Studying the Trinity: More dollars wasted by Templeton and philosophy groups

November 16, 2015 • 10:15 am

Here’s part of an email announcement sent out by the “Philosophy Admin” of Oxford University, which may mean (but may not) that this ridiculous conference, part of an initiative that I’ve mentioned before, has the blessing of Oxford University. It certainly has the blessing of the Templeton World Charity foundation, the Analysis Trust (publishers of the reputable philosophy journal Analysis), and the Aristotelian Society—once, at least, a reputable philosophical society whose presidents included Bertrand Russell, A. J. Ayer, Isaiah Berlin, and Karl Popper.

At least several of these people would, I’m sure, be appalled at this conference, whose notice was sent to me by someone who described it thusly: “Look at this utterly vacuous intellectually corrupt rubbish, at Oxford, and sent also to physics mailing lists! – looking for smartass ways of making talk of ‘god in three persons’ not sound like gobbledygook on methamphetamine.”

*******
The Metaphysics of the Trinity: New Directions 

International conference 

14 – 16 March 2016, Corpus Christi College, Oxford  

Keynote Speakers:

Nikk Effingham (University of Birmingham) [JAC: Head of Birmingham’s Philosophy Department!]
John Heil (Washington University in St Louis) 
Shieva Kleinschmidt (University of Southern California)
Rob Koons (University of Texas at Austin)
Brian Leftow (University of Oxford)
Richard Swinburne (University of Oxford)
An open call for papers from graduate students and early career researchers can be found here. 

A number of student bursaries will be made available.Please contact [NAME REDACTED TO AVOID EMBARRASSMENT] with any queries.

The conference is financially supported by the Templeton World Charity Foundation,  the Aristotelian Society and the Analysis Trust.
*******
A recent and large survey of philosophers found that the majority of them were atheists; here are the results:
Atheism or theism?
72.8% atheism
14.6% theism
12.5% other
Given that philosophers are about as atheistic as academics get, it’s even more bizarre that they’re discussing the philosophical implications of a fatuous, made-up theological construct, and that someone is paying for it.
Fridolin_Leiber_-_Holy_Trinity

63 thoughts on “Studying the Trinity: More dollars wasted by Templeton and philosophy groups”

  1. I’ve never seen the trinity portrayed that way. It was always old dude with white beard, younger dude with brown beard and a dove.

    I like the idea of identical triplets wearing identifying shirts. Maybe swapping shirts to prank their girlfriends.

    Though, why are they standing on those disembodied heads? That’s a tad disconcerting

    1. You’d think that this one was satirical (honestly it’s hard to tell sometimes, religious art can be weird) but if you google Holy Trinity and look at the images you’ll see that a number of depictions included three iterations of the same guy to reinforce the point that the Trinity both was and wasn’t the same entity.

      As for the disembodied cherubim,they feature regularly in religious art. I never can tell whether the artist in question ran out of space on the canvas or just decided he’d had enough of drawing hovering babies for one day.

    2. That’s what got me too – the feet on the angel heads. But I did notice another way of telling them apart – the Jesus god has a bloody mark on his foot! Mother Mary can tell him apart at least!

      Philosophy at Oxford must be really hard up for money, which is sad.

      1. So that shows where he was “nailed”.

        I have a hard time with such little wings on the heads. It’s a miracle that they get off the ground.

        1. I quite like Grania’s suggestions. It’s a lot easier to draw a whole lot of winged heads than some cherubim. On that note, God’s easier if he just needs a logo change too. The medieval version of Photo shop.

          1. That’s true. As everyone knows, “real” cherubim” have like eight faces — including animal faces — and like six sets of wings.

            I also noticed that the artist included two actual babies with hands and arms so that they could get up under Jesus’s and the Holy Ghost’s togas! o 0

            This piece reminds me of another I’ve seen where the Trinity has three heads, one torso and three legs.

          2. Reminds me of the old Rolf Harris song (I wish it didn’t since he turned out to be so revolting) ‘Jake the Peg.’

            I’m Jake the Peg, deedle, eedle, eedle, um
            With my extra leg, deedle, eedle, eedle, um
            http://www.songlyrics.com/rolf-harris/jake-the-peg-lyrics/

            With all those extra bits we should get Ben Carson on the job. With a bit of luck it’ll keep him busy until after the election. I’m sure he’d prefer to spend his time with the triune god.

    3. This is the first time I’ve seen this depiction also. Time for the sophisticated theologians to explore the ramifications of the trinity via Teletubbies.

    4. My bet is that the winged heads are the angels of all the fertilized eggs that God decides to abort.

    5. Yeah I found that amusing too. But hey…what’s Horus doing there in the center? The eye in the pyramid is his symbol!

      In truth the inclusion of that symbol shows this is a relatively recent painting – probably 17th century or later – because before then, this was considered a pagan symbol and not used by Christians to denote God.

    6. “Maybe swapping shirts to prank their girlfriends.” Or possibly their boyfriends? Let’s not assume 😉

  3. If only they’d decided to study foursomes. And then removed the god stuff. O, if only I was a wealthy philanthrope!

    1. “foursomes” in the sense of “Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice?”
      That could make for some … entertining … conferences.

  5. Uhg, they have the odious Richard Swinburne as a keynote speaker. He says that the Holocaust was *necessary* so that people could have the opportunity to do good.(I believe he noted that bit of cringe worthy theodicy in this episode of the Unbelievable podcast, up against Bart Ehrman, https://www.premierchristianradio.com/Shows/Saturday/Unbelievable/Episodes/Unbelievable-10-Jan-2009-The-problem-of-suffering-Ehrman-Swinburne )

    Whether it is defending polytheism as monotheism, er, I mean discussing “The Metaphysics of the Trinity: New Directions”, or defending the Holocaust as morally necessary, religion only hurts rational thinking.

  6. “The Metaphysics of the Trinity: New</b< Directions"

    I'm sure that they will be presenting all their new data at the conference that allows them to promise these new directions.

  7. Oxford like most Universities in the UK is really desperate for nearly anybody’s money and since it also has a connection with C S Lewis it is a natural target for Templeton.
    I suspect he would not have been happy about the trinity depicted above.

  8. If anyone has 40 minutes to spare and fancies a chuckle (although you will also feel like head-butting a table) I would recommend listening to the following podcast: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03xgl3m. This is an edition of the generally excellent In Our Time by BBC Radio 4. The format consists of 3 experts and the host discussing an intellectual topic. In this one we have 3 extremely sophisticated theologians (one each from Oxford and Cambridge) cogitating on the trinity, which as usual results in much obfuscation and silliness. It manages to demonstrate more or less everything that is wrong with theology all in one podcast. Funny and infuriating!

      1. It is. Expat in the US here. All iPlayer Radio stuff is available abroad, it’s just the TV we can’t get without going through a VPN.

    1. othradar6, if you click on the hotlink in the post, “A recent and large survey of philosophers,” you will find a page that names and links to sources.

      1. Thanks, this is great stuff. I’m surprised by the following:

        Aesthetic value:
        Lean toward: objective 252 / 931 (27.1%)
        Lean toward: subjective 181 / 931 (19.4%)

        I would have assumed fewer to accept the Kantian view of objective aestheticism.

        Anyway, intriguing study. Thanks!

  11. Jesus’ lamb shirt is hilarious…then you got the father with the one-dollar-bill all-seeing-eye shirt and the holy geist with the dove…who should I pray too, it’s so confusing? Maybe Templeton can sort this out for us. Probably have to go for the father’s dollar, me being American and all.

    1. “…who should I pray to…”

      Think of them as outfielders. If you bang out a nice high floater of a prayer (say for a new iphone at Christmas, or to get over the flu in a couple of weeks) into left field, Jesus will snag it. More complicated stuff sometimes bounces off the right field wall, and the Holy Ghost isn’t the greatest at running and jumping (ethereal legs and all), so those can get missed. Connecting with a cancer fastball, however, is pretty much over the center field fence and into the stands. Of course God could jump really, really high, but He doesn’t like to show off and seem all supernatural or anything.

  13. I think the doctrine of the Trinity was largely politically motivated as one of many tools for the Emperor Constantine to consolidate his hold on the Christian church in the Empire. Richard E. Rubenstein has discussed this well in his highly readable “When Jesus Became God: The Struggle to Define Christianity during the Last Days of Rome”. (Not to be confused with Riohard L. Rubenstein who has written on the Holocaust!)

    The conference organizers are correct to note that since it was formulated using Greek metaphysical concepts that make no sense in the light of modern science (three hypostases in one substance), the formulation is in some trouble.

    I suspect that the appeal of the notion is that it gives believers a blurry way to think of God as transcendent and immanent at the same time.

    What Templeton is doing has already been tried by “process theologians” who view the 3 “persons” as not being “hypostases” but as “primordial fields of divine activity”.
    If that floats your boat, okay, but I hope your boat has a compass, rudder, and a steering wheel as well.

      1. Going with singular “field”,

        if I am in a field of flowers near a starlit ocean beach eating chocolate-covered strawberries with a beloved one, then I can say “primordial field of divine activity” with a straight face, yes.

  14. 72.8% atheism
    14.6% theism
    12.5% other

    What is “other”? Haven’t really thought about it? And where’s the missing 0.1%?

    1. Philosophers used to be great mathematicians…not so much anymore.

      Philosophers have always been and continue to be great at defining their own world paradigms, so I am surprised only 12.5% have made up some imaginary ontology for themselves (or maybe that’s just the number that admit it).

    2. “Other” is a mishmash of things. I’ve copied the fine-grain breakdown below (from the philpapers site, here: http://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl?affil=Target+faculty&areas0=0&areas_max=1&grain=fine). Bourget and Chalmers ran the survey and wrote a paper about it, which you can get as a pdf here: http://philpapers.org/archive/BOUWDP

      God: Theism or Atheism?

      Accept Atheism: 576 / 931 (61.9%)
      Lean Toward Atheism: 102 / 931 (11.0%)
      Accept Theism: 99 / 931 (10.6%)
      Agnostic / Undecided: 51 / 931 (5.5%)
      Lean Toward Theism: 37 / 931 (4.0%)
      Reject Both: 16 / 931 (1.7%)
      The question is too unclear to answer: 16 / 931 (1.7%)
      Skip: 9 / 931 (1.0%)
      Accept another alternative: 8 / 931 (0.9%)
      Accept an intermediate view: 7 / 931 (0.8%)
      Other: 5 / 931 (0.5%)
      There is no fact of the matter: 5 / 931 (0.5%)

      I am by no means *sure* what people had in mind, but I can imagine some positions that might plausibly count as alternatives to or intermediate views between atheism and theism. For example, one might be an instrumentalist, fictionalist, or constructivist about gods. And the claim that there is no fact of the matter seems reasonable if you think that the hypothesis that there is a god is just too unclear to be testable.

      The reason the percentages don’t sum to 100% is almost certainly an artifact of rounding to the nearest tenth of a percent. (Note that the raw counts do sum up to 931, which is the total number of respondents.) Having percentages that sum to 100% plus or minus 0.1% is not unusual in survey reporting.

      1. Thanks for the clarification, Jonathan. I didn’t go to the link. I would have thought theism/atheism was an either/or thing, like biotic/abiotic, but I was forgetting that these were philosophers.

    3. Rounding error.. like several R candidates.

      And there’s a definite fallacy of composition, as small [and not-so-small] church sponsored schools have philosophy faculty who are much more likely to be theists than elsewhere. Probably below 10% theists among straight-on philosophers at secular US colleges.

  17. reputable philosophical society

    I am tempted to seach for the Oxford Rockinghorse Turd appreciation society. They’re probably just across the hallway. Stableyard. Something like that.
    OK, it’s a bit harsh. But in terms of turning good trees into thin sheets of inky bullshit, Philosophy is up there with … Department of Theology, I guess.

  18. Reblogged this on Nina's Soap Bubble Box and commented:
    the Abrahamic Trilogy is a poorly applied mashup of the Pagan Maid, Mother and Crone.

    it does interestingly, allow the Hindus to say the holy ghost is the aspect of Krishna the overgod, and so all gods are one and the faces are many.

    Dear Templeton Foundation, Can I haz the million dollars?

    religion meets science in the art of psychiatry – yous is delusional. You probably won’t pay to learn that.

    but given the Paris attacks, first on the media and then on civilization

    we don’t have time to coddle religion’s feelings anymore.

    1. “Reblogged this on Nina’s Soap Bubble Box and commented:
      the Abrahamic Trilogy is a poorly applied mashup of the Pagan Maid, Mother and Crone.”

      I’m not seeing it. Maid, mother and crone are part of a continuum, and are serial and repeating in a loop. The Triune God is concurrent.

        1. In viewing the recurring prevalence of this, “Tri-form” meme in religion, I’m tempted to think that it is somehow a, “hard-wired” thing: our thinking is dualistic in nature (a single neuron either fires, or it doesn’t fire) and we can only describe or experience things by setting them against or comparing them to other things. I believe this explains the, “point” of the Zen koan, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”- there must always be, “another side”; everything is dualistic.

          This brings us to a, “two-essence”, dualistic reality, but something is missing: the observer, who NOTES the differences between one thing and another- there’s your third partner. The “observer”, as well, is an integral part of this reality and is actually created and sustained BY the notation of the duality. The Zen koan, “If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?” seems to be designed to lead one back to the realization that there HAS to be an, “observer”, and that the observer is every bit as much a part of the phenomenon as the tree and the event.

          One might well ask, “If the observer is a necessary part, does that mean that nothing existed before we perceived it, or unless we perceive it?” It doesn’t matter: we only perceive in the, “here and now” and the evidence we perceive indicates existence before, and outside of, our personal existence and scope of perception.

          1. We do often get stuck in either/or – binary thinking. But there is also if then else, pascal’s wager is a big illogic that way. it’s not if there is a god – but a tiny chance there is, but that then can point to any of 10,000s of previously considered ones. http://www.godchecker.com

  19. What about the Physics of the Trinity? That has to come first to bear out the plausibility of the metaphysics. I say the Father and Son are 2 superimposed quantum states that manifest themselves into an actual state only when you’ve had enough sips of the Holy Spirit. My personal choice is usually a well aged single malt whiskey. It’s also been rumored that on some occasions the Holy Spirit gives you the power of double vision and you catch a rare glimpse of the father and son together.

    Where’s my grant money?

  20. One of the questions this conference should tackle is whether all the natural and human-made disasters that occur here on earth is because those three fellers are so engrossed in their game of three-handed Sheepshead that they aren’t paying attention to what they started back there in Genesis.

  22. Given that philosophers are about as atheistic as academics get, it’s even more bizarre that they’re discussing the philosophical implications of a fatuous, made-up theological construct, and that someone is paying for it.

    14% of all philosophers is still quite a lot of philosophers, plenty to make a conference about an aspect of theology.

  24. None of the esteemed philosophers would be appalled at the trinity being discussed philosophically as it is a philosophical doctrine, albeit Catholic philosophy which borrowed from the Greeks (in particular ideas about substance) . In his book on philosophy Russell had more than one Catholic philosopher from the Middle Ages. 6 or 7 in fact.

    Which isn’t to say that the philosophy isn’t bunk but it is philosophy.

    1. There are lots Catholics and other theologians worth considering in the history of the field, true, but the field (well, a lot of it) has moved on. Moreover, the bastardization of Aristotle that is required to get (say) the Eucharist to work would be unfamiliar outside of that use, so in particular to ancient philosophers. Similarly for the trinity. Aquinas’ (and others) great genius was used/wasted in creating a system where if you squint, almost sounds plausibly Christian and peripatetic. Doesn’t work – should have stuck with Plato – but then they would have stayed in the Dark Ages, so …

      1. Yeah, I would say it breaks down pretty dramatically when there’s a claim that something with the form of a cracker can have the essence of a deity and this can be known with certainty, but the idea of say a cat having the essence of a T. Rex is just silly.

        Invocation of Divine Mystery, capital letters and much hand-waiving ensues…

        1. But that’s not what Catholic philosophy claims. Based on Greek philosophy it claims that the substance but not the materials change. And to explain that you would need to understand the Greek ideas on substance ( a non material meta physical entity). Which of course most people don’t know. This is the very opposite of what is often claimed, that the Catholic Church was massively irrational – because irrationality wouldn’t need a philosophical explanation but just say the “divine presence” changes or some such claim. That’s in general the Protestant view. It goes against Protestant beliefs of course that Protestantism is irrational, but victors make history.

          As for Oxford it was founded by Catholics, funded by Catholics, introduced (along with the Sorbonne and many ithers) the classical 3rd level education system into Europe and managed to avoid being a victim of the taleban arm of Protestantism. It’s the home of Anglo Catholicism, the Anglican claim of continuity from Rome.

          Theology has been taught in Oxford for centuries.

          Philosophy is almost entirely bunk, but worth listening to anyway as a sample of how people explained the world in the abscence of empirical science. If you ban the metaphysics of the trinity might as well ban it all.

          1. But that’s not what Catholic philosophy claims. Based on Greek philosophy it claims that the substance but not the materials change

            I’m not sure which part of what I said is at odds with Catholic philosophy. From the Catechism: “1376 The Council of Trent summarizes the Catholic faith by declaring: “Because Christ our Redeemer said that it was truly his body that he was offering under the species of bread, it has always been the conviction of the Church of God, and this holy Council now declares again, that by the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood. This change the holy Catholic Church has fittingly and properly called transubstantiation.”

            Later it says, “1412 The essential signs of the Eucharistic sacrament are wheat bread and grape wine, on which the blessing of the Holy Spirit is invoked and the priest pronounces the words of consecration spoken by Jesus during the Last Supper: ‘This is my body which will be given up for you. . . . This is the cup of my blood. . . .'”

            It would seem the Church is using substance rather than essence even though the Aristotelian notions are similar. I’ll accept that substance would have been more accurate than essence in my first post, but essentially (haha), this is what the Church teaches. The cracker has the substance of Christ and the accidents of a cracker. This still leaves the question unanswered that if anything can have its substance and accidents separated, how the hell can one know that anything is what we think it is? Why can’t I be displaying the essential signs of a human typing on the Internet but my substance is in fact that of Poseidon (along with his divinity and soul, two more nebulous terms)? I know there are mounds of philosophy supposedly justifying this stance but it never gets around to presenting any criteria for determining a thing’s substance without massive special-pleading in the case of the holy chip. Aristotle certainly wasn’t making claims that crackers had the substance of deities as far as I’ve ever heard. And that, I think is at least part of what Keith Douglas referred to as the Church’s bastardization of Aristotelian concepts, a sad thing in itself given how those concepts break down in light of modern Physics.

  25. What makes it REALLY awkward are these Wholly Babble quotes:

    Matthew 19:17:
    And he said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God: but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.

    Luke 18:19:
    And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? none is good, save one, that is, God.

    Mark 10:18:
    And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God.

    So- does this mean that one, or more of these three are, “gooder” than the others?

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