Category: Templeton

New York Times op-ed: Science can learn from religion

February 3, 2019 • 10:00 am

UPDATE:  If religious practices promote well being, one would expect that more religious countries would have happier inhabitants. But the graph below (prepared by reader gluonspring) shows that this is not the case: the most religious countries score lowest on the UN’s “happiness index.” Of course this is a correlation and not necessarily a causal relationship, and there are other factors as well (people may turn to religion if they are poor and unhappy), but this certainly goes against DeSteno’s hypothesis.

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I’ve gotten the link to this new NYT op-ed from about a dozen readers, with some explicitly asking me to respond.

Okay, I’ll bite, though my response will be limited to this site as there’s no way in hell that the New York Times would publish a piece saying that science and religion are not mutually helpful. The writer is David DeSteno, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University and author of the book Emotional Success: The Power of Gratitude, Compassion, and Pride. More about him and his funding sources (yes, you can guess!) later.

The article manages to press all my buttons, including extolling the oleaginous Krista Tippett (I had to listen to her ask Daniel Kahneman this morning how he manages to “inhabit the space of his theories”!) and criticizing Steven Pinker. But let’s examine the arguments, which are independent of whether DeSteno loves Krista Tippett (she is, by the way, funded by Templeton).

DeSteno’s thesis is that religion has contributed to science, and that arguing for a divide between the areas “might not only be stoking needless hostility; it might also be slowing the process of scientific discovery itself.”

How does this occur? According to DeSteno, religion has found ways to control not only individual behavior, but also group behavior—and in good ways. If we study these religous methods, we could concoct hypotheses about how we can apply this behavioral control to society at large. In other words, the contribution of religion to science is that it suggests hypotheses. These hypotheses can then be tested using science to see if they work. As DeSteno says:

Religious traditions offer a rich store of ideas about what human beings are like and how they can satisfy their deepest moral and social needs. For thousands of years, people have turned to spiritual leaders and religious communities for guidance about how to conduct themselves, how to coexist with other people, how to live meaningful and fulfilled lives — and how to accomplish this in the face of the many obstacles to doing so. The biologist Richard Dawkins, a vocal critic of religion, has said that in listening to and debating theologians, he has “never heard them say anything of the smallest use.” Yet it is hubristic to assume that religious thinkers who have grappled for centuries with the workings of the human mind have never discovered anything of interest to scientists studying human behavior.

Just as ancient doesn’t always mean wise, it doesn’t always mean foolish. The only way to determine which is the case is to put an idea — a hypothesis — to an empirical test. In my own work, I have repeatedly done so. I have found that religious ideas about human behavior and how to influence it, though never worthy of blind embrace, are sometimes vindicated by scientific examination.

So what are these “religious ideas”? They include these:

1.) Meditation. The idea that meditation can reduce suffering and make people more moral has, says DeSteno, been supported by science. He also says that idea comes from Buddhism.

2.) Ritual. DeSteno says that science has found that the repetitive actions of rituals lead to greater self-control and more feelings of “affiliation and empathy”. He implies that the use of rituals originated in religion.

3.) “Religious virtues such as gratitude and kindness.” See below.

That’s about it, but one can think of other ideas as well. Whether they come from religion is debatable, and I’ll get to that in a minute. DeSteno’s conclusion?

If this view is right, religion can offer tools to bolster secular interventions of many types, such as combating addiction, increasing exercise, saving money and encouraging people to help those in need. This possibility dovetails with a parallel body of research showing that by cultivating traditional religious virtues such as gratitude and kindness, people can also improve their ability to reach personal goals like financial and educational success.

. . . My purpose here isn’t to argue that religion is inherently good or bad. As with most social institutions, its value depends on the intentions of those using it. But even in cases where religion has been used to foment intergroup conflict, to justify invidious social hierarchies or to encourage the maintenance of false beliefs, studying how it manages to leverage the mechanisms of the mind to accomplish those nefarious goals can offer insights about ourselves — insights that could be used to understand and then combat such abuses in the future, whether perpetrated by religious or secular powers.

Science and religion do not need each other to function, but that doesn’t imply that they can’t benefit from each other.

It’s clear that what DeSteno means is that science can find out stuff if they test hypotheses derived from examining religion, but that science itself doesn’t benefit. Science is, after all, a set of practices that help us find out stuff, and it isn’t and has never been helped by religion. It is society that benefits—supposedly.

DeSteno calls these testable hypotheses “spiritual technologies”, a word he got from Krista Tippett (it has shady overtones from Scientology, though). But he also says, correctly, that these practices can be separated from religious dogma, and also don’t vindicate the dogma of any religion. In response to Pinker, who, when faced with DeSteno’s ideas, said that these are cultural and not religious practices, DeSteno says that it’s hard to separate the two.

And it is, which is one of the problems of DeSteno’s thesis. Are these techniques derived from studying religion and its supposed successes, or do they come from elsewhere? I’m willing to admit that meditation comes from Zen Buddhism, though many people don’t see that as a religion. But that aside, it does seem to have value, though some people, like Dan Dennett, never feel the “mindfulness” and “out of self” experiences touted by adherents like Sam Harris. I would be interested to see if the scientific studies of meditation explicitly credit Buddhism, but I won’t carp if they did.

As for the other two, I am not so sure they come from religion.  Ritual probably long preceded present-day religions, and may have had little to do with belief in divine beings. The origins of ritual are lost in the irrecoverable past of our species. Indeed, religion may have adopted rituals like singing and dancing from the teenage phase of our evolutionary history.

And, of course, there are other ways of bonding. Do soccer fans derive their chants and solidarity from observing religion? I don’t think so. There are many things that help us bond, and many rituals that facilitate that, and surely some of those don’t come from religion. I won’t go into this in detail as readers can think of these on their own. But why not write an article like “What science can learn from soccer”?

Here’s some video from that proposed article:

As for “gratitude and kindness,” I deny that these ideas derive from religion. While some religions emphasize them, many urge them on adherents to their faith but urge intolerance and dislike towards members of other faiths. That, indeed, was the situation throughout most of religious history. If you ascribe “gratitude and kindness” to religion, you must also ascribe “dislike, xenophibia, and intolerance of others” to religion as well. Here DeSteno is brandishing a double-edged sword.

There are many reasons to think that religion adopted the “gratitude and kindness” stand from secular reason and from evolution. These virtues would have arisen via experience and evolution over the long period of time when humans lived in small groups—groups of people who knew each other and thus could practice these virtues in light of the expected reciprocity from others. And, of course, secular ethics has emphasized these virtues from since forever. As Rebecca Goldstein told me, moral philosophy is a thoroughly secular enterprise. And she’s right. Religions simply took over these virtues from preexisting groups.

But there’s more to say. Religion has also had a malign influence on humanity, not, perhaps, through scientific study of religious methods of behavior control, but from secular enterprises apeing religious methods to control people. For example:

  1. Threats as a way to control behavior. There’s nothing more compelling than making people behave than by threatening them if they don’t. Religion is excellent at doing this, especially through threats of burning in hell. Other threats have been used by dictatorships to make people conform. What are Nazism and Stalinism but oppressive ideologies that use the methods of religion, including god figures, threats, ritual, and punishment of apostasy and blasphemy?
  2. Deprivation of freedom of expression. Religions have been suppressing heresy for centuries, a technique taken over by totalitarian regimes to ensure control.
  3. Use of raw power to get your way. Here I’ll mention how some Catholic priests have used the cachet of their church to sexually molest young people.
  4. Promises of reward if you give money or effort to the church. People who tithe expect rewards, often in the afterlife. But “prosperity gospel” hucksters like Creflo Dollar, as well as Scientologists, use these promises of reward to bankrupt their acolytes.

Now scientists may not have studied these religious methods to judge their efficacy. After all, who would fund a study of whether gaining religious power over someone makes them more likely to succumb to sexual molestation? But the hypotheses that these methods work can reasonably be ascribed to religion (at least as reasonably as the three ideas mentioned above), and they have been used to damage human beings. On balance, one can’t say that the existence of religions has been an overall good in making humans feel good and behave well. Likewise, we can’t say that scientific discoveries about human behavior would be less advanced if religion hadn’t existed.

When I read this article, I immediately thought, “I smell Templeton in here.” (By the way, the self-aggrandizing rat in the wonderful children’s book Charlotte’s Web is named Templeton!) And it doesn’t take much digging to find that DeSteno has been and still is amply funded by Templeton. Here are two past grants he’s had, both listed on his c.v.:

John Templeton Foundation Co-PI’s: David DeSteno and Lisa Feldman Barrett Informal Science Education via Storytelling: Teaching Scientists and Philosophers How to Communicate with the Public Funding Program: Academic Engagement November 2016 – October 2018; Total costs: $216,400. J

John Templeton Foundation PI: David DeSteno Behavioral Measures of Virtue: Moving from the Lab to the “Real World” Funding Program: Character Virtue Development June 2014 – May 2016; Total costs: $244,251

And, on January 22 of this year, Northeastern University noted that DeSteno and a colleague now have three more grants from Templeton adding up to a cool $600,000:

DeSteno and fellow Northeastern psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett recently received three grants from the John Templeton Foundation for a total of nearly $600,000, including two grants to continue offering workshops that help scientists such as Routledge communicate complex information to laypeople.

Hundreds of scientists from all over the world have applied to attend the first three workshops, and a dozen have been selected to participate in each one. According to DeSteno, several of their workshop attendees have written articles for major news outlets such as theTimes, The Wall Street Journal, and Scientific American. Now they are planning a fourth workshop this fall in Boston.

Some of these grants have been to teach scholars to communicate with the public. As Templeton described the first grant above, which expired in October 2018:

Scholars yearn to provide insights into some of the big questions. Yet, too often, they are limited in their abilities to communicate findings directly to a knowledge hungry public .The result is either that scholars write mainly for one another, placing important knowledge in insular academic journals that are beyond the reach and interest of the public, or rely on intermediaries to digest and transmit knowledge. If science and philosophy are to maximally enhance well-being and benefit humanity, scholars must have a way to more easily disseminate their discoveries to the public. Success in doing so requires learning not only how to tell a good story, and how to write in different styles, but also how to approach, pitch and work with editors at prominent publications.

There’s the Big Questions trope again, which is TempletonSpeak for “osculating faith.” I see workshops like this as Templeton fostering a way to spread its own views to the public, as DeSteno does here (this article could have been written by a Templeton flack). And two of DeSteno’s new Templeton grants are for further workshops in this kind of communication.

There’s a lot of dough to be made, and public approbation to be gained, by claiming that science and religion have a lot to teach each other. Yes, science can often test religious claims (Adam and Eve, the efficacy of prayer, and so on), and these claims are always dispelled. As for religion’s contribution to science, as outlined by DeSteno in this article, well, it’s not impressive.

It’s not to the New York Times’s credit that they continue publishing religion-osculating pieces like this. Would that they gave the same space to criticisms of religion!

Templeton the rat (from the Charlotte’s Web Wiki)

h/t: Greg Mayer, Michael

FIRE is supported by Templeton

January 31, 2019 • 1:00 pm

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!).

 

A “Sinai and Synapses” writer tries to show that religion gives us truths that science cannot, fails miserably

December 17, 2018 • 9:00 am

I mentioned the project/website “Sinai and Synapses” (S&S) a few days ago (oy, what a name!). It came up in an accommodationist article written by Brian Gallagher, editor of a Nautilus blog and also a S&S fellow.  Checking out the S&S site, whose mottos are below, I see it’s the Jewish equivalent of BioLogos: a religious organization dedicated to showing the harmony between science and religion. S&S is run by the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, and, as expected from its mission, it’s funded in part by—you guessed it—the John Templeton Foundation:

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.

The amount of dosh given to S&S by Templeton: $217,400.

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.

 

A bogus reconciliation of science and religion from Nautilus

December 10, 2018 • 1:01 pm

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.

Religiosity and atheism: American scientists versus American public

December 2, 2018 • 1:45 pm

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.

AAAS continues its incursion into accommodationism and theology

October 8, 2018 • 10:15 am

UPDATE: Dr. Swamidass has responded to my criticisms in a comment below (here), but my concerns are not allayed, as you can see from my response.

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The American Association for the Advancement of Science is America’s most famous umbrella organization for scientists, and publishes the influential journal Science. In the past few years, though, it’s been increasingly sticking its nose into religion, with the explicit aim of convincing religious people that their faith is compatible with science. Their efforts include the Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion (DoSER) Program, headed by an evangelical Christian astronomer, Jennifer Wiseman.

Five years ago, with the support of the Templeton Foundation (who else?), the AAAS began a “Science for Seminaries” program, using AAAS and Templeton money to send scientists (often religious ones) into seminaries to try to get students of religion to learn more science and to learn that it’s not in conflict with their faith.  I wrote about this program five years ago, saying this:

Why, I ask, is Templeton and the AAAS so interested in infusing science into seminaries? Wouldn’t the money be better invested in teaching minorities or underserved communities about science? After all, at least that carries the possibility that those kids might become scientists.

The purpose of the seminary program, of course, is not really to make America more science literate, but to blur the boundaries between science and religion, which has always been Templeton’s aim. Why else would the program work not by teaching straight science to theologians, but to somehow (and how is not clear) infuse science or “the history of science” (?) into courses including “pastoral counseling or systematic theology.” Like that’s worth $3.75 million!

What’s worse is that the program’s aims are deeper than that, for they include not only putting science into theology schools, but trying to teach theology to scientists, as the paragraph below shows. Talk about a waste of money! Why on earth do scientists need to become more theologically literate? Yes, it might be salubrious for most of us to know something about the history of religion, and about the nature of religion, but somehow I don’t think that’s what Templeton had in mind.

Now, an article in Wired gives us an update on the program, and it’s clear that the AAAS is now using religious scientists to tell the faithful that they can have their God and science, too. Click on the screenshot below to read the piece:

Now I don’t really object to scientists going to seminaries to teach students science, although, as I said above, the dosh might be better spent teaching those who don’t have a religious bias against science, and have a chance of actually becoming scientists. What I really object to is the AAAS emissaries trying to tell religious people how to reconcile science with their religion—and that is theology.  Here’s a description of one of their science ambassadors, who of course is religious:

IN MAY 2015, S. Joshua Swamidass, a computational biologist at Washington University in St. Louis, received a curious email: would he like to try advising a theological seminary? The note was from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a nonprofit organization that was spinning up a program to send scientists into religious institutions. The organizers had come across an essay he had written, and thought he could help.

So this is how Swamidass and the program help (my emphases):

A week after he got the email, Swamidass headed down to Concordia Seminary, a historic Lutheran campus just a few blocks away from his office in Saint Louis. He met with Joel Okamoto, a Concordia systematic theology professor, and they began searching for places to insert science into the school’s curricula. One course on the Old Testament would analyze whether Genesis could be interpreted as a form of early cosmology. Another would explore what neuroscience has to say about human identity and the soul. “That’s a central preoccupation of books like the Psalms or the Book of Job,” says Okamoto. They also drew up plans for a day-long symposium on faith and the science of memory. Soon, Swamidass was visiting Concordia as often as a few times a month.

. . . The program also made room for more difficult discussions, like evolution. For instance, Bethany Seminary, in Indiana, is planning a conference that will explore “another way of reading [the Bible], whereby they can take the Bible seriously but also accept where the science leads,” says Russell Haitch, a Bethany theology professor.

The bits in bold don’t represent science, but theology: trying to force two disparate ways of knowing together, like mismatched pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

But does it even work? Who knows? BioLogos, a similar organization started by Karl Giberson and Francis Collins, has failed miserably in its goal of getting evangelical Christians to accept evolution. Instead, that program is now deeply engaged in theological pilpul like trying to reconcile Adam and Eve with genetics; and evangelicals are still resisting Darwinism.

The Science for Seminaries program also seems to be failing, at least in some venues:

In response, Concordia reaffirmed its commitment to a Six-Day creation in a science-themed summer edition of its Lutheran Journal, which featured the Hubble Space Telescope’s image of the Westerlund 2 star cluster on the cover. “To the credit of AAAS, they never wanted us to compromise or change,” says Okamoto. “They wanted to make sure we knew that.” But, as he wrote in the journal, “Science for Seminaries” had affirmed that Richard Dawkins did not represent most scientists, “just as the Westboro Baptist Church does not represent all Christians.” Concordia has also learned to empathize with the “lonely calling” of Christian scientists and “theistic evolutionists” like Swamidass—even if the seminary wouldn’t take their position.

Yep, the AAAS is telling the faithful that Richard Dawkins doesn’t represent most scientists, for of course Dawkins is Satan to many religious people. It’s unclear, however, whether Dawkins’s views on atheism don’t represent “most scientists”, since the ubiquitous and unctuous accommodationist Elaine Ecklund says this:

Elaine Ecklund, who researches science and religion at Rice University, says that scientists often underestimate how popular their work is within religious communities, and vice versa: 39 percent of American biologists and physicists affiliate with a faith.

That’s a lot less religiosity than is seen among non-scientist Americans.

So Dawkins’s atheism may indeed characterize most scientists, and certainly characterizes scientists at elite universities (72% atheists) as well as member of the National Academy of Sciences (93% atheists). But even if it didn’t, deliberately dissing one of biology’s premier science popularizes to seminarians is at best unseemly.

And the emissary Dr. Swamidass embarrasses himself in other ways, too (my emphasis):

Meanwhile, seminarians at other schools heard about Swamidass’ work with “Science for Seminaries” and started privately reaching out, curious to understand how he simultaneously affirmed evolutionary science and his faith. Swamidass responded to the interest with a blog post on his lab page, in which he wrote: “it appears that, for some reason, God chose to create humans so that our genomes look as though we do, in fact, have a common ancestor with chimpanzees.”

For some reason? For WHAT reason? Maybe there isn’t a god, and evolution just happens to have occurred by naturalistic means. That in fact is what most scientists believe, not that God made us looking as if we had evolved. Here Swamidass comes perilously close to the old canard that God put the fossils in the rocks to test our faith. At the very least, he’s promulgating a form of theistic evolution.

If you’re a member of the AAAS, be mindful of this. I for one would never join that organization, as I don’t want my money going to theological endeavors.

h/t: Diane G.

Templeton poisons Aeon magazine with Catholic dogma

May 23, 2018 • 11:30 am

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

. . . and from The Conversation:

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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!

h/t: Alexander