Category: Templeton at it again

The University of Edinburgh and the John Templeton Foundation royally screw up evolution and science (and tell arrant lies) in an online course

March 25, 2018 • 9:00 am

Reader Simon sent me this video, which is a short (8-minute) lecture that’s apparently part of an online Coursera course on Science and Philosophy sponsored by the University of Edinburgh, the EIDYN Research Center run by Edinburgh’s Department of Philosophy, and the John Templeton Foundation. The presenter of this talk on creationism and evolutionary biology, S. Orestis Palermos, is a lecturer in philosophy at Cardiff University (also identified as a “research explorer” at Edinburgh).

If you had any pretense that Templeton is in favor of rigorous science, it will be dispelled by this video, which argues that science, like religion, is based on faith, and that evolution is merely an ad hoc rationalization of observations that is not science because it can’t make predictions. It’s also ineffably sad that the University of Edinburgh is sponsoring this nonsense.

I’ve put a transcript of the video below (also prepared by Simon), with the really bad parts in bold; and I’ve added some comments. What we see here is the pernicious influence of postmodernism on science: a claim that science gives us no objective truth because it’s based on faith. This is rotten philosophy and is also either clueless or deliberately duplicitous. Palermos doesn’t deserve the monicker of “philosopher”—not if that monicker requires one to be rational. In this video Palermos acts like Ray Comfort with a Ph.D.: a distorter and outright liar in service not of Jesus, but of postmodernism and perhaps faitheism.

Click on the screenshot below to go to the short lecture, and be prepared to gnash your teeth!

Simon’s transcript (indented; my own comments are flush left):

The final lecture of the free online course science and philosophy is dedicated to the topic, evolutionary biology and creationism science or pseudoscience. This lecture focuses on the same scientific status of evolutionary biology and genetics.

Within western society, there is a tendency to raise science to a special epistemic status. Science is always taken to be better than fairy tales, myths, and of course, religion. If a claim is supposed to be scientific, then it is supposed to constitute some kind of absolute truth that will always be true and which is impossible to deny. So for example, many times, in order to support a claim, we say that this is a fact that is scientifically proven.

No scientist would make the claim that science gives us “absolute truth”; and we use the word “proven” not in the sense of “absolute unchanging truth” but, “supported by evidence so strong that you could bet your house on it.” For Palermos to make his claim means that he has no understanding of how science is done or how we should regard scientific “truth.” That disqualifies him from the outset to give this lecture.  But let’s proceed:

But is this attitude towards science correct? What if science is not the kind of secure, absolute knowledge that scientists make it out to be, and which most of us accept unreflectively? And if science can be questioned, then how does it compare with other predictive and explanatory devices like myths and religion?

A particularly, interesting case in point is whether creationism should be taught alongside evolutionary biology as part of the standard curriculum in the schools in the United States of America.

The standard approach to this long-standing debate is to claim that evolutionary biology as opposed to creationism is scientific. Therefore, we have a good reason to teach the one but not the latter. Evolutionary biology is science, creationism is pseudoscience, and obviously we should always prefer disciplines that are scientific.

However, upon further reflection it is not quite obvious whether this claim is actually valid. For the second half of the 20th century, the best philosophers of science, philosophers like Sir Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend, attempted to explain what science consists in and how it differs from myths and religion. And no matter how hard they tried, eventually, the debate died out their realization that science, much like religion, requires faith.  To choose one scientific theory over another, is simply a matter of aesthetics in the hope that this theory and all to the other is going to work out.

Here we have another lie. I’m not that familiar with Lakatos or Feyerabend’s views, but I doubt that any of them would equate the epistemic status of science with that of religion. Popper, for sure, saw evolution as a historical science, and one that produced the best understanding we have of the natural world. He also rejected creationism, although he did see natural selection—only one aspect of evolutionary theory—as hard to test). See here for a refutation of Palermos’s distortions about Popper. And if Kuhn put creationism on an equal footing with religion, with the choice simply “a matter of aesthetics”, I’m not aware of it. Readers with philosophical expertise might weigh in here.

But clearly it’s not “aesthetics” to regard evolution as a much better explanation of the data than creationism. We have reliable ways of dating the Earth and its fossils, and we have observations that comport fully with evolutionary theory but not with creationism (biogeography, dead genes in the genome, vestigial organs, and so on). And yes, evolutionary theory makes predictions. One, that marsupial fossils would be found in Antarctica, since the group crossed that continent when it still linked South America to Antarctica, was verified within the last two decades. We’ve predicted that transitional forms existed—transitions between fish and amphibians, reptiles and mammals, and reptiles and birds—that were later found. Even Darwin predicted in The Descent of Man that humans evolved in Africa, and from other apes. That prediction didn’t begin to be verified until the early 20th century, long after Darwin had passed away. Much real-time evidence, as well as historical evidence and both predictions and “retrodictions” (observations that, in retrospect, make sense in light of evolution but not creationism) are detailed in my book Why Evolution is True. 

To reject the historical evidence of fossils, vestigial organs, and biogeography, as not constituting “real” evidence is another misunderstanding of science. Much of physics, and nearly all of cosmology, rests on historical observation and reconstruction. So is human history itself! Is it an “aesthetic preference” to think that Julius Caesar really lived when all we have left are traces of his existence—his writings, those of his contemporaries, statues, coins, and so on? The notion that history can’t buttress empirical theories is a fantasy promulgated by the likes of Ray Comfort. It shouldn’t be shoved down the throats of students by a misguided professor of philosophy. But on with this dreadful “lecture”:

But there is no way to disprove or prove in theory. And since there is no way to prove it or disprove it, then there is no point where it becomes irrational for a scientist to stay with a failing theory.

It’s just a lie to say that we cannot adjudicate the likelihood of evolution versus creationism from data (I reject the term “prove”) as a way of getting better and better explanations for our universe. Yes, there is a point where it’s irrational for a scientist to stay with a failing theory like creationism. And that is when the data are so strong against it that you’d be a fool (or a religious believer) to maintain what is palpably false.

But wait! There’s more!

So, the best example of this is the case of heliocentricism. Heliocentricism was first put forward about 2,000 years ago. And for about 1,600 years, it was a failing theory. However, at some point, Kepler and Galileo decided to take it up. And even though it was failing for 1,600 years, they managed to convert it in a very successful theory. The choice, however, to do so, was not because the theory was a good one—since obviously it was failing for a long time—but simply because they liked it and for some reason they had faith in it. So scientists choose to stay, we the few, simply because they have faith in it. So both science and religion seem to require faith, which means that it is not so easy to distinguish between creationism and evolutionary biology.

Kepler and Galileo “converted” heliocentrism to a good explanation because of OBSERVATIONS, you moron! It was not because they had “faith” that the Sun was the locus of the solar system.

Instead of writing a lot here, just read my essay in Slate, “No faith in science“, which dispels the canard that science requires some religious-like “faith.”

Moreover, even by the most rigorous standards for distinguishing between science and pseudoscience, what is known as Imre Lakatos’s sophisticated falsification, it was seen that evolutionary biology in creationism and actually, on a path. So, creationism may not be scientific but then again, neither is evolutionary biology, which  appears unable to predict anything but only provides an explanation for the phenomena after the fact have taken place. Parenthetically, this is what is known within philosophy as an ad hoc hypothesis. To introduce an explanation in a hypothesis, only in order to explain something that is already known. And not to provide an explanation or a prediction for something new. And most philosophers of sciences agree that introducing such ad hoc hypotheses within science should always be avoided because it turns a scientific theory into pseudoscience.

This is again a twofold lie: the claim that historical data cannot constitute support for a theory, or help us distinguish between theories, as well as the claim that “evolutionary biology is unable to predict anything.” I’d add here that although creationism has been falsified by many lines of evidence, evolution could have been falsified by observations like 400-million-year-old mammal fossils, an absence of genetic variation in species, or adaptations in one species which are useful only for a different species. But the falsifying observations haven’t been made. As I say in WEIT, “Despite a million chances to be wrong, evolution always comes up right. That’s as close as we can get to a scientific truth.”

Let’s get to the end of this pack of Palermos’s lies and distortions:

However, both evolutionary biology and creationism are guilty of introducing side ad hoc hypothesis. And so it would seem that neither is scientific.

Now, add to this the fact that genetics, which is a special discipline of evolutionary biology, is facing a number of anomalies. Like any other discipline in the past, in any other scientific field, [it] is most likely to change in the future. It becomes even less obvious why evolutionary biology and genetics should be taught in schools as scientifically proven theories but reject creationism as being pseudo-scientific.

Ah, now we hear that Palermos also claims that genetics isn’t really science. I’m not sure what “anomalies” he’s talking about (Epigenetic modification of DNA? Horizontal movement of genes?), but if genetics weren’t science, we have a lot of valuable and useful data that suddenly acquire the epistemic status of Mormonism. That’s just garbage—and it’s lying to the students of this course.

So this lecture delivered by professor of philosophy and theology Cornel Carnihim from the University of Nottingham, will go over some of themes in an accessible and captivating way.

The lecture purposely avoids to put forward any conclusion but it raises a number of interesting questions. Does the epistemic polity between creationism and evolutionary biology mean that neither of them should be taught as part of the standard curriculum? Or should we teach both, but with intellectually honest attitude that neither is quite scientific? And then, does this mean that we trust and pursue both to the same extent? Or should we invest our efforts to develop the most plausible hypothesis in a way that will finally make it stand out from religion?

Isn’t it better to be honest about the status of our best scientific theories, such that future students can know their limits and attempt to improve them, rather than dogmatically believing that they amount to proven knowledge when in fact, they’re far from it?

Isn’t it better to be intellectually honest about why virtually all scientists rejection creationism and accept evolution—a stand based on evidence—than to push postmodernism on a credulous group of students by equating religious faith with scientific confidence?

Shame on the John Templeton Foundation, and shame on the University of Edinburgh, for presenting these lies and distortions in a lecture on evolutionary biology! And Templeton, if you’re listening, how dare you fund a program that fundamentally misrepresents the nature of science? If you claim you’re promoting science in your program funding, you’re also undercutting the claim with junk lectures like this. And that is why no scientist should be taking money from the John Templeton Foundation.

As for the University of Edinburgh, they’ve got some housecleaning to do.

Philip Goff returns with panpsychism: now claims that a non-goddy “conscious Universe” explains the “fine-tuning” of physical constants permitting life

February 11, 2018 • 11:30 am

I’ve written two critical posts about the ideas of Philip Goff (a philosophy professor at Central European University in Budapest): here and here. In both places (Aeon and NPR, respectively), Goff argues for “panpsychism”—the idea that in some sense the entire Universe is conscious. He waffles on exactly how that consciousness is manifested, or where it comes from, but in a new piece in Aeon magazine, “Is the Universe a conscious mind?“, Goff not only continues his daft arguments, but now claims that a conscious Universe is the best explanation for the “fine-tuning” of the physical constants that make life on Earth possible.

Let us put aside the contentious claim that the laws of physics are fine-tuned for life, since we just don’t know anything beyond the fact that the constant permit life. Goff says that there are three explanations why we are lucky enough to live in a universe where the constants of physics enable us to contemplate our luck: a beneficent being who made the laws, panpsychism, or the multiverse.  He neglects two other explanations: we’re just lucky, or that there is some reason we don’t understand why physical constants have to take the form they do.

Goff says that panpsychism is the best explanation because theism is afflicted with the problem of evil, which has no clear solution (true!), and the multiverse hypothesis fails —or so he says—because consciousness in a multiverse is more likely to be instantiated in a Boltzmann brain—a conscious “thing” that formed physically in the universe without evolution—than in evolved creatures that developed consciousness. Conscious evolved creatures, he implies, are much rarer than Boltzmann brains, so he accepts Roger Penrose’s argument that:

 . . . by far the most common kind of observer [in the multiverse] would be a ‘Boltzmann’s brain’: a functioning brain that has by sheer fluke emerged from a disordered universe for a brief period of time. If Penrose is right, then the odds of an observer in the multiverse theory finding itself in a large, ordered universe are astronomically small. And hence the fact that we are ourselves such observers is powerful evidence against the multiverse theory.

I doubt that someone like Sean Carroll would agree with that.

I’m not that familiar with Penrose, though I know his ideas aren’t popular, and I know that some readers are familiar with them. But this doesn’t seem a knockdown argument to me. If consciousness evolved even once in a near-infinite number of universes, then the relative likelihood  Boltzmann brains versus evolved brains seems irrelevant. But perhaps I misunderstand the argument.

But I do contest Goff’s claim that the universe has a kind of consciousness, and don’t understand at all how even if there were that consciousness, it would explain “fine tuned” laws of physics. Goff proposes two types of panpsychism:

There are two ways of developing the basic panpsychist position. One is micropsychism, the view that the smallest parts of the physical world have consciousness. Micropsychism is not to be equated with the absurd view that quarks have emotions or that electrons feel existential angst. In human beings, consciousness is a sophisticated thing, involving subtle and complex emotions, thoughts and sensory experiences. But there seems nothing incoherent with the idea that consciousness might exist in some extremely basic forms. We have good reason to think that the conscious experience of a horse is much less complex than that of a human being, and the experiences of a chicken less complex than those of a horse. As organisms become simpler, perhaps at some point the light of consciousness suddenly switches off, with simpler organisms having no experience at all. But it is also possible that the light of consciousness never switches off entirely, but rather fades as organic complexity reduces, through flies, insects, plants, amoeba and bacteria. For the micropsychist, this fading-while-never-turning-off continuum further extends into inorganic matter, with fundamental physical entities – perhaps electrons and quarks – possessing extremely rudimentary forms of consciousness, to reflect their extremely simple nature.

Yes, but surely consciousness requires some kind of neurological substrate, and at some point on the journey from humans to quarks, that substrate disappears completely. What kind of consciousness, then, does a photon have, and how is it formed? He never says. Nor does he discuss that idea that consciousness could be an emergent property of life when it’s reached a certain stage of neurological complexity, and need not be manifested on the scale of particles—just as “wetness” need not be manifested on the scale of a single molecule of water. It takes quite a few of them. Wetness is not a property of an individual molecule, but appears when you get a bunch of them together, and is consonant with the laws of physics.

In the end, though, Goff accepts a different form of “holistic” panpsychism:

However, a number of scientists and philosophers of science have recently argued that this kind of ‘bottom-up’ picture of the Universe is outdated, and that contemporary physics suggests that in fact we live in a ‘top-down’ – or ‘holist’ – Universe, in which complex wholes are more fundamental than their parts. According to holism, the table in front of you does not derive its existence from the sub-atomic particles that compose it; rather, those sub-atomic particles derive their existence from the table. Ultimately, everything that exists derives its existence from the ultimate complex system: the Universe as a whole.

. . . If we combine holism with panpsychism, we get cosmopsychism: the view that the Universe is conscious, and that the consciousness of humans and animals is derived not from the consciousness of fundamental particles, but from the consciousness of the Universe itself. This is the view I ultimately defend in Consciousness and Fundamental Reality.

The cosmopsychist need not think of the conscious Universe as having human-like mental features, such as thought and rationality. Indeed, in my book I suggested that we think of the cosmic consciousness as a kind of ‘mess’ devoid of intellect or reason. However, it now seems to me that reflection on the fine-tuning might give us grounds for thinking that the mental life of the Universe is just a little closer than I had previously thought to the mental life of a human being.

But if this cosmopsychism has no mental-like features, why and how would it “fine tune” the universe for organic life? A “mess” couldn’t do that. And what, exactly, does he mean by cosmopsychism?   In the end, Goff has to accept something like a God, a powerful conscious entity that has a purpose and resolve to fine-tune the laws of physics. The only difference between the Abrahamic God and Goff’s “conscious universe” is that the latter isn’t as powerful. I quote:

But the cosmopsychist has a way of rendering axiarchism intelligible, by proposing that the mental capacities of the Universe mediate between value facts and cosmological facts. On this view, which we can call ‘agentive cosmopsychism’, the Universe itself fine-tuned the laws in response to considerations of value. When was this done? In the first 10-43 seconds, known as the Planck epoch, our current physical theories, in which the fine-tuned laws are embedded, break down. The cosmopsychist can propose that during this early stage of cosmological history, the Universe itself ‘chose’ the fine-tuned values in order to make possible a universe of value.

. . .How are we to think about the laws of physics on this view? I suggest that we think of them as constraints on the agency of the Universe. Unlike the God of theism, this is an agent of limited power, which explains the manifest imperfections of the Universe. The Universe acts to maximise value, but is able to do so only within the constraints of the laws of physics.

Well, I thought the laws of physics were what was to be explained by the Big Non-Goddy Brain, so it appears that Goff is begging the question. The laws, he says, are already there, and impose constraints on the Universe Brain, so how can they be tweaked for life? At this point the argument appears to vanish up its own fundament, but Goff continues the obscurantism:

Having said that, the second and final modification we must make to cosmopsychism in order to explain the fine-tuning does come at some cost. If the Universe, way back in the Planck epoch, fine-tuned the laws to bring about life billions of years in its future, then the Universe must in some sense be aware of the consequences of its actions. This is the second modification: I suggest that the agentive cosmopsychist postulate a basic disposition of the Universe to represent the complete potential consequences of each of its possible actions. In a sense, this is a simple postulation, but it cannot be denied that the complexity involved in these mental representations detracts from the parsimony of the view.

That’s putting it mildly! But Goff still thinks that an aware Universe wanted to see life evolve over billions of years, and thus twiddled with the laws of physics to do so (while itself constrained by those same laws), and that is more parsimonious than the multiverse or a theistic God. But what is the mechanism of this fine tuning? How does it work?

In the end, the best answer to “why is the universe fine tuned for life” seems to be “We don’t know if it is, and even if it is, there are non-panpsychic and non-supernatural explanations for which there is some evidence. But in the end, we don’t know how to answer this question yet.”

I’m surprised that anybody buys this kind of stuff, because it’s really a form of sophisticated-sounding woo. I guess it gives people solace that there’s Something Bigger Than Us Out There. But why on Earth would Aeon publish two articles about this?

Well, here’s one possibility: a disclaimer at the end of Goff’s piece:

This essay was made possible through the support of a grant from Templeton Religion Trust to Aeon and a separate grant from the Templeton funded‘Pantheism and Panentheism’ project to the author. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Templeton Religion Trust.

Yep, Templeton again! But what does it mean that they made this essay possible? Did they pay Goff to write it, or Aeon to publish it, or was it simply part of Goff’s Templeton-funded work? Who knows? But it’s useful to know that Aeon is well ensconced in Templeton’s deep pockets. Caveat emptor!

On the page listing its sponsors, Aeon notes only one “corporate” sponsor:

I suspect Goff’s pieces are two of the “articles and videos bringing to public view important research and deep, new thinking about soceity, religion, and individual development. Oh, those Big Questions!

All I know is that we have two essays on woo at Aeon, which itself is funded by Templeton, and one at NPR; and a competent physicist could take them all apart with ease. Eight words would suffice: “This is all pure speculation unsupported by evidence.”

Philip Goff

Templeton gives millions of dollars to promote “intellectual humility”

February 6, 2018 • 10:30 am

Perhaps readers can help me out with this one. First, remember that the goal of the John Templeton Foundation (JTF) has always been what its namesake specified in its will—Sir John’s money was to be used to promote the use of science as a way of helping make “spiritual discoveries”, i.e., entangling fact and faith. As Wikipedia notes:

. . . . .one of the major goals of the Templeton Foundation is to proliferate the monetary support of spiritual discoveries. The Templeton Foundation encourages research into “big questions” by awarding philanthropic aid to institutions and people who pursue the answers to such questions through “explorations into the laws of nature and the universe, to questions on the nature of love, gratitude, forgiveness, and creativity.”[29]

Templeton asserts that the purpose of the Templeton Foundation is as follows:

We are trying to persuade people that no human has yet grasped 1% of what can be known about spiritual realities. So we are encouraging people to start using the same methods of science that have been so productive in other areas, in order to discover spiritual realities.

— Sir John Templeton, Interview with Financial Intelligence Report

What, pray tell, is a “spiritual reality”?

“Big Questions”, of course, is a euphemism for “spiritual and religious questions”, as the JTF has been sweeping the religious aspect of its mission under the rug. Here’s part of its mission statement (click on screenshot to go to site):

Note the questions. Some are already answered by science (Do we have free will? Is evolution directional? Are we immortal?), and the answers are all “no”. But of course the motivation for those questions is religious, not scientific. As for “What is love?”, do they seriously think they’ll be able to answer that? However, this shows the religious foundations that still underlie the JTF’s activities.

And the JTF is loaded. Loaded with so much dosh that they can easily skew the direction of research—in science, in sociology, in psychology, and in theology—toward the aims they want. Look at this money! $77.4 million awarded just in 2016! And the endowment is huge!

Reader Michael called my attention to one of Templeton’s recent funding areas: “science and humility”, for whose study the JTF has appropriated millions of dollars. For example, in 2013-2015 it gave 2.7 million dollars to St. Louis University to study “the philosophy and theology of intellectual humility”.

Here’s the original announcement of the grant from St. Louis University . (The middle two paragraphs come straight from Templeton’s description of the grant, in the screenshot below).

The emphases are mine:

The Philosophy and Theology of Intellectual Humility

Saint Louis University has received a generous grant from the The John Templeton Foundation to explore the subject of intellectual humility. The Templeton Foundation will contribute over $2.7 million to the project, with contributions by SLU bringing the total grant to over $3 million. The Philosophy and Theology of Intellectual Humility project will focus on a variety of philosophical and theological issues relevant to the topic of intellectual humility. The project is being led by John Greco and Eleonore Stump.

Intellectual humility is an intellectual virtue, a character trait that allows the intellectually humble person to think and reason well. It is plausibly related to open-mindedness, a sense of one’s own fallibility, and a healthy recognition of one’s intellectual debts to others. If intellectual humility marks a mean between extremes, then related vices (on the one side) would be intellectual arrogance, closed-mindedness, and overconfidence in one’s own opinions and intellectual powers, and (on the other side) undue timidity in one’s intellectual life, or even intellectual cowardice.

The project will focus on a variety of philosophical and theological issues relevant to the topic of intellectual humility, as informed by current research in the empirical sciences, including: virtue epistemology; regulative epistemology; peer disagreement; intellectual humility, intellectual autonomy and deference to authority; religious pluralism; divine hiddenness; intellectual humility and theological method; biases, heuristics, dual-process theories and evolution; intersubjectivity and mind reading.

The Saint Louis University effort complements the activities and research occurring under Templeton’s Science of Intellectual Humility project by encouraging philosophers and theologians to integrate empirical research on questions surrounding intellectual humility into their own investigations.

Note, please, that this project is “informed by current research in the empirical sciences”. What I take this to mean is that the project is aimed, as is so often the case with Templeton, at doing down naturalism and criticizing “scientism”, at the same time promoting religion by looking for “divine hiddenness” and using the “theological method”. They don’t appear to address this topic “informed by current work in theology”.  While scientists themselves can be less than humble, science itself is, and any scientist saying they were using faith to discern the truth would be laughed out of the field. All of us, even if personally arrogant, must couch our findings in terms like “this suggests that. . . ” or “we suspect. . .”. Yet theologians generally operate with certainty or near certainty, and nobody accuses them of a “lack of humility.”

As far as I can see, then, “intellectual humility” is aiming an arrow directly at science, not at theology. For when the dust settles, theology and religion are far more arrogant than science, with doubt being at best a trivial part of theology, rarely encouraged in religion, with religion having no tools to ascertain what is really true. What can be more arrogant than holding as firm truth that there is a God and his son/alter ego Jesus was killed and resurrected to expiate our sins? Or that Allah dictated the Qur’an to Muhammad through an angel, and that Qur’an is the final truth. It will be a cold day in July when Templeton decides to examine the “intellectual arrogance” of theologians!

And now Templeton has given another $5.75 million to the Humanities Institute of the University of Connecticut (click on screenshot) for another mushbrained humility initiative:

Part of the announcement (my emphasis):

The John Templeton Foundation has awarded $5.75 million to the UConn Humanities Institute for research on balancing humility and conviction in public life.

The grant is the largest for the humanities ever awarded to UConn, and is one of the largest humanities-based research grants ever awarded in the United States.

. . . The grant will allow the Humanities Institute, which is part of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, to sponsor three high-profile public forums; summer institutes for high school teachers on how to incorporate intellectual humility into their classes; an online course on project themes; and a series of awareness-raising media initiatives. The co-principal investigator for the project is Brendan Kane, an associate professor of history and associate director of the Humanities Institute.

The project’s research activities include a visiting fellowship program hosting leaders from the academic, media, and non-profit sectors; an international research funding competition targeting interdisciplinary teams of researchers pursuing project themes; four research workshops hosted at UConn; and a collaboration with UConn’s Mellon Foundation-funded “Scholarly Communications Design Studio” for the presentation of project research in new interactive modalities.

And their definition of “intellectual humility”:

For the purposes of this CFP, intellectual humility can be understood to involve the owning of one’s cognitive limitations, a healthy recognition of one’s intellectual debts to others, and low concern for intellectual domination and certain kinds of social status. It is closely allied with traits such as open-mindedness, a sense of one’s fallibility, and being responsive to reasons. Traits and behaviors opposed to intellectual humility and its allied traits, then, would include closed-mindedness, overconfidence in one’s opinions and intellectual powers, dogmatism, an exaggerated sense of intellectual autonomy, reluctance to pursue and consider new evidence, intellectual arrogance, and intellectual vanity.

For the life of me, I can’t see the value of investing $8 million in studies of “humility”.  My take, as I said, is that this money is meant to fund studies of “scientism”: the overreach of science beyond its so-called proper boundaries, and the role that close-mindedness among scientists (e.g., towards God) impedes intellectual advance.

But I welcome other people’s takes. Templeton is really good at cloaking its accommodationist agenda, and I can’t quite figure this one out.

Finally, a cartoon comment from reader Pliny the in Between:

 

Templeton abandons pretense of rationality, awards Templeton Prize to Alvin Plantinga, intelligent-design advocate

April 27, 2017 • 9:30 am

Reader Mark called my attention to the fact that John Templeton Foundation (JTF) has bestowed its annual Templeton Prize on someone who’s not only a deeply misguided religious philosopher, but also has promoted intelligent design and criticized naturalism. Yes, it’s Alvin Plantinga, an 84-year-old emeritus professor of philosophy at Notre Dame and also a professor at Calvin College (he’s a Calvinist of sorts).  I’ve written about Plantinga and his claims a lot on this site (go here to see what I’ve said): his main schtick is to claim that it’s not irrational to believe in God; that therefore it’s rational to believe in God; that the existence of God is a “basic belief” that doesn’t require empirical justification; that such belief comes from a divinely installed sensus divinitatis that allows us to detect truth; that because the truth-detector has to come from God, what it finds, like scientific “truths”, is incompatible with pure naturalism; that evolution was guided by GOD AND SATAN; that the God who installed our sensus is none other than Plantinga’s Christian God (surprise!); and that the presence of atheists, Hindus, Jews, and the majority of people with “false beliefs” simply had broken sensuses, which were due to, yes, the actions of SATAN!

Indeed, Plantinga does believe in the Hornéd One. Here’s a quote from his 2011 book, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism, explaining why there is undeserved evil in the world (my emphasis):

But any world that contains atonement will contain sin and evil and consequent suffering and pain. Furthermore, if the remedy is to be proportionate to the sickness, such a world will contain a great deal of sin and a great deal of suffering and pain. Still further, it may very well contain sin and suffering, not just on the part of human beings but perhaps also on the part of other creatures as well. Indeed, some of these other creatures might be vastly more powerful than human beings, and some of them—Satan and his minions, for example—may have been permitted to play a role in the evolution of life on earth, steering it in the direction of predation, waste and pain. (Some may snort with disdain at this suggestion; it is none the worse for that.)

Yes it is the worse for that, for where’s the evidence for Satan? That’s some scholarly theodicy, no? And for such lucubrations, Plantinga got £1.1 million—more than a Nobel Prizewinner.

If you think I’m making up my claims about Plantinga’s views, read some of my posts on Plantinga’s claims or the section about his views in my book Faith Versus Fact (pp. 148-149 and 177-183. For a better refutation of the views that earned Plantinga his $1.4 million dollar prize, read pp. 22-73 of an underappreciated scholarly book attacking theism, The Non-Existence of God by Nicholas Everitt, who simply demolishes Plantinga’s piffle. (By the way, have theists read Everitt’s book? If not, then they’ve neglected some of The Best Arguments for Atheism.)

All of this casts doubts on Templeton’s claim to be increasingly down with science, for, after all, Plantinga is pretty much an intelligent design creationist. Although he’s waffled on this a bit in the past, he seems to have settled on ID creationism. I’ll quote Michael Ruse from The Chronicle of Higher Education in 2011, and, having read Plantinga’s book, I concur with Michael:

Now, Plantinga has given us a full-length treatment of his views on science and its relationship to religion. I can only say that either he has changed his mind in the last year [when said he didn’t dismiss Darwinism] or, shall we say, he was not being entirely forthcoming. There is a chapter of the book on Intelligent Design Theory and I challenge any independent person to read it and not conclude that Plantinga accepts this theory over modern evolutionary theory, especially the dominant modern Darwinian evolutionary theory. But read the chapter yourself if you have doubts about what I claim. Make your own judgment.

Remember, Ruse is usually soft on theists.

You can read Maarten Boudry’s review of Plantinga’s book here, a review that severely faults Plantinga for his “philosophical trickery” and his flawed arguments for God-guided evolution.

If you want to be charitable, you could argue that Plantinga adheres to a form of theistic evolution, in which God created and directed the process, but that’s still a form of theistic creationism, and of course there’s no scientific evidence for it (and there is evidence against it, like the randomness of mutation and the extinction of most species [or is that due to SATAN?]), so Templeton has put their imprimatur on an explicit denier of science. But even if you leave aside ID, Plantinga’s arguments that you can prove the existence of the Christian God through philosophy alone are wrong, an attempt that smacks of the Ontological Argument. You simply cannot establish the existence of a theistic entity through thought alone.

Here’s the announcement of Plantinga’s Big Prize from the National Catholic Reporter (click on screenshot to to go the piece), which parrots the JTF’s own announcement (right below it):

But it gets worse: here’s part of the JTF’s announcement (my emphasis):

WEST CONSHOHOCKEN, Pa. – Alvin Plantinga, an American scholar whose rigorous writings over a half century have made theism – the belief in a divine reality or god – a serious option within academic philosophy, was announced today as the 2017 Templeton Prize Laureate.

Plantinga’s pioneering work began in the late 1950s, a time when academic philosophers generally rejected religiously informed philosophy. In his early books, however, Plantinga considered a variety of arguments for the existence of God in ways that put theistic belief back on the philosophical agenda.

Plantinga’s 1984 paper, “Advice to Christian Philosophers,” challenged Christian philosophers to let their religious commitments shape their academic agenda and to pursue rigorous work based on a specifically Christian philosophical vision. At the same time, he was developing an account of knowledge, most fully expressed in the “Warrant Trilogy” published by Oxford University Press (1993 and 2000), making the case that religious beliefs are proper starting points for human reasoning and do not have to be defended or justified based on other beliefs. These arguments have now influenced three generations of professional philosophers.

Indeed, more than 50 years after this remarkable journey began, university philosophy departments around the world now include thousands of professors who bring their religious commitments to bear on their work, including Buddhist, Jewish, and Muslim philosophers.

“Sometimes ideas come along that revolutionize the way we think, and those who create such breakthrough discoveries are the people we honor with the Templeton Prize,” said Heather Templeton Dill, president of the John Templeton Foundation, which awards the Prize. “Alvin Plantinga recognized that not only did religious belief not conflict with serious philosophical work, but that it could make crucial contributions to addressing perennial problems in philosophy.”

Note the claim (mostly false) that Plantinga’s work has inspired serious philosophers to “bring their religious commitments to bear on their work”. That is, he’s given them a license to engage in confirmation bias: justifying post facto what they already believe and want to be true. That’s hardly a good way to do philosophy, but of course it’s the way philosophers of religion proceed.

Now if Plantinga were that influential, why are 62% of philosophers atheists—a frequency at least ten times higher than the general public as a whole? (Plantinga claims that the reason is that atheistic philosophers don’t want to believe in God rather than having good rational reasons for their nonbelief.)

Larry Moran at Sandwalk has written a number of critiques of Plantinga and his views on evolution, and you can see a list here. Here are two videos of Plantinga explaining his Prize-winning views. In the first, he emphasizes why, he thinks, you can’t believe in both naturalism and evolution. That’s because, as I said, Alvin can’t imagine how humans can have reliable mental faculties without God, and without those faculties you can neither accept science as a valid method of inquiry nor rely on its conclusions. Ergo, if you accept what science has found, you’re tacitly accepting the Christian God.

Plantinga, of course, neglects the possibility evolution could have given us the ability to draw rational conclusions from data, simply as a survival tool.

Here’s his argument for God as a “basic belief”, which boils down to this: “it seems to be right.” Now that’s powerful philosophy, philosophy based on his gut. I urge you to watch this to see what he thinks.

Below is a partial list of scholars—natural scientists, social scientists, and philosophers and historians of science—whose endeavors have been supported by the JTF. (You can see the full list here; there are hundreds of them.) I’ve listed names only of people I’ve heard of—and remember, I’m just a biologist.

These are good scientists and scholars, by and large, but they take money from an organization that promotes religion, natural theology, and antievolution. I ask them this with all due respect: do you really want to take money from a Foundation that’s devoted to watering down science with superstition?

I believe most or all of these people are holders or beneficiaries of current grants. There are many more who held JTF grants in the past.

Brian Greene and Tracy Day (World Science Festival)
David Sloan Wilson
Martin Nowak
David Albert
Max Tegmark
Kevin Laland
Alexander Vilenkin
Lee Smolin
Carlo Rovelli
Elaine Ecklund
Robert Pennock
Simon Conway Morris
Andrew Whiten
Niles Eldredge
Jon Entine
Paul Bloom
Marcus Feldman
Jennifer Wiseman (head of the AAAS DoSER project)
Scott Edwards
Robert Wright
Jeremy England
Gunter Wagner
Tanya Luhrmann

Apropos, here’s a tw**t from Dan Dennett:

h/t: John O.

More waste of Templeton money

December 20, 2016 • 11:30 am

Now that execrable organization, bent on blurring the boundaries between science and religion, has its sticky fingers in Oxford University (it’s long invaded Cambridge University). Here’s a worthless series of podcasts, for which Templeton anted up 1.3 million pounds (now about #1.6 million US)

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Here are some of the topics. I love the last one (#29)!  And. . . epistemic defeat!

screen-shot-2016-12-20-at-10-53-05-am screen-shot-2016-12-20-at-10-53-34-am
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Now you tell me: was anything substantive added to human knowledge by these lectures? It seems to me they were simply arcane academic exercises designed to buttress fairy tales. How much clean water could have been given to African villages for 1.6 million dollars?

h/t: Dennis

Robert Wright in the NYT: Evolution could have a “higher purpose”

December 13, 2016 • 10:00 am

The article I’m writing about today at length—and I apologize to the “TL; DR” crowd—was brought to my attention by more than a dozen readers, which shows how eagerly they wanted a response—and a refutation. But the article is so muddled and philosophically weak that it basically refutes itself. Nevertheless, because it’s a big piece in the New York Times‘s “Stone” (philosophy) section, I feel that I must take up the cudgels. Actually, the laws of physics dictated that I had no choice.

Robert Wright has written several books on evolution and religion, as well as their relationship; these include The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, and The Evolution of God. (He’s a visiting professor of science and religion at Union Theological Seminary and runs MeaningofLife.tv, a website set up last year with the help of—you guessed it—the John Templeton Foundation.)

I reviewed Wright’s last book on God (critically) for The New Republic, calling it “creationism for liberals,” since Wright imbued evolution with a sort of teleology that became mixed up with human moral progression, and somehow imputed the latter to numinous rather than secular sources.  (Note: In a letter to The New Republic, Wright responded to my review and I responded to his response.)

This is a quote from The Evolution of God that I reproduced in my review:

The god I’ve been describing is a god in quotation marks, a god that exists in people’s heads…. To the extent that “god” grows, that is evidence–maybe not massive evidence but some evidence–of higher purpose. Which raises this question: If “God” indeed grows, and grows with stubborn persistence, does this mean that we can start thinking about taking the quotation marks off? That is: If the human conception of god features moral growth, and if this reflects corresponding moral growth on the part of humanity itself, and if humanity’s moral growth flows from basic dynamics underlying history, and if we conclude that this growth is therefore evidence of “higher purpose,” does this amount to evidence of an actual god?

….Maybe the growth of “God” signifies the existence of God. That is: if history naturally pushes people toward moral improvement, toward moral truth, and their God, as they conceive their God, grows accordingly, becoming morally richer, than maybe this growth is evidence of some higher purpose, and maybe–conceivably–the source of that purpose is worthy of the name divinity.

You can see that in that book Wright elided changes in the idea of God (the Abrahamic God envisioned by worshipers has become more moral over time) into the existence of God: an unwarranted conflation of a change in society’s view of mythical being with the existence of that being itself. Wright has done this repeatedly over time, arguing that yes, there can be cultural evolution and biological evolution, but behind both there is some “higher purpose”—perhaps a divine being pushing it all forward. And I believe Wright thinks that being is God, though this is sheer speculation.

Yet Wright, though raised as a Southern Baptist, considers himself an atheist—though he’s repeatedly attacked New Atheists. But he’s an atheist who hasn’t fully abandoned the notion of God, even if that God is some teleological force that doesn’t have a beard or recline on clouds.

And Wright is still at it, holding forth in a new essay in an essay in the New York Times: “Can evolution have a ‘higher purpose'”? It’s a real mess, since Wright, while still not having decided what, exactly, the teleological force is behind evolution and human moral progress, still maintains that there is one.

He begins (and repeatedly returns) to the idea that Earth and our conception of the Universe may all be a gigantic trick played by extraterrestrial beings for their own amusement: a “terrestrial zoo” that is occasionally manipulated by its creators. Wright got that idea from a conversation with the famous evolutionist W. D. Hamilton. Well, Hamilton had some bizarre ideas about evolution (a few of them were right, which is why he became famous), but the alien zoo idea is not one of them.

And neither is the idea, suggested by Wright later in the piece, that we’re all characters in a gigantic simulation, a Matrix, also devised by super-intelligent beings. Both of these hypotheses don’t deserve serious consideration, though many do consider them. For one thing, they are untestable claims and therefore unscientific ones. How would we know that we’re manipulated by aliens, or even part of a simulation? Further, it’s unparsimonious. What reason do we have for thinking that we are a gigantic real or virtual experiment rather than inhabitants of a real Universe? Adding those manipulative aliens just puts another layer on the hypothesis.

But Wright wants to keep his teleology without obviously dragging in our conventional notion about God, and so he tries to dispel what he calls “three great myths about evolution and purpose”. The myths and Wright’s refutations of them (abridged) are indented, and I’ve put Wright’s headings (and a couple other bits) in bold:

Myth number one: To say that there’s in some sense a “higher purpose” means there are “spooky forces” at work.

When I ask scientifically minded people if they think life on earth may have some larger purpose, they typically say no. If I ask them to explain their view, it often turns out that they think that answering yes would mean departing from a scientific worldview — embracing the possibility of supernatural beings or, at the very least, of immaterial factors that lie beyond scientific measurement. But Hamilton’s thought experiment shows that this isn’t necessarily so.

You may consider aliens spooky, but they’re not a spooky force. And they’re not supernatural beings. They’re just physical beings, like us. Their technology is so advanced that their interventions might seem miraculous to us — as various smartphone apps would seem to my great-, great-grandparents — but these interventions would in fact comply with the laws of science.

Wright considers the alien zoo experiment as evincing “purpose” because, he says, the aliens were purposeful in planting simple self-replicating material on earth a few billion years ago, confident that it would lead to something that would keep them entertained (keeping them entertained being, in this scenario, life’s purpose). And they were also purposeful because they’d occasionally enter the zoo and tweak things a bit to their liking.

But of course there’s not the slightest bit of evidence that this is true.  (Note that here he says that the aliens can’t be considered supernatural beings because they’re physical entities residing somewhere else in the Universe.) Yes, I suppose this scenario is a logical possibility, but I don’t see it as probable—not without evidence. You could envision all sorts of logically possible scenarios for evolution besides the above (e.g., fairies making mutations that change evolution and so on), but without evidence, and no way to disprove them, we needn’t take them seriously. Yet as he so often does, Wright thinks that if he gets us to admit that something is logically possible,  then he’s increased its probability.  But that’s simply not true, and it’s the same tactic that the obscurantist theologian Alvin Plantinga uses to defend the existence of God. God’s existence is logically possible, ergo he exists.

Myth number two: To say that evolution has a purpose is to say that it is driven by something other than natural selection.

The correction of this misconception is in some ways just a corollary of the correction of the first misconception, but it’s worth spelling out: Evolution can have a purpose even if it is a wholly mechanical, material process — that is, even if its sole engine is natural selection. After all, clocks have purposes — to keep time, a purpose imparted by clockmakers — and they’re wholly mechanical. Of course, to suggest that evolution involves the unfolding of some purpose is to suggest that evolution has in some sense been heading somewhere — namely, toward the realization of its purpose.

I find this deeply muddled. A blind material process, which acts simply according to the laws of physics, has no being behind it, no “mind” directing it. That, to me, is what indicates a purpose. Now a clock was designed to do something specific—keep time—but, as far as we know,  there’s no such mind behind evolution. The conception of “purpose” for a process or object, if it means anything, means that an intelligence designed it with some outcome in mind. That’s true for a clock, but not for evolution. There’s no evidence that evolution is tweaked by some intelligence to achieve some aim. The refutation of Wright’s clock scenario is the same as Darwin’s refutation of William Paley’s watch scenario.

Wright, however, doesn’t conceive of “purpose” in this way: he says that there’s a purpose simply if a process is “heading somewhere”. But in retrospect every process is heading somewhere, including evolution. It’s been heading toward all existing species, and will keep heading toward future species. Yet that’s simply the result of the undirected processes of genetic drift and natural selection, and there’s no more purpose in that than there is in the formation of a snowflake, in which water molecules are, in retrospect, seen as “heading” toward a complex and lovely crystal.

Myth number three: Evolution couldn’t have a purpose, because it doesn’t have a direction.

The idea that evolution is fundamentally directionless is widespread, in part because one great popularizer of evolution, Stephen Jay Gould, worked hard to leave that impression. As I and others have argued, Gould was at best misleading on this point. And, anyway, even Gould admitted that, yes, on balance evolution tends to create beings of greater and greater complexity. A number of evolutionary biologists would go further and say that evolution was likely, given long enough, to create animals as intelligent as us.

In fact, that idea is implicit in Hamilton’s saying the aliens could have “set up” evolution in such a way that “it would produce these really interesting characters — humans.” This part of Hamilton’s scenario requires no intervention on the part of the aliens, because he believed that evolution by natural selection has a kind of direction in the sense that it is likely, given long enough, to produce very intelligent forms of life. (When speaking more precisely, as he did in other parts of the interview, Hamilton would say that the human species per se wasn’t in the cards — that it wasn’t inevitable that the first intelligent species would look like us.)

Well, my answer to the question, “Was the evolution of intelligent, God-worshiping humans inevitable?” has been “we don’t know, but probably not.” Even as a determinist on the macro level, I see are truly indeterministic factors affecting evolution, including the creation of Earth by the Big Bang and the likely quantum nature of mutational changes, which makes the course of evolution fundamentally unpredictable (see Faith Versus Fact for a discussion of this issue). From the rest of Wright’s article, it’s palpably clear that Wright sees evolution as having a purpose because it a). operates largely by the differential reproduction of genes (therefore, Wright says, the “purpose” of a chicken is to create an egg), and b). it’s led to the evolution of higher intelligence, which now seems inevitable.

As for natural selection, well, it’s not driven by anything external: it reflects the differential reproduction of forms of genes, and that’s all. If you want to say that’s a “purpose”, then fine, but that notion undercuts what every human thinks about what’s “purposeful”, which is that it reflects processes driven by a being with foresight. As for the evolution of humanlike intelligence as inevitable, it arose but once on our planet, and that doesn’t make it seem so inevitable to me. Feathers and elephant trunks also evolved only once, but would we say that the “purpose” of evolution is to create feathers and trunks? No, Wright emphasizes human intelligence for one reason only: he wants the teleology, without his explicitly having to say so, to implicate a God of some sort. After all, intelligent creatures were the explicit purpose of God’s creation.

Finally Wright muddles up his whole essay by adding a confusing scenario and then trying to dispel a fourth myth.

Wright goes on to misuse Lee Smolin’s idea of cosmological natural selection to argue for the existence of intelligent beings. But Smolin’s idea is about explaining the laws of physics, not about explaining intelligent life. First, here’s how Wright (accurately) describes Smolin’s idea, which is credible:

Smolin thinks our universe may itself be a product of a kind of evolution: maybe universes can replicate themselves via black holes, so over time — over a lot of time — you get universes whose physical laws are more and more conducive to replication. (So that’s why our universe is so good at black-hole making!)

This could lead to a Universe that has the laws of physics that we see—if those laws of physics are conducive to producing black holes. And those laws of physics supposedly are most conducive to the appearance of life. (Actually, all they say is that they permitted the appearance of life; see Sean Carroll for more on this.) But Smolin doesn’t make that last claim, since neither he nor anybody else knows whether the laws of physics are best suited to life. To get to that, Wright has to make a far more dubious claim:

In some variants of Smolin’s theory — such as those developed by the late cosmologist Edward Harrison and the mathematician Louis Crane — intelligent beings can play a role in this replication once their technology reaches a point where they can produce black holes. So through cosmological natural selection you’d get universes whose physical properties were more and more conducive to the evolution of intelligent life. This might explain the much-discussed observation that the physical constants of this universe seem “fine-tuned” to permit the emergence of life.

Do I really need to rebut that speculation, which requires the existence of some hyper-intelligent agents able to produce black holes? Isn’t it rather unparsimonious to think that? And if this aliens are already living material beings somewhere in the Universe, or in another Universe, then there’s already some place where intelligent life already exists. Why go to the trouble of making more black holes for making more life when there already is life? Here Wright is adding what Anthony Grayling calls an “arbitrary superfluity” to save his hypothesis that there is some Big Mind behind human evolution.

At the end, Wright notes that although these Fancy Space Aliens might be material beings, they’re also sort-of-supernatural (or at least Goddy)—something he denied in Myth Number One. And so he adds another myth:

Myth number four: If evolution has a purpose, the purpose must have been imbued by an intelligent being.

That said, one interesting feature of current discourse is a growing openness among some scientifically minded people to the possibility that our world has a purpose that was imparted by an intelligent being. I’m referring to “simulation” scenarios, which hold that our seemingly tangible world is actually a kind of projection emanating from some sort of mind-blowingly powerful computer; and the history of our universe, including evolution on this planet, is the unfolding of a computer algorithm whose author must be pretty bright. [JAC: Why is this a myth, then, if it involves an intelligent being?]

 Again, a simulation scenario is an unparsimonious hypothesis that, as far as I can see, is untestable. But Wright sees it as logically possible (which it is), and therefore we should take it seriously. But that’s bogus: there are lots of logical possibilities, like the existence of Santa Claus and the as-yet-unseen Loch Ness Monster, that we don’t take seriously—at least as adults. Further, Wright sees the simulation hypothesis as something corresponding to our idea of God, therefore vindicating his hidden desire for divinity:

When an argument for higher purpose is put this way — that is, when it doesn’t involve the phrase “higher purpose” and, further, is cast more as a technological scenario than a metaphysical one — it is considered intellectually respectable. [JAC: Not to me! And isn’t setting up a specific “tech=nological scenario” accepting a purpose conceived by intelligent beings?] I don’t mean there aren’t plenty of people who dismiss it. I’m talking about how people dismiss it. The Bostrom paper [a paper by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostron claiming there are good reasons to think we’re living in a simulation] drew flack, but a lot of it was from people who thought the chances that we’re living in a simulation are way less than 50 percent, not from people who thought the idea was wholly crazy.

If you walked up to the same people who gave Bostrom a respectful hearing and told them there is a transcendent God, many would dismiss the idea out of hand. Yet the simulation hypothesis is a God hypothesis: An intelligence of awe-inspiring power created our universe for reasons we can speculate about but can’t entirely fathom. And, assuming this intelligence still exists, it is in some sense outside of our reality — beyond the reach of our senses — and yet, presumably, it has the power to intervene in our world. Theology has entered “secular” discourse under another name.

Personally, I’m fine with that. I think discussion of higher purpose should be respectable even in a scientific age. I don’t mean I buy the simulation scenario in particular, or the space alien scenario, or the cosmological natural selection scenario. But I do think there’s reason to suspect that there’s some point to this exercise we Earthlings are engaged in, some purpose imbued by something — and that, even if identifying that something is for now hopeless, there are grounds for speculating about what the point of the exercise is.

No, the simulation hypothesis is not a “God hypothesis,” for if anything, to the vast bulk of believers God represents something supernatural, and Wright’s hypothesis is manifestly not supernatural. And it’s not theology, either, which is the study of a supernatural god or gods. And if Wright wants to posit the existence of something that directs evolution, he has to first show us phenomena that cannot have been produced by evolution itself  without the intervention of some other intelligence.

At the end of his piece, Wright links to his essay on one such phenomenon, which is consciousness. Well, we don’t yet understand its neurological or evolutionary basis, but I have confidence that some day—probably not in my lifetime—we will. After all, materialism has always led to the solution of scientific problems, if they’re solvable, whereas teleological and supernatural views have never led anywhere. Wright’s SOMETHING-of-the-Gaps argument is the reason why I refer to his lucubrations as “creationism for liberals”. It doesn’t materially differ from those Intelligent Design advocates who claim that there are some scientific puzzles (like consciousness or bacterial flagella) that can’t be explained and never will, therefore there’s some “Designer” out there. Like Wright, they, too, don’t name the designer, though we know that IDers really think it’s the Abrahamic God. Wright is either more coy than IDers (and thus won’t drag God into his essay), or—more likely—simply confused, but longing for transcendence. But in the end, the fact that something is logically possible says nothing about its probability.

Wright’s oeuvre over the last few years has been aimed at what he said in his quote at the top: taking the quotation marks away from “God.” Now why on Earth would someone want to do that? I can only speculate, but I do see that Wright describes the Higher Purpose Gambit as a “philosophically liberating upshot.” In other words, it makes him feel good, and makes his religious or “spiritual” readers feel good. And it surely also makes the John Templeton Foundation feel good. Again I say, “Well played, Templeton!”

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Could this be Wright’s source of “transcendence”?

Templeton sponsors accommodationist “ads” in Smithsonian Magazine

November 20, 2016 • 10:45 am

Two days ago I was beefing about an “article” in Smithsonian Magazine in which physicist (and believer) Sylvester James Gates was interviewed about physics, and at the end espoused a harmony between science and religion. Here’s the masthead:

screen-shot-2016-11-20-at-8-42-42-amI wrote a critique of that piece, concentrating on Gates’s answer to the last question, “In science, both mathematics and physics play large roles in describing and probing the earliest stages of our universe. But some people view the question of where our universe came from as the sole domain of faith or religion. What do you think about how science and faith are often pitted against each other?“.  I found Gates’s accommodationist answer lame—indeed, almost incoherent.

I took that piece to be a genuine article in Smithsonian, but it wasn’t. It was, as readers Darren and Taz noticed, as I didn’t, “sponsor content”; I simply didn’t notice this bit over the title:

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Let me enlarge that little stuff at the upper right:

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So what we have is a Templeton-funded ad (euphemism: “sponsor content”) masquerading as an article. (Note as well that only the last of eight questions to Gates has anything to do with the ad’s title!) So I’ll apologize for accusing Smithsonian itself for publishing an article promoting accommodationism, and chastise myself for missing the fact that the piece was an “ad”. But my criticism of the contents of the piece stands, and I still think the ad was designed to look like a real article—just like this other Templeton-funded “sponsor content” promoting the compatibility of science and religion (click to go to the article):

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That interview was also conducted by Summer Ash. So what we have is two Templeton-sponsored ads in Smithsonian Magazine, both espousing harmony between science and religion, with both interviews conducted by a writer who describes herself like this:

I’m the Director of Outreach for Columbia University’s Department of Astronomy.

I’m also a freelance science writer and communicator. My work has been published in The Atlantic, Smithsonian, Now. Space, Scientific American, Slate, and Nautilus.

Note that Ash’s Smithsonian link is to another Templeton sponsored “ad”, and that Nautilus magazine was started and is sustained by grants from the John Templeton Foundation: over two million dollars in the last two years.  It’s not clear who’s paying Ash, since she’s listed with “smithsonian.com” under her name. My guess is Templeton, but it’s a bit unclear.

Reader Taz also ferreted out Smithsonian’s editorial guidelines:

As members of the American Society of Magazine Editors, Smithsonian.com adheres to the guidelines set forth by ASME; you can read the full guidelines here: http://www.magazine.org/asme/editorial-guidelines, which contain the following points:

  • Every reader is entitled to fair and accurate news and information

  • The value of magazines to advertisers depends on reader trust

  • The difference between editorial content and marketing messages must be transparent

  • Editorial integrity must not be compromised by advertiser influence

  • Marketer-provided content, including native advertising, should be prominently labeled as advertising, and the source of such content and the affiliation of the authors should be clearly acknowledged. The term “Sponsor Content,” already in use on some websites, can be used to label native advertising.

  • Native advertising should include a prominent statement or “What’s This?” rollover at the top of the advertising unit explaining that the content has been created by a marketer and that the marketer has paid for its publication

  • Native advertising should not use type fonts and graphics resembling those used for editorial content and should be visually separated from editorial content.

I suppose Smithsonian has adhered to these guidelines, but I still object to the ads. Now the onus for the tripe emitted by Gates falls not on the magazine itself (though I think they could have rejected these ads), but on the John Templeton Foundation, which continues its relentless and misguided campaign to show that religion and science are compatible. Templeton now inserts into Science magazines ads that, I claim, are deliberately designed to look like articles. Though they’re labeled as “sponsor content,” they at least fooled me—and I bet other people as well.

What I find odious about all of this are two things. First, that Templeton continues to pay huge amounts of money to persuade scientists that religion is not at odds with science, though it is in several ways (see Faith versus Fact). The organization has claimed to me that I misrepresent it, implying that they’re more engaged in promoting science than pushing accommodationism. And yes, they do promote science, but their main aim, which seems unchanged, is to promote religion and science together as a Happy Package.

Second, I find it disturbing that the Director of Outreach for Columbia University’s Department of Astronomy is making bucks on the side promoting science and religion for Templeton. Were I an member of Columbia’s Astronomy department, I’d be a bit miffed by this, for it besmirches the pure science produced by that group.