Speak the name “Templeton” and the prim, dutiful servants of the foundation will appear. If you look at the recent articles from Coyne, Dawkins, and me, you’ll discover the same comment, shown below, from a representative of the Templeton Foundation. I’ve seen these guys in action before. They are very serious, somber fellows in their nice suits, with the dignitas of boodles of cash behind them, who will calmly state their position with an air of dispassionate certitude.

They remind me of Mafia lawyers.

A.C. Grayling and Daniel Dennett have refused to talk to a serious
journalist (Edwin Cartlidge of Physics World) about a serious subject
(philosophical materialism) because the journalism fellowship under
which he is pursuing this subject is sponsored by the Templeton
Foundation. They will have nothing to do with the Templeton Foundation,
they say, because our aim is somehow to “muddy the waters” about the
relationship between science and religion.

That’s not how we see it at all. First-rate, peer-reviewed science is
essential to our work at the Foundation and to the progressive vision
of the late Sir John Templeton, who was deeply committed to scientific
discovery. Many of our largest grants go to pure scientific research
(like our support for the Foundational Questions Institute in Physics
and Cosmology, the Godel Centenary Research Prize Fellowships, and the
Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard).

But, yes, we do like to include philosophers and theologians in many of
our projects. Excellent science is crucial to what we do, but it is not
all that we do. We are a “Big Questions” foundation, not a science
foundation, and we believe that the world’s philosophical and religious
traditions have much to contribute to understanding human experience
and our place in the universe. For Grayling and Dennett to compare this
rich, expansive discussion to a dialogue with astrologers is silly.
They know better.

Gary Rosen
Chief External Affairs Officer
John Templeton Foundation

Materialism, philosophical or otherwise, is a serious and useful subject. The bit he left off, though, is that the Templeton Foundation opposes it. For instance, they give a series of prizes, many of which reward people for making the best excuses for inserting superstition into research: the Templeton Prize, for “affirming life’s spiritual dimension”; the Award for Theological Promise, for the best thesis on “God and spirituality”; the Religion Reporter of the Year; the European Religion Writer of the Year; the Religion Story of the Year; the Epiphany Prize, for shows that “increase man’s understanding and love of God”; the Kairos Prize, for movies that “result in a greater increase in either man’s understanding or love of God”; you get the idea. Let’s have no illusions. First and foremost, the Templeton Foundation’s purpose is the promotion of religion…they have simply chosen to pursue that goal by dressing up as philanthropists supporting a certain kind of science. They are what the Discovery Institute wishes they could be, if they were staffed with grown-ups and had $1.5 billion to play with.

They do aim to muddy the waters. They want to blur the boundaries between legitimate science, which questions traditional dogma, and religion, which is traditional dogma, by playing favorites with religion in a game that apes scientific institutions. Yes, they certainly do spend money on real science projects; it’s part of their aim to entangle valid, secular science in the financial webs of a religiously motivated agency. Again, look at the Mafia for a model. Diversify and get your hands in real businesses like trucking or garbage collection or construction, and when someone asks difficult questions, just say “Hey, look — fleet of garbage trucks!” And meanwhile, build up a network of obligations — do a little, perfectly legal favor for some little guy, and when the time comes, you can ask him to return the favor, to your advantage.

Now of course, the Templeton Foundation is doing nothing illegal, and the comparison to a criminal organization does not extend to actual criminality. The only place it holds up is in the way they maintain a pretext of doing one thing, while actually profiting most off another activity altogether. Look at Mr Rosen’s comment. Nowhere does he admit outright that what they fund is the introduction of a religious perspective in science. Instead, we get euphemisms. They are a “Big Questions” foundation, whatever that means. He will not come right out and state plainly that what they think is a “Big Question” is the role of a god in creating and maintaining the universe and humankind.

That’s not a big question. It’s a bad question.

I have never found a discussion with a theologian about their favorite deities to be “rich, expansive” — just saying it is so doesn’t make it so, but is actually the crux of the argument. They are trying to buy their way into the debate, rather than earning it. I don’t think they know Grayling and Dennett very well at all, either, because they do know better, and the comparison with a dialog with astrologers is spot on — they won’t be disavowing it any time soon.

I’ll stand by my Mafia comparison, too. It’s an organization that gets a lot of mileage out of making offers people can’t refuse.

Juicy stuff from a mainstream newspaper coming out and hitting Scientology hard: this week and over the next few days, they’re publishing a special report on Scientology. If you’ve followed the cult at all, there’s nothing too surprising — it’s a scam run by abusive psychotics — but it does have some personal accounts by high-ranking defectors.

I’m sure there are meetings going on in Clearwater right now where they’re plotting revenge.

A young man in Kansas had a traumatic event in his life. Here’s a simple outline of what happened.

Chase Kear has a serious accident, fracturing his skull.
↓ Bystanders call for emergency medical help on their phones. ↓ Doctors arrive in a helicopter. ↓ Doctors administer emergency care. ↓ Helicopter arrives at hospital; doctors take him into surgery. ↓ Surgeons remove portion of his skull to protect his brain from swelling. ↓ Kear is treated with antibiotics to prevent infections. ↓ Swelling reduces, doctors restore Kear’s skull. ↓	↓ Bystanders pray. ↓ Family prays. ↓ Family prays. ↓ Family asks for the last rites to be administered to Kear. ↓ Family prays. ↓ Family prays. ↓ Family prays. ↓ Family prays. ↓
Kear survives, is rehabilited, and seems to be making a full recovery.

There are two ways of looking at this event. You either look at all the hard work that was put into saving Kear and helping him recover (the left column), or you ignore all that and pretend it was a group of people sitting around with folded hands who magically prodded an invisible man to do indetectable things that saved him (the right column). The latter view is now prompting the Catholic Church to send in a team of ‘investigators’ to determine whether Kear’s recovery was a miracle.

You should see me right now. I turned water into iced tea this morning, and right now I’m levitating a glass of the stuff with the power of my mind. Please ignore the contributions of the Lipton company, and the fact that I’m also using my left hand to hold up the glass, and canonize me. Oh, wait…I feel another magical transformation coming on. Let me submit this post (Huzzah! I affect electrons thousands of miles away!) and teleport myself to the bathroom. I expect emissaries from the Vatican to be at the door by the time I get back.

It’s a sad story. Amreen was Muslim, and Lokesh was Hindu, but these two young people loved each other and got married anyway. Isn’t that the way it should be, that religion is something that shouldn’t dictate the important matters in your lives? Unfortunately, the other people in their small town of Phaphunda couldn’t allow that. The village council met and ordered them to annul the marriage — and their families seem to have felt likewise, that their love had to be destroyed.

So Amreen and Lokesh took poison and killed themselves.

If this story sounds vaguely familiar, Cuttlefish has written a poem to clarify the resemblance.

Now the village is turning silent and stony to the outside world; the chief of the village is scurrying about to make sure no one speaks ill of the council or their traditions. It won’t help. Amreen and Lokesh spoke loud enough.

Barbara Bradley Hagerty has lately been polluting NPR with a series of superficial fluff pieces on religion — I’ve just groaned and turned the radio off when she comes on. She also has a book out, Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality, and just the title is sufficient to tell you it’s noise to avoid. If that’s not enough, though, you can also read a revealing review of the book.

That is why the work of a religion writer is different than that of a science reporter or a sportswriter. Most journalists — or at least most good journalists — are supposed to question everything. They are supposed to write about facts.

Religion writers, on the other hand, could care less about the facts – or at least about the basic facts. They write about faith, not facts.

Heh. Yes. Exactly.

And the conclusion of her book?

Nevertheless, Hagerty concludes by erring on the side of amorphous belief, concluding that “the language of our genes, the chemistry of our bodies, and the wiring of our brains – these are the handiwork of One who longs to be known.”

If he longs to be known, why not just come out and say howdy? Is this god shy or something? Otherwise, this is just the standard Intelligent Design creationist malarkey: something that is complex has the appearance of design because a) people conflate complexity with intent, and b) people have brains that have evolved to explain the world in terms of agency, therefore it must be designed by an intelligent agent for a purpose.

It’s a good review. It convinced me that I don’t need to read the book, ever.

That’s the title of the site, anyway, Proof That God Exists. It ain’t.

It’s a dreary exercise in the fallacy of the excluded middle. You are lead through a series of binary choices, in which you are asked to choose one alternative or the other, with the goal of shunting you to the desired conclusion, which is, of course, that God exists. Building on a fallacy is bad enough, but even worse, it can’t even do that competently — it cheats. All of the options are designed to bounce you to only one line of reasoning, and if you don’t play the designer’s game, it gets all pissy at you and announces that you aren’t serious and you should go away. Some proof, eh?

The one argument it channels you into is this one: there must be an absolute source of absolute morality, therefore, God. Francis Collins would be quite happy with it, I’m sure. When I took it, I agreed that there is an absolute truth (because I believe reality exists), I believe in logic and mathematics, but then when it asked if there is an absolute morality, I had to say no. Morality is a derived property generated by the interactions of individuals; it is not imposed on us from above. And that’s where the site gets nasty.

It gives you two choices: “Molesting children for fun is absolutely morally wrong” and “Molesting children for fun could be right”. If you answer the former, it bounces you back to the question about whether absolute moral laws exist…therefore God. You don’t get to choose something like “Molesting children is damaging to our species and harmful to individuals, and I agree with the cultural proscription against it”. If you answer the latter, you get their surrender message.

You have denied that absolute moral laws exist but you appeal to them all the time. You say that rape IS wrong because you know that it IS wrong and not just against your personal preference. Unless you reconsider your stand on this matter, your road to this site’s proof that God exists ends here. It is my prayer that you come to understand how inconsistent and irrational this line of thinking is and return to seek the truth.

I don’t think they understand the concept of a proof, or logic for that matter.

It is rather interesting that this is the most common “proof” people are throwing at us lately, this idea that the existence of a common morality in human cultures is evidence for a supreme being. It’s a sign of how weak and pathetic their arguments have become.

Jerry Coyne’s criticism of accommodationism by evolutionists seems to still be shaking a few trees and is generating an endless debate. Ken Miller has posted a long rebuttal. It’s mainly interesting for the way Miller flees from theism.

His first and only defense seems to be a denial of most of the implications of an interventionist deity…which is, of course, fine with me. He argues that all of his arguments about how a god could have intervened are carefully phrased in terms of conditional probabilities — he’s not describing what actually happened, but how a god might have meddled in the world, and then he openly states that any such interference would be beyond the ability of science to investigate. Well, OK. We could use the same logic to argue for the hypothetical role of elves in human history. I don’t see Miller or anyone else writing books about Finding Darwin’s Elves, however.

He then runs through various references from his books, and points out that he has been scrupulous about keeping the supernatural out of his explanations. This is true; whenever Miller talks about science, he’s careful not to play the “goddidit” gambit. He even says that you’d find “passages very much like that in some of Richard Dawkins’ books”, which is rather interesting and a point worth emphasizing. When scientists talk about evolution, it doesn’t matter whether you are a Miller or a Dawkins…the ideas are all the same. Note, however, that this occurs without Dawkins conceding a single point about a deity, while, as we see in his latest essay, Miller has to disavow any detection of divine tinkering at all.

It gets a little weird. Miller is reduced to embracing Dawkins and Carl Sagan, while claiming Coyne’s supporters are Bill Buckingham, Don McLeroy, and Phillip Johnson. Miller writes a book titled Finding Darwin’s God, but somehow he can claim this has nothing to do with mingling theism with evolution. It all reads as something rather disingenuous.

One thing I’d really like to have seen is something simple: is there anything that distinguishes the science of Coyne and Dawkins from that of Miller? Miller is quick to complain that his views have been twisted, but he only seems to want to say how everyone else is wrong, without clarifying exactly what his views on theistic explanations in evolution are. If they’re effectively excluded from scientific scrutiny, as he states, why should we bother with them at all? If any godly interventions would be indetectable, why shouldn’t we simply show the door to anyone who claims to have found reason to believe in them? Even more oddly, why should we credit any sectarian version of this interventionist deity — why Christian, or specifically Catholic, over any other supernatural tradition? Are we really supposed to accept that a vague deism and Catholicism are philosophically indistinguishable from one another?

Finally, two little details in his essay that bug me in particular.

In an essay in which he indignantly protests that his words have been twisted, he really ought to be more careful about twisting the words of others. He complains that Coyne argues that “Apparently, NAS and the NCSE ought to change their ways, come out of the intellectual closet, and admit that only one position is consistent with evolution — a philosophical naturalism that requires doctrinaire atheism on all questions of faith.”

I think if you actually read what Coyne wrote, he’s careful and explicit to say the exact opposite. He’s pointing out that those organizations have not been neutral, but have effectively endorsed a specific position favoring theistic evolution. He and I both have said that they should not demand atheistic purity, but that they should either stop making one-sided arguments for fluffy, boring, ‘innocuous’, and scientifically unsupportable theistic evolution, or they should be more careful to accurately represent the range of views of scientists, which includes atheists.

The final thing I find objectionable in the essay is Miller’s parting threat. I see this all the time, and seriously…every time, my lip curls in a sneer of disgust. It’s this genuinely stupid argument:

The tragedy of Coyne’s argument is the way in which it seeks to enlist science in a frankly philosophical crusade — a campaign to purge science of religionists in the name of doctrinal purity. That campaign will surely fail, but in so doing it may divert those of us who cherish science from a far more urgent task, especially in America today. That is the task of defending scientific rationalism from those who, in the name of religion would subvert it beyond all recognition. In that critical struggle, scientists who are also people of faith are critical allies, and we would do well not to turn those “Ardent Theists” away.

Set aside the claim that Coyne is on a crusade to purge biology — it’s a false assertion. What I really object to is the goofy “if you don’t be nice to god belief, the churchy scientists will take their ball home”. I metaphorically puke on the shoes of anyone who tries to make that argument.

Turn it around. Can you imagine atheist scientists saying that, if the NAS and NCSE keep talking the god talk, we’ll stop being allies in support of evolutionary biology and good science education? That we’ll be turned away and go do what, support Buckingham and McLeroy and Johnson? Pssht.

If theistic scientists are going to “turn away” from the science because of vigorous debate by the atheist contingent, then that gives the lie to the claim that they are not prioritizing their superstitions over science, and suggests that they aren’t really our allies in promoting good science. It’s a genuinely contemptible argument.