Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
What do you do when an organization you admire gets money from an organization you detest? I’ve just found out that FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a free-speech group whose work I admire, has gotten lots of dough from the John Templeton Foundation. To see the article on the FIRE website, click on at the screenshot:
Gag me with a spoon! This is what FIRE writes:
“FIRE is grateful to the Templeton Foundation for its generous investment in the fight to defeat censorship and preserve academic freedom on campus,” said FIRE President and CEO Greg Lukianoff. “The grant will give FIRE tremendous resources to engage a wider audience and better understand the current attitudes and arguments about campus rights. FIRE has been eager to pursue a project like this since our founding in 1999. The Templeton Foundation has now made it a reality.”
Businessman and philanthropist Sir John Templeton gave his foundation the motto “how little we know, how eager to learn” to exemplify its support for open-minded inquiry and the hope for advancing human progress through breakthrough discoveries. The Templeton Foundation supports research on subjects ranging from complexity, evolution, and infinity to creativity, forgiveness, love, and free will. It encourages civil, informed dialogue among scientists, philosophers, and theologians, and between such experts and the public at large, for the purposes of definitional clarity and new insights.
As the Templeton Foundation noted when it gave this grant in 2016, the money is $2,547836, and the grant goes from January of 2017 to December of this year. As for me, well, I’ll still report on FIRE’s activities promoting free speech on campus, but I won’t be involved with them in any other way (not that they’ve ever asked me!).
Scientists in Synagogues, an initiative funded primarily through The John Templeton Foundation. . . offers Jews opportunities to explore the most interesting and pressing questions surrounding Judaism and science, and to share how some of the most thoughtful Jewish scientists integrate their Judaism and their scientific work.
And if you look up the goals of “Scientists in Synagogues,” you find out that, unlike evangelical Christians, most Jews are okay with science (read: evolution). Contra Biologos, S&S’s goal is not to get Jews to embrace science, but to embrace Judaism more firmly! The organization wants to use “theology” to hammer into Jews that science and religion are not in conflict, but collaborative. To wit (emphases are mine):
About 25% of the American populace chose one of the two conflict options, which, interestingly, was the same percentage as the Jewish population. But while most of the Christians who saw religion and science in opposition viewed themselves as on the side of religion, those Jews who saw science and religion in conflict came down on the side of science — and by a huge margin. For the “conflicted Christians,” three out of four opted for religion, and one out of four chose science. But for the 25% of conflicted Jews, 15 out of 16 saw themselves on the side of science, and therefore, anti-religion.
This finding clearly implies that it’s often less of a challenge to get Jews to embrace science than it is to get them to embrace Judaism. Perhaps because Judaism has long embraced questioning and challenging authority, or perhaps because theology is rarely emphasized in the more liberal branches of Judaism, many Jews erroneously think that if they accept science, then they need to reject their Judaism. Thus one goal of Scientists in Synagogues will be to show that science and Judaism need not be in conflict, and that Jews do not need to reject their Judaism in order to celebrate science.
Yet there is an even more important goal of Scientists in Synagogues, and that comes from a slightly more subtle finding from the Perceptions Project. For the 75% of the populace who did not see science and religion in conflict, respondents were allowed to choose either “in collaboration” or “independent.” Jews were lower than any other religious group in viewing religion and science as “collaborative,” meaning that many Jews did not see science and religion as supporting each other. Instead, Jews were higher than any other group in viewing religion and science as “independent.”
Well, if Judaism supports science, it’s only through a disproportionate number of scientists having Jewish backgrounds (most “Jewish” scientists I’ve met are, of course, atheistic cultural Jews, like me). And science surely doesn’t support Judaism, for time after time science has shown that Jewish scripture is just wrong (two examples: the creation story of Genesis and the now-falsified Exodus of Jews from Egypt). What a great use of Templeton dollars!
Sinai and Synapses mottos:
Before I get to the S&S article at hand, I looked up S&S’s advisory board, and found, to my surprise, the usual suspects, including some Christians. Among the advisors are Elaine Ecklund, accommodationist extraordinaire, a sociologist heavily funded by Templeton; Karl Giberson, who used to bear the honorific “Uncle” but has now lost it again; Jennifer Wiseman, a Christian astrophysicist who heads the AAAS Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion (DoSER) program. (If you belong to the AAAS, which publishes the journal Science, remember that your membership money is used for accommodationism); and Michael Zimmerman, head of the Clergy Letter Project, a project self-described as “an endeavor designed to demonstrate that religion and science can be compatible and to elevate the quality of the debate of this issue.”
What a nest of accommodationists! I’m a bit disheartened to see that Templeton, which seems to be neuronally depauperate, continues to pump money into the futile endeavor of reconciling science and religion. And as the West becomes more secular, the necessity of that endeavor shrinks even as the desperation of its adherents grows.
To the issue at hand: I looked at the S&S webpage and found this article, comprising two separate promoters of apologetics. It caught my eye because I’ve always been interested in the question of whether there are religious “truths” that can’t be apprehended by science. (The answer, as I show in Faith Versus Fact, is “no”—not when it comes to factual statements about the cosmos. As for “moral truths”, well, those aren’t really truths in the scientific sense, but simply statements—usually consequentialist in nature—that grow out of one’s preference.)
But let’s look at how Timothy Maness, a Ph.D. student in religious studies at Boston University, answers the question below. Maness recites the entire piece in the video below, but I’ll single out the one “truth” that religion purports to find and science cannot. Read and weep:
First, Maness claims that religious “truths” are found by a different method than are scientific truths. That method is personal apprehension, a form of “subjectivity”:
. . . . when people over the past couple of hundred years have talked about religion, we have usually put most of our emphasis on the subjective rather than the “objective” side, and not without good reasons. As the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard observed, a religious experience is by its nature one that we can’t really capture in words. Trying to describe something that you don’t really have words for is hard, for the same reason that it’s hard to tell someone else about a dream you had: while you may be able to set out in a dispassionate way the images you saw or the words you heard, it’s impossible to get across to another person the strange and powerful meaning that those words or images had in the context of your dream: the emotional details that gave the dream its character. If you can’t pass an idea on clearly from your mind to other people’s minds, then you can’t really treat that idea in anything but a subjective way. Of course, I don’t mean to say that religion is all about private, subjective experiences that we can’t talk about effectively. I just mean that, in religious contexts, we have no choice but to think in subjective terms as well as objective ones if we want to address everything that’s going on.
Ascertaining the “truth content” of a private, subjective experience is impossible unless you can verify it empirically, i.e., objectively. If Maness says that Jesus came to him in a revelation as the Son of God, all I can say is that, yes, Maness says that he had such a revelation (if you believe him). But that tells us absolutely nothing about whether Jesus existed, was divine, and was the son of God. As William James noted, a lot of religious belief comes from revelation—from people getting feelings of what’s true. And that’s surely the case, but it doesn’t tell us what actually is true. After all, Muslim religionists, Hindu religionists, and so on all get revelations that tell them different “truths.” And there’s no way to winnow the real truths from the claimed ones—if there are any real truths there.
Well, Maness makes no statement defending Jesus, miracles, the Resurrection, and so on, but he does limn one “truth” that subjectivity reveals and empiricism cannot. He reveals that below, but for the life of me I can’t figure out what he’s trying to say:
Still, I think that, if we try to live by objectivity alone, we end up missing things that we can’t do without. Let’s take time as an example again. As I said earlier, when we treat time in purely objective, mathematical terms, what we get is just a list of events ordered from earlier to later, with every moment in time like every other one. The crucial thing that’s missing from that view of time is any sense of now, of a unique moment in which we can act, unlike all the past moments that we can remember or the future ones we can try to imagine. There’s no way to translate that vital distinction into mathematics. And we need both points of view, the objective and the subjective, in order to live our lives in time, just as we need two eyes to see depth. I need the objective view of time, that numbered list of events on a timeline, to say that I’m meeting my friend for lunch at noon, and I also need the subjective view, so that I can know when noon is now, the time for me to get up and go.
So, that’s one of the roles that my religion plays in my life: to show me that I need the subjective as well as the objective, the personal as well as the purely rational, action as well as contemplation. If in my life I can integrate that subjective call to action, to know who I am and to be who I ought to be, with the powerful objective tools of science, then that will be something like success.
I’ve read that first paragraph and pondered it several times, and I’m still mystified. First of all, even if you think there’s a truth buried in there somewhere, it’s not a truth that requires religion. That aside, why does the concept of “now” have to be translated into mathematics? (In fact, I’m sure it could be.) The entire “truth” that Maness discerns from his faith seems to be this:
I need the objective view of time, that numbered list of events on a timeline, to say that I’m meeting my friend for lunch at noon, and I also need the subjective view, so that I can know when noon is now, the time for me to get up and go.
Well, of course there are objective ways to tell Maness when it’s noon: he can simply set his iPhone alarm, which is synched to the local time. And when the alarm goes off, the signal goes through his ears and into his brain, where there’s a program telling him what he has to do at noon. That’s all objective, empirical stuff. I don’t see how Jesus tells Maness that he has to go to lunch at noon.
What that has to do with religion, or is a “truth” that somehow circumvents science, defies me. All I can say is that if this is the best religion can do at discerning “truth”, then religion’s truth-finding capabilities are nil. Sinai and Synapses would be better named “Sinai and Schmaltz”.
Here’s Maness reciting aloud his whole spiel, some of which is transcribed above.
Nautilus Magazine is an online site that bills itself as “a different kind of science magazine.” And indeed it is—for it’s partly supported by the John Templeton Foundation (JTF). The Foundation is largely dedicated to showing that religion and science are compatible,—even in harmony—for Sir John left his dosh to the JTF to fund projects showing how science would reveal the divine. Thus the magazine publishes accommodationist articles, like this one from last July, and now we have a new one by Brian Gallagher, editor of the Nautilus blog Facts So Romantic and a “Sinai and Synapses” (oy!) fellow.
Here he purports to find a reconciliation of science and religion, but provides nothing of the sort. Have a read: it’s short (click on screenshot):
As we see so often, quotes are taken from Einstein and even Stephen Hawking to show that they had some simulacrum of religion, although Gallagher at least admits that Einstein’s views on religion weren’t that clear. Gallagher first quotes Elon Musk, who reportedly said, “I believe there’s some explanation for this universe, which you might call God,” and then trots out Albert and Stephen:
Einstein did call it God. The German-Jewish physicist is famous for many things—his special and general theories of relativity, his burst of gray-white hair—including his esoteric remark, often intoned in discussions of the strange, probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, that “God does not play dice.” A final or ultimate equation, describing the laws of nature and the origin of the cosmos, Einstein believed, could not involve chance intrinsically. Insofar as it did—it being the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics—it would be incomplete. (The consensus now among physicists is that he was wrong; God is indeterminate. “All evidence points to him being an inveterate gambler,” Stephen Hawking once said, “who throws the dice on every possible occasion.”)
That, of course, implies that Hawking believed in God.
But Einstein was at best a pantheist who was in awe of the laws of nature, but never accepted the kind of theistic God that everyone wanted him to. And as for Hawking, well, reader Dave, who brought this piece to my attention, told me this:
Hawking wrote in his latest and last book:
If you like, you can call the laws of science “God”, but it wouldn’t be a personal God that you would meet and put questions to. … We are each free to believe what we want, and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is that there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate.
(Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, pp. 36-8)
The warped selectivity by Nautilus never fails to impress.
Indeed, Hawking was an out-and-out atheist. But Gallagher argues that Hawking and Einstein demonstrate that there’s no conflict between science and religion. How? Read on:
Benedict Spinoza, the 17th century Jewish-Dutch philosopher, was also in his day confused for an atheist for writing things like this, from his treatise Ethics: “All things, I say, are in God, and everything which takes place takes place by the laws alone of the infinite nature of God, and follows (as I shall presently show) from the necessity of His essence.”
In 1929, Einstein received a telegram inquiring about his belief in God from a New York rabbi named Herbert S. Goldstein, who had heard a Boston cardinal say that the physicist’s theory of relativity implies “the ghastly apparition of atheism.” Einstein settled Goldstein down. “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of the world,” he told him, “not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.”
What that amounted to for Einstein, according to a 2006 paper, was a “cosmic religious feeling” that required no “anthropomorphic conception of God.” He explained this view in the New York Times Magazine: “The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man’s image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.”
So, as Einstein would have it, there is no necessary conflict between science and religion—or between science and “religious feelings.”
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I see this kind of dissimulation. Spinoza may have been a real pantheist, seeing some kind of ubiquitous divinity in the universe, but that’s beyond my pay grade. Einstein, however, is another matter. He rejected the idea of a theistic God: the one that Americans believe in, who interacts with the world and has a personal relationship with His flock. What Einstein means by “religious feeling” is simply “awe before the universe”, or that deeply ambiguous word “spirituality.”
When Gallagher, then, says that this shows there is no necessary conflict between science and religion, what he’s really saying is “there is no necessary conflict between science on one hand and awe at the wonder of the universe on the other.”
“Religious feelings” in Einstein are very different from the “religious feelings” of those 70% of Americans who believe in God. To say that Einstein—and Gallagher—have effected some kind of accommodation between science and religion is simply a lie based on a deliberate conflation between conventional religion and “awe and wonder.”
Another Nautilus fail, but one that keeps those Templeton bucks flowing.
There’s one sociologist who has made her name solely on accommodationism—funded by Templeton, of course. That’s Elaine Ecklund of Rice University, whose 2010 book Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think, is a masterpiece of spinning one’s data to fit one’s ideology (and pecuniary master), namely, that scientists are more religious than one thinks. On top of that is a bunch of tut-tutting that Ecklund does about how scientists are so nasty, and if we’d just be nice to the faithful, and respect their beliefs, Americans wouldn’t be so suspicious of evolution and science in general.
I’ve written a lot about Ecklund’s work and how she spins it to fit an agenda (go here and note that there are several pages of posts), and I’d largely forgotten about her until I was recently asked to write something about science and religion. More about that later, but I went to Ecklund’s book to look up the data on the religiosity of the American public versus that of scientists from 21 “elite” research universities (the University of Chicago is one). The book is pretty short on data and long on anecdote and tut-tutting, but here’s Table 2.2 (p. 16 in the book) comparing belief in God amongst the public vs. “elite” scientists:
The disparity is blindingly clear. If you use the first two rows as denoting “atheism and agnosticism,” then 64% of the scientists fit in that class versus just 6% of the public—a tenfold difference. If you add the third row (I won’t) to denote “theism” versus “nontheism”, then 72% of scientists are nontheists versus just 16% of the public.
If you add the last three rows as an indication of “sometimes or always believes in God” versus “never believes in God”, you come up with 28% of scientists versus 84% of the public.
This is a staggering difference, but no surprise to anyone who’s been around scientists. I’ve discussed it before, and will say only that it could mean two things: either nonbelievers are preferentially attracted to science, or that doing science erodes people’s religious belief. I suspect that both factors are at work, but will leave it there. The main lesson is that regardless of the reason for this disparity, it denotes some incompatibility between science and religion.
It’s interesting how Ecklund gets around this data in her book, and in fact distorts it, as Jason Rosenhouse (peace be upon that retired blogger) wrote in a review of Science vs. Religion. I’ll quote Jason from his review on ScienceBlogs:
Asked about their beliefs in God, 34% chose “I don’t believe in God,” while 30% chose, “I do not know if there is a God, and there is no way to find out.” That’s 64% who are atheist or agnostic, as compared to just 6% of the general public.
An additional 8% opted for, “I believe in a higher power, but it is not God.” That makes 72% of scientists who are explicitly non-theistic in their religious views (compared to 16% of the public generally.) Pretty stark.
From the other side, it is just 9% of scientists (compared to 63% of the public), who chose, “I have no doubts about God’s existence.” An additional 14% of scientists chose, “I have some doubts, but I believe in God.” Thus, it is just 25% of scientists who will confidently assert their belief in God (80% of the general public.)
For completeness, the final option was “I believe in God sometimes.” That was chosen by 5% of scientists and 4% of the public. Make of it what you will.
Now explain to me, please, how anyone can look at that data and write this:
As we journey from the personal to the public religious lives of scientists, we will meet the nearly 50 percent of elite scientists like Margaret who are religious in a traditional sense…. (p. 6)
This claim, that fifty percent of scientists are traditionally religious, is repeated in the jacket copy. The expression, “religious in a traditional sense” is never precisely defined, but I would have thought that a belief in God is a minimal requirement. With 72% of scientists explicitly nontheistic, and an additional five percent professing to believe in God only sometimes, it looks to me like 23% would be the most generous figure for the fraction of scientists who are traditionally religious.
Ecklund has also made a huge deal about some scientists being “spiritual” (see here), for of course Ecklund and Templeton like to lump “spirituality” together with “religion” to make it seem that “spiritual” scientists are essentially religious. Here’s what Jason said about that:
Another one of Ecklund’s findings is that 22% of atheists describe themselves as spiritual. In his jacket endorsement for the book, Ron Numbers cites this as the book’s most surprising finding. Personally I find this neither surprising nor interesting. “Spiritual” is not at all the same thing as “religious.” The term is often used as a way of describing awe and wonder at the mysteries of nature, and does not necessarily connote any supernatural belief at all. Atheists are as capable of such strong emotions as anyone else. Typically, using a term like spiritual is specifically a way to distance oneself from traditional religion.
Ron Numbers, a historian of science, has also devoted a substantial part of his career to touting the harmony between science and faith. But Jason’s right here. Even Richard Dawkins has described himself as a “spiritual” person, meaning that he harbors an Einsteinian awe and wonder before the universe. And so it is to many of us. We have awe and wonder, but no belief in the supernatural or in gods. But people like Ecklund and Numbers willfully ignore this difference in their headlong rush to make scientists seem religious.
If there’s a take-home lesson, it’s the figure above. Ponder the difference between scientists and the American public and think about what that means.
Jason hasn’t been blogging for four years, as he’s doing book projects and other stuff, and tells me he doesn’t plan to blog again, but might some day. It’s a shame, and I appreciate that he has larger fish to fry, but he put out a good site, and I miss it.
Lois Lee, a religious scholar whom I’ve written about before, is the lead investigator on a big Templeton grant, or, as The Conversation describes her in erroneous spelling, “Principle [sic] Investigator on the Understanding Unbelief programme.” Templeton gave her and her co-PI Stephen Bullivant (also a religious scholar) nearly three million dollars to study the nature and variety of “unbelief”. While the grant summary pretends that this is a dispassionate inquiry into the origin and nature of atheism, I wrote at the time that giving the grant to these two was “like asking creationists to direct a sociological study of why so many scientists accept evolution.”
And indeed, it’s clear from Lee and Bullivant’s writings that their study is tendentious. It’s not a rational inquiry into atheism, but rather an attack on atheism, and, in Lee’s latest article in The Conversation, “Why atheists are not as rational as some like to think” (click on screenshot), she positively celebrates irrationality. Note that the obligatory picture of the Satan Atheist accompanies the article:
I’m not sure I want to dissect this egregious and lightweight piece; it’s best summed up by saying its thesis is this: “Atheists are irrational, just like religious people.” In other words, “You’re just as bad as we believers are”: not a very persuasive argument. In fact, Lee adduces no strong evidence that atheists are just as irrational as believers. Rather, she uses a series of arguments, many of which rest on opinion rather than data, e.g. “some atheists are irrational” or “many atheists don’t arrive at their nonbelief through reason or science, but because they’re indoctrinated by their parents.
Who would deny this? Certainly not all atheists arrive at their stand by reason, but many of them have enough rationality to think “there’s no evidence for religious beliefs”, which is all the rationality you need to reject religion. You don’t have to be rational in every aspect of your life. Further, Lee fails to mention that religious belief is completely irrational—in the sense that there’s no evidence supporting the existence of Gods or the factual (and conflicting) assertions of the world’s many religions.
So yes, perhaps to some people “atheists aren’t as rational as you’d like to think”, but so what? What matters is not whether atheists are 100% rational, or whether some of them become atheists for reasons other than reason, but whether the claims of religion are true. That crucial issue isn’t discussed. Lee’s purpose here is simply to criticize atheists rather than to examine whether atheism can be seen as it truly is: a rational response to a lack of evidence for gods.
Here are a few of her assertions that I’ve summarized in bold (Lee’s direct quotes are indented):
Atheism is a sad way to live. Here Lee begins her celebration of irrationality, which I take to be osculation of religion (I’m betting she’s religious):
When you ask atheists about why they became atheists (as I do for a living), they often point to eureka moments when they came to realise that religion simply doesn’t make sense.
Oddly perhaps, many religious people actually take a similar view of atheism. This comes out when theologians and other theists speculate that it must be rather sad to be an atheist, lacking (as they think atheists do) so much of the philosophical, ethical, mythical and aesthetic fulfilments that religious people have access to – stuck in a cold world of rationality only.
That I don’t get. Why does atheism “not make sense” because it’s “sad”? And of course many of us nonbelievers are not sad at all. We fall in love, enjoy friendship, beauty, books, art, and food. What we don’t do is proselytize or believe in divine fairy tales. What we have here from Lee is a knowingly distorted indictment of nonbelief.
Many atheists arrive at nonbelief for non-rational reasons.
Even atheist beliefs themselves have much less to do with rational inquiry than atheists often think. We now know, for example, that nonreligious children of religious parents cast off their beliefs for reasons that have little to do with intellectual reasoning. The latest cognitive research shows that the decisive factor is learning from what parents do rather than from what they say. So if a parent says that they’re Christian, but they’ve fallen out of the habit of doing the things they say should matter – such as praying or going to church – their kids simply don’t buy the idea that religion makes sense.
This is perfectly rational in a sense, but children aren’t processing this on a cognitive level. Throughout our evolutionary history, humans have often lacked the time to scrutinise and weigh up the evidence – needing to make quick assessments. That means that children to some extent just absorb the crucial information, which in this case is that religious belief doesn’t appear to matter in the way that parents are saying it does.
. . . Some parents take the view that their children should choose their beliefs for themselves, but what they then do is pass on certain ways of thinking about religion, like the idea that religion is a matter of choice rather than divine truth. It’s not surprising that almost all of these children – 95% – end up “choosing” to be atheist.
My response is “so what?” Many atheists give up religious beliefs as adults, not children. And again, the main issue for me is whether it IS rational to be an atheist, not how you come to be an atheist. Of course not everyone gives up or rejects faith for the same reason.
Atheists purport to think scientifically and love science, but not all of us are that way.
But are atheists more likely to embrace science than religious people? Many belief systems can be more or less closely integrated with scientific knowledge. Some belief systems are openly critical of science, and think it has far too much sway over our lives, while other belief systems are hugely concerned to learn about and respond to scientific knowledge.
But this difference doesn’t neatly map onto whether you are religious or not. Some Protestant traditions, for example, see rationality or scientific thinking as central to their religious lives. Meanwhile, a new generation of postmodern atheists highlight the limits of human knowledge, and see scientific knowledge as hugely limited, problematic even, especially when it comes to existential and ethical questions. These atheists might, for example, follow thinkers like Charles Baudelaire in the view that true knowledge is only found in artistic expression.
Yes, of course not all atheists are completely rational in everything they do. But some are more rational than believers, especially in the crucial area of embracing superstitions. And any believers who see “scientific thinking as central to their religious lives” are, I submit, deluding themselves.
I’ll give one more quote and pass on:
Clearly, the idea that being atheist is down to rationality alone is starting to look distinctly irrational. But the good news for all concerned is that rationality is overrated. Human ingenuity rests on a lot more than rational thinking. As Haidt says of “the righteous mind”, we are actually “designed to ‘do’ morality” – even if we’re not doing it in the rational way we think we are. The ability to make quick decisions, follow our passions and act on intuition are also important human qualities and crucial for our success.
It is helpful that we have invented something that, unlike our minds, is rational and evidence-based: science. When we need proper evidence, science can very often provide it – as long as the topic is testable. Importantly, the scientific evidence does not tend to support the view that atheism is about rational thought and theism is about existential fulfilments. The truth is that humans are not like science – none of us get by without irrational action, nor without sources of existential meaning and comfort. Fortunately, though, nobody has to.
Check out that link. It doesn’t really show that “rationality is overrated” but that “gut instincts can be correct and we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss them.” But “gut instincts” can also be the result of rationality, whether conscious but not pondered at length, or unconscious but either the result of evolved ways of thinking or unconscious ways of thinking that have been adaptive in the past.
In the end, I’d like to see Lee justify the rationality of theism. Is there any scientific evidence for gods or the divine? If so, where is it? Templeton, of course, doesn’t care: their purpose here is to cast aspersions on nonbelievers.
Lee’s article is accompanied by a “disclosure statement”:h/t: Michael
I believe I’m back on solid ground again with this post about the Templeton Foundation (in this case, the Templeton Religion Trust) and their incursion into Aeon magazine, a secular site devoted to “ideas and culture.” What we have here is an article by Manini Sheker whose work apparently wasn’t underwritten by Templeton—which would mean that Sheker was supported by the organization—but where the magazine itself apparently got money from Templeton to publish a dire piece touting the benefits of Catholicism. Or so I interpret from the phrase in the disclaimer below: “this essay was made possible through the support of a grant from the Templeton Religion Trust to Aeon.” In other words, Templeton gave money to the magazine for publishing, or enabling publication, of this article.
But how would that work? Readers are invited to help me out here, for this appears at the end of Sheker’s piece:
A bit about the author:
Manini Sheker is a scholar and writer interested in religion, the arts, social justice, the environment and the good life. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, openDemocracy and Litro, among others
I’m a PhD candidate in social anthropology at the University of Sussex studying development and ethics in post-liberalization India. I hold a MPhil in International Development from the University of Oxford and a Masters of Social Work from the University fo Toronto. My writing has been featured in the Guardian, the Hindu, openDemocracy, Litro and Seminar magazines among other publications. In 2013, I was awarded the Ngo Human Welfare Prize by the University of Oxford for an essay on religion, freedom and development.
Now, why would Templeton fund this one way or the other? Well, read the article if you have the kishkas (click on screenshot below).
It’s a very bizarre piece of prose. The author begins on reasonable ground by discussing how the United Nations’ Human Development Index was formulated, and about the input of Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen’s “capabilities approach” for formulating that index of the well being of various countries. Sheker makes the point, with some justification, that one should also include non-material well being in the index, although I’m sure people would prefer clean water, toilets, sufficient food, and good healthcare, before they start worrying about whether their spiritual needs are met. I also feel that people always manage to find a way to meet their need for comity and fellowship regardless of whether there’s religion involved, so dragging in religious stuff, which is the real point of Sheker’s piece, seems almost irrelevant. Are Sweden and Denmark not sufficiently “developed” because they’re largely atheistic countries?
Then, all of a sudden, Sheker goes off the rails, touting the need for including Catholic social teaching and morality as a good way to improve countries’ well being. And that is surely why Templeton paid some money for this article, whomever the recipient was. A few quotes from Sheker:
As the world faces moral and economic crises, perhaps it is more relevant than ever to return to Maitreyi’s question, and to ask: what if economic and social arrangements were actually conceived within a moral or even religious framework? Would it help open our eyes to the real task at hand – human fulfilment? Would the most urgent problems, from global poverty to climate change, benefit from the kind of moral deliberation that is required by a religious point of view?
Her answer to the last question is clearly “yes!”
For the most part, the development establishment has been suspicious of religion, a nervousness only exacerbated in recent years by the rise of religious extremism. Institutionalised religion carries dark associations – it can be authoritarian, offend reason, thwart progress towards social justice and, in its most egregious, illiberal expressions, it serves up a retrograde vision of the future. There’s also the real fear that development activities, especially when carried out by faith-based organisations, can easily become pretexts for proselytising. Then there are those who, against much evidence, cling to the belief that religions are irrelevant to modern societies; that modernisation means secularisation.
This is a Big Lie: modernization does mean secularization, for as people’s lot improves, they have no need for religions. Sociologists have given evidence for that time and time again. Sheker simply ignores the fact that nearly all countries in the West are becoming less religious at the same time that their well being is improving. And yes, religions are irrelevant to modern societies; as Hitchens says, they’re the vestigial remnant of our fearful and bawling childhood as a species.
She goes on:
Post-Vatican II, Catholic social teaching engages directly with applying theological insights to the problem of contemporary poverty. It recognises that social problems can benefit from reflection on the Christian message. In many ways, the understanding of human flourishing derived from Catholic social teaching and from Sen’s work converge. Both recognise that the purpose of development is human dignity. Dignity depends on exercising one’s agency and realising freedoms such as being healthy, living in a peaceful environment, and so on. Any economic model that comes out of Catholic social teaching would rest on the principles of equity, participation, sustainability and human development. The rationale for human dignity in Catholic social teaching is a bit different, however.
You don’t need Christianity to deal with social problems; in fact, spreading religiosity is a way, as Marx realized, to get people to accept a problematic status quo: religion, as he said, is an “opium of the people”. Without the promise of a Better Life Hereafter, we have to figure out how to improve our lot in the Here and Now. The best “belief system” for tackling social problems is secular humanism, especially since Sheker adduces not a shred of evidence that Catholicism is the “true” religion, or that any of its grounding, in the new Testament, is based on true facts.
And get this Mother Teresa approach:
Catholic social thinkers hold that poverty neither determines human worth nor is a constraint to achieving ethical or salvific liberation. While poverty is not condoned, there is a recurring theme in Catholic thought that poverty can even strengthen and beautify the human spirit – voluntary poverty is certainly a mark of the good. Think of Saint Francis in Dante’s Paradiso, in romantic pursuit of Lady Poverty; he was the shepherd who, in making his choice to own nothing, ‘wore a crown again’.
There is also a deep ambivalence towards material liberation. Eliminating social deprivation is a moral imperative, but there is a very real danger that material prosperity presents acute dangers. Real liberation comes only when material things are renounced and one accepts suffering and complete dependence on God. True freedom comes when material, ethical and salvific liberation are cultivated together. In other words, true freedom can be attained only when all worldly goods are redirected towards God through charity.
. . . Though Sen recognises the limits of focusing on material needs, his model places importance on freedom and agency over the realisation of God (or the good). Social arrangements should be gauged by the extent to which they enable the former. From a religious point of view, earthly freedom is subordinate to the highest liberation in God. It is important not to disregard the significance of these concerns for millions of people worldwide, to remember that religious and non-religious communities share many ideas related to human fulfilment. The Catholic view of human flourishing performs an important task by requiring any approach to economic development to consider seriously the moral and non-economic consequences of development.
This is just preaching; she adduces no evidence that people would prefer God over starvation and sickness.
In all of this Sheker makes several fundamental errors:
She equates morality with religiosity, not really considering that secular morality can be an even better source of welfare than is Catholic teaching. After all, “Catholic social teaching” can include “abortion is bad under all circumstances”, “homosexuality is a sin”, “women are inferior to men”, and so on. Those aspects of “morality” surely aren’t conducive to any form of progressive human development.
She doesn’t consider that Christian morality doesn’t really come from scripture, as we know from the Euthyphro argument, but is pre-Biblical, probably based on rational reflection, evolved behavior, and non-religious social contracts.
Sheker doesn’t deal at any length with how one is suppose to use Catholic moral teachings to improve the well being of the majority of countries in the world, which aren’t Catholic.
She doesn’t consider whether, even if Catholic morality could improve people’s welfare, it matters whether the dogma on which that morality is based is true. After all, if the New Testament is fictitious, which most of us think it is, then morality based on Jesus and scripture is out the window. Why not “Muslim morality” or “Jain morality”? My view, of course, is that we have to have some ethical principles guiding how we determine the welfare of a country, but most of this will involve the idea that material well being (including health, reproductive freedom and so on) supercedes spiritual well being. Religion is irrelevant here.
I cannot emphasize how shockingly bad this article is. It starts out fine, but soon Sheker’s mask slips, apparently revealing her as a staunch Catholic who wants to proselytize a morality based on her religion, not worrying about the morality of other religions or the sounder principles of secular humanism—principles that don’t depend on belief in fictitious books.
And how did Templeton get its sticky fingers in here? Who were they paying to get this article published? We don’t know. Shame on Aeon for publishing such tripe!
The John Templeton Foundation has announced yet another big grant for “biology” research, except that its principal investigators are a theologian (Christopher Southgate) as well as a biologist (Niles Lehman). Click on the screenshot to go to the announcement. As you see, the grant, which just started, will last 32 months, and eat up over half a million dollars:
But first meet the principals/ Southgate is an associate professor of Theology and Religion at the University of Exeter. His own website details his activities, and, as usual, he’s been supported by Templeton in several ways. There’s no evidence that he has any qualifications to be Principal Investigator on a biology grant:
THEOLOGY – Chris has taught at the University of Exeter since 1993. His main fields of study are the science-religion debate, ecotheology and environmental ethics. He welcomes enquiries from prospective research students. His current project is on divine glory (see Zygon, Dec 2014)
His current teaching includes the modules ‘Evolution, God and Gaia’, and ‘God, Humanity and the Cosmos’. His book The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution and the Problem of Evil (Westminster John Knox Press, 2008) has been described as ‘quite excellent’ (Church Times)
Chris is Project Director for a major new project in practical theology, aimed at identifying good practice after a congregation has suffered a sudden tragedy. For details see www.tragedyandcongregations.org.uk. This project is funded by the Templeton World Charities Foundation Inc.
SCIENCE – Chris will also be Principal Investigator on a new scientific project starting in January 2018 entitled ‘Cooperation and interpretation in the emergence of life’. More details shortly.
Southgate’s research and teaching won him a Templeton Award, and he has since served as a Coordinating Editor of the Science and Religion Textbook Project for the Templeton Foundation.
“How can congregations be helped in times of tragedy?”, £154,977 from the Templeton World Charities Foundation [JAC: see above]
“Information and the Origins of Life’, with Andrew Robinson. £196,562, Science and Transcendence Advanced Research Series, made possible by the Templeton Foundation, 2008-2011.
As usual, once you have a stall in the Templeton stable, they keep giving you big buckets of oats.
Niles Lehman, Chemistry faculty, received a $436,432 grant from the John Templeton Foundation for “NetLife: Experimental Evolution of Networks in Abiogenesis.”
What a pity he had to put together a Templeton grant proposal with a theologian. But why on earth did Lehman do it?
Well, of course, there’s the money—essential to advance both your research and your career. But that isn’t all: have a look at Templeton’s description of what the grant is about. I’ve rarely seen Templeton be so explicit about why they’re constantly going after neo-Darwinism:
The Darwinian research program has been very successful over almost 150 years. But two of its core presumptions militate against pursuit of one of JTF’s key areas: ‘the exploration of the evolution and fundamental nature of life, especially as they relate to meaning and purpose’. These Darwinian presumptions are: the centrality of competition, and the need to avoid teleological explanations.
In other words, because the Templeton foundation doesn’t like competition (although of course Sir John made his money as a mutual fund manager) or nonteleological—i.e., naturalistic—explanations, they have to attack the evil instantiation of those paradigms: modern evolutionary biology. Clearly, Templeton is trying to buttress Sir John’s original agenda, which was to find evidence for God in science, and to finally answer those Big Questions of meaning and purpose. And such evidence would be teleology in biology: non-materialistic evidence of “purpose” or directionality in evolution. Ergo, this grant sets out to find it:
This project works at the transition from non-life to life, to clarify key characteristics of life at its origin, and therefore its fundamental nature. We draw on published work by the project team showing the importance a) of cooperation between RNA fragments in developing catalytic ability and correct folding, and b) of purposive responses to signs in the environment (interpretation) understood within a naturalised teleology, also demonstrated in single RNA molecules. Showing interpretation in proto-life implies that meaning-finding and purpose goes ‘all the way down’. Through empirical research and computer modeling, the present project seeks to answer the question: can a cooperative system of RNA catalysts be constructed capable of two modes of action based on interpretation of the state of the environment. Using proven experimental systems, computer models and game theory, we will explore adaptive interactions between these two behaviors in evolutionarily ancient molecules. The project aims to show that cooperation (rather than mere competition) and interpretation (which is inherently purposeful) may together have been intrinsic to the emergence of life. We expect at least four major papers to result from the study, together with presentation at the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life, a review article on the philosophical implications, and a TED talk. The proposed work could help to show that the default mode of Nature can be meaning-seeking and cooperative, not selfish as is widely supposed.
I am astonished, for of course cooperation between fragments of RNA could be (and almost certainly is) the result of natural selection, not God telling the molecules, “Thou shalt cooperate in helping big molecules fold properly.” As for the “purposive responses to signs in the environment. . . understood within a naturalised teleology”, I have no idea what that means. If they find molecules cooperating (and by that I mean “working together”), how can that provide evidence for God? Does the cooperation of molecules in clotting blood, or fighting antigens, also denote “purposive responses”? No, I’m afraid that Drs. Lehman and Southgate will have to do better than showing cooperation to convince us of teleology in nature.
Well, they strain at gnats:
. . . we will explore adaptive interactions between these two behaviors in evolutionarily ancient molecules. The project aims to show that cooperation (rather than mere competition) and interpretation (which is inherently purposeful) may together have been intrinsic to the emergence of life.
Again, what does it mean to say that “interpretation is inherently purposeful”? Is that the job of theologian Southgate to get his $300,000 by pronouncing, “Cooperation means God did it”? And in what way would “interpretation”, which is a phenomenon of human mentality, have been “intrinsic to the emergence of life”?
So we see again an enormous waste of money, and a seemingly reputable scientist getting mired in the hinterlands of theology. It is beyond me how a researcher can participate in such a project, unless he’s either a believer or desperate for money.
The only good thing about this announcement is that Templeton pulls no punches in telling us why they don’t like modern evolutionary biology: it’s too naturalistic (no teleology) and too competitive (presumably between “selfish genes” or organisms themselves in ecology and evolution). And so they throw money at projects that attack these paradigms.
The thing is, we have no evidence against pure naturalism, and competition among genes and individuals is well documented. Of course “selfish” genes can produce cooperation, something that Dawkins has been at pains to emphasize given the misconstrual of his title “The Selfish Gene.” But that’s not enough for Templeton. They not only want to show cooperation (which is presumably why they fund people like David Sloan Wilson and Martin Nowak), but also that the cooperation comes from God. Sadly, there’s still no evidence for Templeton’s teleological God (remember, they once funded Intelligent Design projects for that reason), and so they throw good money after bad.
I find the John Templeton Foundation reprehensible, for they take advantage of scientists’ need for money to push their own agenda, which is a nasty miasma of theology and science. I decry any scientist who would take money from them, and I won’t listen to excuses like “I’m just doing pure science.” In this case Lehman doesn’t have that excuse, for he co-wrote a grant with a theologian designed to find purpose in the origin of life. Shades of Genesis!
Here: have a six-minute video (click on screenshot) featuring Southgate telling us about God’s nature, and supposedly answering the question, “Did God make animals suffer?” (I gather Southgate’s answer is “yes”, and his astonishing explanation is apparently so that animals could experience the sufferings of Jesus and, like humans, be redeemed by the Crucifixion and Resurrection. Typical theological apologetics. This bit starts at 4:42.)
