A reader sent me an email he/she got touting a new project by the Templeton Religious Trust, one of the big-money-granting foundations that arose from the largesse of gazillionaire fund manager John Templeton. You can see the initiative by clicking on the screenshot below. Note that the subheading reprises the original purpose of the Templeton Foundation: to find evidence for God in science. And of course they maintain the accommodationism that science and religion can be “mutually reinforcing”, which is ridiculous:
The grant for this project, which was a munifent $3,033,427, ended last October, and now they’re public. The email gave a summary, and we find no surprises there. David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist, apparently was part of this project (he appears at 1:35 in the video below). I’m not going to discuss it in detail, as it’s incredibly boring and tendentious, so click the screenshot above if you want an eyeful.
The only thing I’ll mention about the palaver below is the old rotten assertion that both science and religion are “belief systems”. No, religion is a belief system, a “way of believing what you can’t confirm, but science is, as Carl Sagan notes below, a “way of thinking.” The claim that science and religion are coequal as “belief systems” is one way that people like those at Templeton try to simultaneously do down science and elevate religion. It hasn’t worked: Christianity and Judaism are rapidly waning in the West as “nones” grow in number.
This is from the Templeton email; all bolding is theirs:
Can both science and religion help us find meaning?
Dominic Johnson at Oxford, and Michael Price at Brunel University say they can. Through a grant from Templeton Religion Trust, Johnson and Price have funded 18 research projects around the world to study how religious and scientific beliefs evolve over time and provide systems of meaning for people and whole communities.
“We are interested in the origins of two very important belief systems; religion and science; how these systems are compatible or incompatible, and what the implications are for society,” says Price.
To Price and Johnson, religion and science are both sources of wonder, awe, and life, and help satisfy the human need for meaning and purpose. Through this cross-cultural, interdisciplinary study, they have shown that many of the assumptions we have made about the relationship between religion and science have been wrong all along.
Doesn’t that remind you of sociologist Elaine Ecklund (who’s also been copiously funded by Templeton, making a career of osculating faith)?
“The findings that surprised me the most were that science and religion are not only not incompatible, but are actually mutually reinforcing,” continues Price. “The people who got the most benefits from science and religion were the people who subscribed to both belief systems.”
Science and religion are not in conflict, they’re stronger together.
For more information, watch this video
Who are they kidding? How is science, which operates without using the notion of gods or the supernatural, “stronger” because of religion? Well, here’s a 5-minute video, and the last 30 seconds tells us how science and religion are mutually reinforcing. But it’s a con.
Another big-time waste of money. What’s your meaning system?
Dialectical synthesis is guaranteed to produce the worst results. The results are fed back into dialectic. Its a faith.
Humans are imperfect-able. Humans are not god.
The Templeton Foundation is a gnostic religious cult.
Agreed science is (in order of importance) a method for finding out what’s true, a way of thinking, a body of knowledge, and a social community. Religion goes three for four there: way of thinking, body of knowledge, social community, but not a method. So if you don’t notice the method gap, then the claim that “The people who got the most benefits from science and religion were the people who subscribed to both belief systems” can still be true if ‘benefits’ mean church picnics, organ music, cathedrals, and introspection. Sort of a Dawkins religious benefit.
But those “benefits” are completely unrelated to science, and to imply otherwise is an awful disservice to science.
Exactly so, Mary.
As I understand it, science is a process whose guiding principles include a search for and dissemination of objective, replicable truth. The process is the foundation for the rules the community of scientists follow. Religion’s guiding principles are based on creating a group of people who live by a similar set of rules and venerate the same symbol or group of symbols called God. That symbol is the authority for that group’s community rules. Religion is based on faith. Social justice’s organizing principle seems to be raising the status of groups that have historically been socially, financially, or legally disadvantaged compared to the majority of people in their communities. All understood within an oppressed/oppressor framework, thus a faith based philosophy. Religion’s guiding principles have no nexus to science’s guiding principles. Social justice’s guiding principles have zero nexus to science’s but a relatively strong nexus to religion’s. My point? Good question. Scientific studies, publications, and commentary that attempt to incorporate religion or social justice principles are apt to fail spectacularly in their efforts. And to be intensely irritating in the process.
At the end: “The people who got the most benefits from science and religion were the people who subscribed to both belief systems.”
That is a deepity with at least one fallacy slipped in. Circular reasoning, for one thing.
Thanks to Jerry Coyne for the books Why Evolution is True [a great title that draws readers in] and Fact vs. Fancy.
We need to be patient with folks who hold to religious beliefs and understand they have been brainwashed to some extent. If adults can be drawn into a cult what chance do children have?
In my own case I assumed the dawn of Christianity was in ‘recorded’ times so that even if Noah’s flood was obviously garbled nonsense like Santa Claus, the ‘New Testament’ was imperfectly recording something that happened. Only much later did I find the overwhelming counterarguments with the help of science-based authors like Dawkins and Coyne.
Thanks again to Professor Coyne, the Skeptical Inquirer, etc. for trying to point out a lot of traps we gullibly fall into.
“Noah’s Flood” actually has some historical basis. A great flood is mentioned in
ancient Sumerian texts ca 3500 BC (way way before Noah btw).
Some geologists have found evidence that it may be connected with the
formation of the Black Sea millions of years ago.
There is evidence of a stupendous re-filling of the Mediterranean Sea after a long period of dryness. I can easily imagine stories told through many generations that would then be co-opted for the story of “Noah’s flood.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanclean_flood
(I found an article from Scientific American, but since it’s currently ideologically bent, I went for the Wikipedia article.)
Mutually reinforcing? Really?
Religion propounds all sorts of empirical claims that are not only incompatible with science, but are simply wrong. Religion and science are also epistemologically incompatible, with the findings of science being provisional, and with ideas being accepted or rejected based on evidence, reason, and repeatability. Depending on how one defines religion (and religionists often move the goalposts depending on the situation—another incompatibility with science), science and religion share little common ground.
“Mutually reinforcing? Really?”
Templeton is the gnostic with the secret knowledge.
What gets me about David Sloan Wilson is that he’s studied evolutionary biology. He must have read Dawkins and he must know that empathy and reciprocal altruism are both fully captured and explained by kin selection, so I can’t understand why he spends all his time scratching his head trying to understand it when it’s already been explained.
Where he is right is that humans are generally more empathetic, and less selfish than our nearest primate relatives.
Chimpanzees, for example are highly volatile and aggressive, especially the males, and this works for them as a species, because, as Jane Goodall and others have noted, status in their society is a strong indicator of their reproductive success and the survival of the offspring. What is different about modern humans is that our children mature at a much slower rate. Chimps become sexually mature at seven years old, and don’t require anything like the level of instruction and learning that a human child does. It follows that too much volatility and aggression would not be favoured in human society, as kids would be less likely to survive and succeed if their parents spent all their time fighting instead of caring for them. Warlike behaviour might have been an adaptation so that tribes did not allow themselves to be exploited by other tribes, but it would not be good for the children’s survival and upbringing if we were at war all the time. We are adapted for the social world we live in – there’s the explanation, so he doesn’t need to scratch his head over this “pro-social” stuff either.
DS Wilson is a long-time proponent of group selection. I don’t think he rejects kind selection (who could?) but he thinks group selection accounts for the spread and fixation of some kinds of traits in social groups like humans. I can’t summarize his reasons for thinking this, but he seems to think that religious belief is one such trait that can spread because shared belief makes some groups more likely than other groups to prosper and proliferate.
Wilson has been giving group selection a chance for a long time; he was espousing such heterodoxies when I took an evolutionary biology course he co-taught at Michigan State back in 1981 or so. (Another of the instructors in that course was the late Guy Bush, who was giving sympatric speciation a chance.)
The problem Dawkins and others had with group selection was that it could easily lead to muddled thinking.
Dawkins argued that it had to be gene selection that was at the core of evolutionary theory, because genes are the replicators and that is where the information about the phenotype is encoded, so selection at the level of groups or even, as some had suggested then, at the level of the species had to be wrong. For me gene selection is the real deal in evolutionary thinking, and it’s hard to see how Dawkins could be wrong about this way of thinking, which is why I find DSW’s position so surprising.
To illustrate the point: if traits become fixed in populations how could that be encoded except by change in the gene pool? This is not to say, of course that animals can’t be biologically programmed for group behaviour, for example herding behaviour in ungulates and tribalism in primates, but from an evolutionary perspective, those behaviours are encoded in genes and visible to natural selection.
I would not argue that social change could not happen in populations of complex social animals like us, and these could become fixed in the meme pool, as it were, but that is not an explanation that is relevant to Darwinian evolution by natural selection; it would be a sociological explanation and, as I understand it, DSW is claiming to be an evolutionary biologist not a sociologist.
On the question of religion, I think there probably is an underlying, genetically mediated predisposition for belief in humans. As I said above, the human need to protect, educate and nurture the young, probably means it wouldn’t be appropriate for our populations to be too volatile and aggressive. So if there was a trait that did not, by itself, encourage warlike behaviour but acted as a trigger for intensifying the response when a tribe does go to war, so that they would interpret an attack not just being on the tribe but is threatening deeply held beliefs, whether animism, ancestor worship, organised religion or any other system, it would mean a more determined opposition and more likelihood of success. From an evolutionary perspective of course, success would have to be measured in terms of the survival of the genes that predisposed the response.
Given the very powerful messages from Human history, and indeed current affairs, the dangers of tribalistic in-group/out-group behaviour, are all too apparent, especially with the presence of nuclear weapons, and as I’ve written elsewhere: “The loyal battalion commander of faith seems to have been the main supporter of Major-General Tribalism throughout all of human history.”
As others have pointed out above, science is above all a methodology. Religion is not only not a methodology of any sort, it has no methodology of its own to speak of. Indeed, in order to determine the truth or falsehood of statements within religion, there is no alternative to using the scientific approach! All religion has to offer is faith, tradition and holy texts, which are no guarantees of anything approaching the truth at all.
+1
Can I offer a small quibble here? From the perspective of the philosophy of science and the sociology of science, “science” is the systematic study and classification of the empirical world. The “methodology” that many scientists point to is the primary technique for testing/verifying/falsifying the findings and hypotheses of scientists, but it would still be “science” without subjecting those findings and hypotheses to testing.
“Religion” is trickier to define, but I always thought that Tyler’s late 19th century perspective is pretty good: religion refers to beliefs and actions relative to the supernatural.
The difference was nicely captured by the classic Scientific American cartoon by Sydney Harris, the one that has two scientists standing in front of a blackboard covered with formulae, and in the middle of the blackboard is the comment “Then a miracle occurs” – one scientist says to the other “I think you should be more explicit here in step two.” The point, of course, is that science does not mix the empirical and the supernatural, at least not intentionally, in the work of understanding the empirical world.
It’s just dishonest propaganda. But then, peddling nonsense is stock in trade for religion. Since religionists can no longer try to ban or simply dismiss science, believers are forced to create these absurd paradigms in an attempt to justify continued relevance for religion.
I am personally very tired of these reworkings of the “non-overlapping magisteria” hogwash. I generally refer people to Dr. Coyne’s book for a concise deconstruction of this nonsense.
The “meaning of life” for any individual is “to achieve a sense of accomplishment and feelings of joy.” The idea of a shared “meaning of life” is a dictate imposed by power mongers.
Science is “reality testing” whereby scientists put the fancies of the human imagination to the test by performing experiments to see if ideas conform to the way matters really are. Religion is neck deep in reality denial.
If “God” is defined as a code word for “the political power of the churches” then evidence can be found for “God” in science. Churchgoers are loath to define “God” this way because the evidence is of corruption.
+1
A religious approach to belief is characterized by a moral component: believing in X instead of Y (a) is an act of virtue and/or (b) leads to a virtuous end. Therefore, we ought to constantly find ways to hold on to X.
Whatever position reinforces and elevates the belief in one’s own esteem — it’s consistent with science, it follows the science, it contradicts science, it’s the root of the scientific process, it leads to the rejection of the need for science — is the position it’s going to be easy to take and defend. We are a moral animal, and the drive to make sense of the world by making it consistent with our ethics is stronger than a desire to make it consistent with our scientific discoveries.
The scientific method, with its demand for skeptical criticism from outsiders and a willingness to change a conclusion, obviously isn’t about finding which belief is more virtuous.
Excuse the horse laugh, but Templeton has been banging this drum since its inception. This whole wide eyed assurance that golly, we have to change what we thought we knew to accomodate this unexpected and unprecedented discovery is pure theater.
And if it’s the square root of the scientific process then it can’t have a negative (social) value.
Checkmate, atheists!
You just hit it. “Theater” is the word I was searching for. These guys are having such fun listening to one another blather on, loving the attention they’re attracting, but who’s listening? They are their own audience and they can’t get enough if themselves. Self important hams. Whatever.
Sastra, I like your highlighting the moral component of religious belief and would like to enlarge on it a bit. The morality of believing in and holding on to X is derived from the desire to be an obedient child, which itself is a valuable desire in that it has survival value when one is an ignorant, innocent child. I submit that the majority of the religious don’t fundamentally believe that the Bible, Koran, Vedas, Guru Granth Sahib, or any one of other so-called holy books are true and inerrant; they believe in an authority figure—parent, pastor, imam, swami, or other charismatic person—who told them that a certain book is true and inerrant. Thus, these believers have a primal fear of disobeying their authority figure deep down in their psyches. A criticism of their belief is really a criticism of their beloved authority figure, and so they respond self-righteously in defense. It’s the natural thing for an obedient child to do.
+1
The believer’s “primal fear” is that their guru might be wrong. Their internal sense of safety requires that he and his message be true.
Seeking to reconcile religion and science is to travel down the wrong path. Religion/myth taps into feeling, heart, mines what’s “true” for all humans now and in earlier times. Science is about fact, objective, reason. You don’t expect religious myth to be literally true; there is truth in the story, a truth
about humanity. Many do a “vision quest,” in one way or another; the Hero is an archetype that can guide and teach. Don’t expect to square religion with science.
Science is a system of disbelief – it is incompatible with every belief system.
“Science is system of disbelief — it is incompatible with every belief system.”
I like that! Can I use it generically, or do you want credit?
My sense of the appeal of religion is simple: The world is a scary, unpredictable place, and it’s natural to feel vulnerable to destructive forces beyond our control. It’s comforting to think that there are also forces to protect us, which we (the we here being humanity as a whole) anthropomorphize into gods. But those gods are unreliable, which just adds to our insecurity, so we try to find ways to encourage their benevolence—rituals, sacrifices, prayers.
Once you accept the above premise, you are enraged by anyone who doesn’t participate in the rituals, because they are alienating the gods. That justifies burning them at the stake.
The craziest part is that out of that fear we defer to those that appoint themselves the voices of the gods, who are usually the least moral and most shameless and self-serving among us. That’s how we arrive at all the mega-church billionaire pastors. And Templeton was willing to spend big bucks to promote the delusion to which he himself was prey.
Wait, are you talking about religion or about the pandemic response in much of the West?!
And in the article, Professors Willard and DeBarra say
The state of not knowing makes some people deeply uncomfortable that it makes them conducive to accepting dogma. In effect, a made up ‘truth’ is better than not knowing.
It takes some courage to admit to oneself that one is ignorant — the good first step to finding out. Of the religious people with whom I’ve had serious conversations, none admitted right away that they could be wrong; one did finally give in after what seemed an eternity, only to revert to being absolutely sure that he was right the following morning.
The Christians were quick to admit that humans are fallible (of course they are!). But could they have erred in believing the things they do? No, of course not!
This seems to be what happened to Ayaan Hirsi Ali: a existential crisis led her to turn back to religious belief (Christianity the second time around).
https://twitter.com/HannahGraceLong/status/1787143238526099796
Ironically she invokes the need for humility as a justification for belief. Sort of the opposite of your point about the importance of acknowledging one might be wrong.
There was a passage from one of Richard Dawkins’ books – I forget which one – which asks us to imagine what would happen if all of humanity were to wake up one day with complete amnesia. We would have forgotten all of our scientific knowledge, there would be no memory of our native languages, and also no recollection of our various religions.
Over time, we would gradually regenerate these things. But the languages that we would make would turn out completely differently, as would our particular religions. There would be no Christianity, no Islam, no Buddhism, and so on. Those would be replaced by beliefs in other gods and by other rituals.
But the scientific method would re-grow pretty much as it is, and scientific knowledge would also be recovered, in every detail, and so would our same scientific theories.
Excellent point.
Of course, the talk about ‘both religion and science as systems of belief’ is a weak point in the article, science being radically different. It is as if the authors are trying to impose an equivalence where none exists.
The questions do not mention finding evidence for God in science. Do you think that’s what’s being suggested? The ‘big questions’ being explored within this initiative don’t seem intent on finding evidence for God in science; instead, it seems that the projects described in this article are more about investigating the role of religion in society than about Truth.
Has the Templeton Foundation’s original purpose been diluted? Or do you think that the Templeton people don’t want to admit their real purpose anymore?
Of reading of what others have discribed and written I go with…
Science is fact based, dynamic and facilitates error correction, religion on the otherhand is dogma and static.
Religion is at best a history lesson in societal cultural adhesion, useful only in that we now know we don’t need it.
Science is provisional and the pursuit of reality devoid of morality confusing issues. Science though betters our ability to be moral, negate illusions, apply reason and truth to make decisions to improve our lot and hopefully our fellow travelers and planet.
Science to me is a part and pacel of the human survival mechanism.
If I may be so bold. I believe that religion began neither as a philsophical construct, such as to explain the meaning of life, nor to explain scientific phenomena in eras before such phenomena could be explained (why does is rain).
Religion began as a socially created tool of law enforcement. Before any form of rapid communication, before police, before forensics, God existed as the big brother watching us all, seeing our misdeeds, and punishing us even if it meant waiting until death to do so.
In time, religion added onto its roster of rule-based social construction to include the philosopical and scientific explanations of why and how things exist. But I believe that it started basically as a legal code.
In short, the Taliban and Sharia is more in line with what I see as the fundamental core of religion than a religious school trying to circumvent science.
It’s a plausible hypothesis. But maybe they all “co-evolved”?
Philosophers have been given grief for seeing things the way they are instead of the way things should be. Of course people are deeply divided on “how things SHOULD be” so that’s a problem.
I wish I could find the BC Comic of the two guys explaining the rainbow to the woman – as she walks away with one peg leg says, “She’ll take the dreamer over the blowhard every time” .
FWIW I ran this question by the AI (Llama3-70B) this weekend and it hallucinated:
Prompt:
What happens when you fail to acknowledge the undefinable basis of consciousness, or pretend it does not exist because it cannot be make the object of consciousness?
Response:
When we fail to acknowledge the undefined basis of consciousness or pretend it doesn’t exist because it can’t be made the object of consciousness, several consequences arise:
Limited understanding: We restrict our comprehension of consciousness to only its manifestations and expressions, overlooking the fundamental essence that underlies them. This limited perspective prevents us from grasping the true nature of consciousness.
Objectification of consciousness: By attempting to make the undefined basis of consciousness an object of consciousness itself, we fall into a logical contradiction. Consciousness becomes both the subject (the observer) and the object (the observed), leading to a philosophical impasse.
Neglect of subjective experience: Focusing solely on the definable aspects of consciousness might lead us to disregard the subjective, qualitative experience that is inherent to conscious existence. This neglects the very essence of what it means to be conscious.
Reductionism and fragmentation: When we try to break down consciousness into its constituent parts or functions, we risk losing sight of the integrated, holistic nature of consciousness. This reductionist approach can lead to a fragmented understanding, failing to capture the intricate relationships within consciousness.
Mystification or dogmatism: The undefined basis of consciousness may be shrouded in mystery or obscured by dogmatic beliefs. This can result in an ungrounded, speculative approach to understanding consciousness, rather than acknowledging the limits of our knowledge and engaging in open-minded inquiry.
Missed opportunities for self-reflection: By not acknowledging the undefined basis of consciousness, we might overlook opportunities for introspection and self-awareness. Recognizing the limitations of our understanding can foster humility, encouraging us to explore the depths of our own consciousness.
Impoverished philosophy of mind: A failure to acknowledge the undefined basis of consciousness can lead to a impoverished philosophy of mind, neglecting the complexities, nuances, and paradoxes inherent to conscious experience.
Unproductive debates and conflicts: Disputes about the nature of consciousness may arise from differing perspectives on its undefined basis. Unacknowledged assumptions and biases can fuel these debates, hindering constructive dialogue and progress.
By recognizing the undefinable basis of consciousness, we can cultivate a deeper appreciation for the mysteries of conscious existence, fostering a more nuanced, humble, and open-minded approach to understanding the human experience.
I am not a professional scientist, but I am very much a fan of the success of scientific methods in explicating the universe around me and expanding what I know about it. Much of my attitude toward science is colored by the wonder it creates in me, and the beauty it exposes to me.
https://x.com/Jon_Alexandr/status/1760338456306385330