Vatican investigators to Ireland appointed by Pope Benedict XVI are to clamp down on liberal secular opinion in an intensive drive to re-impose traditional respect for clergy, according to informed sources in the Catholic Church.

The nine-member team led by two cardinals will be instructed by the Vatican to restore a traditional sense of reverence among ordinary Catholics for their priests, the Irish Independent has learned.

Priests will be told not to question in public official church teaching on controversial issues such as the papal ban on birth control or the admission of divorced Catholics living with new partners to the sacraments — especially Holy Communion.

Theologians will be expected to teach traditional doctrine by constantly preaching to lay Catholics of attendance at Mass and to return to the practice of regular confession, which has been largely abandoned by adults since the 1960s.

An emphasis will be placed on an evangelisation campaign to overcome the alienation of young people scandalised by the spate of sexual abuse of children and by later cover-ups of paedophile clerics by leaders of the institutional church.

A major thrust of the Vatican investigation will be to counteract materialistic and secularist attitudes, which Pope Benedict believes have led many Irish Catholics to ignore church disciplines and become lax in following devotional practices such as going on pilgrimages and doing penance.

That’s just wonderful — there’s little the church could do to help secularism advance more than to totter on its creaky old legs into the fray, yelling at those damned kids to stop being so progressive. Well, they could bring back the Inquisition and send teams of witchfinders loose in Ireland…and given their record, I expect that’s what we’ll see after the new policy of increased hectoring fails.

Templeton gets an invigorating massage, with a little deep pressure and an occasional gentle thump

The Nation has published an extremely generous profile of the Templeton Foundation. I’m trying to be charitable about it, but there’s little here that the Templeton itself will find objectionable — it’s one more swoop of the brush in an effort to always whitewash the foundation as sober, sensible, and serious, instead of the nest of delusional religious apologists that it actually is…apologists with astounding quantities of money and a willingness to spend it freely to promote its superstitious agenda.

For instance, it describes the founder, John Templeton, in terms that make him sound like a nice guy, open-minded and inquisitive, perhaps also eccentric and naive. From all I’ve heard, he probably was a very nice fellow, but he also had his weird ideological obsession, and his eclectic approach to religion makes him a very flaky dingleberry. He was a gentle-hearted kook with lots of money.

He’s dead now, and control has passed to his son.

Jack Templeton is little like his father. While the elder Templeton’s writings venture into the poetic and speculative, his son’s read like a medical report. Jack displays admirable filial loyalty, evident most of all in his decades-long leadership of the foundation under his father’s guidance; he has been president since it began, serving full time since he left a successful pediatric surgery practice in 1995. His memoir begins and ends with lessons his father taught him and is suffused by, as he put it, “a struggle to find acceptance and approval in my father’s eyes.”

Only now, though, are we beginning to learn how that struggle will express itself in his father’s absence. With Harper gone, and his replacement yet to be announced, there is a vacuum at the top. It is, says physicist and trustee Paul Davies, “an anxious time.” What seems to have people there most on edge right now, though, is not so much science as politics. In this respect too, the younger Templeton differs in kind from his father. He has financed a right-wing organization of his own, Let Freedom Ring, which once promoted the “Templeton Curve,” a graph he designed to advocate privatizing Social Security. Now Let Freedom Ring lends support to the Tea Party movement. Jack Templeton’s money has also gone to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and to ads by the neoconservative group Freedom’s Watch. In 2008 he and his wife gave more than $1 million to support California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage.

That is not reassuring. Give it a few years, and I’m willing to bet that the Templeton Foundation will be getting far more attentive to the Teabaggers, and then we’ll be facing a major money institution run by a narrow-minded conservative religious zealot. We should be strangling this evil baby now.

But, you know, even if it were in the hands of gentle liberal Christians who also advocated equality and civil rights instead of opposing them, it’s still an organization dedicated to injecting foolishness into the scientific enterprise, throwing money at cronies willing to put a soft and accommodating polish on science that undermines their biases. Yet this article oozes softly over that fundamental issue; it has only brief comments from Richard Dawkins, Sean Carroll, and Harry Kroto. We really don’t need more funding for garbage science selected for its appeasement of religion, and that’s all we’re going to get from Templeton, because it is not dedicated to science, its sole goal is propaganda.

And this conclusion is pure gushing BS.

John Templeton built a place where the right’s hardened partisans, like Dreher and Rosen, can settle down and turn to life’s real Big Questions, in peace, for all mankind. But the foundation meanwhile has associated itself with political and religious forces that cause it to be perceived as threatening the integrity of science and protecting the religious status quo. This is quite the reverse of the founder’s most alluring hope: a spirituality finally worthy of our scientific achievements. As a result of such alliances, though, the foundation is also better positioned than most to foster a conservatism–and a culture generally–that holds the old habits of religions and business responsible to good evidence, while helping scientists better speak to people’s deepest concerns. On issues that range from climatology to stem cells, science has too often taken a back seat to the whims of politics, and Templeton’s peculiar vision offers a welcome antidote to that. To live up to this calling, Big Questions are one thing; but the foundation will have to stand up for tough answers, too, as it did when announcing the findings of a major study that intercessory prayer doesn’t improve medical outcomes, or when rebuking intelligent design.

What ‘deepest concerns’? Pandering to religious biases and reassuring people that their faith in angels is reasonable is not addressing a concern, it’s surrendering to it. I agree that science has been buffeted by the whims of politics, but I fear the whims of religion as much, if not more — and as we can see in the instance of Jack Templeton, religion and politics are not separable.

I am also not at all impressed with the occasional admission of failed politico-religious strategies, like prayer studies and ID. These are tactical retreats where they recognize that progress for their agenda cannot be made, but it doesn’t change their overall intent in the slightest. And, as usual for this kind of insidious religious apologetics, the goal isn’t to find clear answers to anything, but to blur all of the edges and foment further doubt and ignorance, because that is where religious wishy-washiness thrives best.