The other day, theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser of Dartmouth College won the £1 million Templeton Prize for “affirming life’s spiritual dimension.” At the time I used his quotes reported by the media to show that, while Gleiser may be a good physicist, he’s not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer when it comes to […]
Category Archives: Templeton’s shenanigans
Templeton Prize awarded to physicist for blending science and woo
March 19, 2019 – 12:15 pm
Well, once again the canny John Templeton Foundation has awarded its million-pound Templeton Prize to someone who’s not a religious figure but a scientist who enables religion and criticizes materialism and atheism. This time the Big Dosh went to Marcelo Gleiser, a professor of Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth College. He’s a theoretical physicist and […]
Another big Templeton grant for philosophy (religious philosophy, of course), and a note on Templeton’s corruption of the field
February 19, 2019 – 9:30 am
A certain philosopher who could be mistaken for Santa Claus called my attention to this article in the Daily Nous, a website devoted to the profession of philosophy—and by “profession” I mean “job”. Below you can read yesterday’s announcement of a big new John Templeton Foundation (JTF) grant by clicking on the screenshot, but I’ve […]
Templeton gives half a million dollars to demonstrate that science and religion can help each other find truth
February 14, 2019 – 9:15 am
Lest you think that the Templeton foundations have changed their mission, have a gander. As you may recall, when Sir John died in 2008, he left much of his fortune—acquired by creating investment funds and moving to the Bahamas to avoid taxes—to his own foundations, with the aim of showing that science and religion are […]
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 […]
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 […]
Templeton funds more atheist-bashing
September 27, 2018 – 10:30 am
Lois Lee, a religious scholar whom I’ve written about before, is the lead investigator on a big Templeton grant, or, as The Conversation describes her in erroneous spelling, “Principle [sic] Investigator on the Understanding Unbelief programme.” Templeton gave her and her co-PI Stephen Bullivant (also a religious scholar) nearly three million dollars to study the nature and […]
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 […]
Templeton wastes $ 630,791 on “biology” research, finally making its anti-evolution agenda explicit
April 6, 2018 – 9:00 am
The John Templeton Foundation has announced yet another big grant for “biology” research, except that its principal investigators are a theologian (Christopher Southgate) as well as a biologist (Niles Lehman). Click on the screenshot to go to the announcement. As you see, the grant, which just started, will last 32 months, and eat up over […]
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. […]
