I’m not going to let up on the John Templeton Foundation (JTF), for, despite their fervent assurances to the contrary, they’re still in the business of trying to drag science and religion into a loving concordat. They do this in numerous ways, but always their end is to fulfill the dreams of their founder and funder, who gave the foundation its largesse—now up to 1.5 billion dollars in endownment (JTF dispenses $70 million yearly in grants and prizes). Lest I distort that mission, let me quote the JTF’s own words:

Our vision is derived from the late Sir John Templeton’s optimism about the possibility of acquiring “new spiritual information” and from his commitment to rigorous scientific research and related scholarship. The Foundation’s motto, “How little we know, how eager to learn,” exemplifies our support for open-minded inquiry and our hope for advancing human progress through breakthrough discoveries.

Short take, which I think is accurate: Sir John thought science would give us information about God. That’s why they funded the famous intercessory prayer study that, distressingly, gave NO evidence for divine healing. Indeed, it showed a slight increase in bad cardiac outcomes for patients who received prayer. I guess the “new spiritual information” from that study is that “God doesn’t answer prayers.” Duh!

At any rate, I won’t have anything to do with the JTF, nor would I even if they completely separated their science function from their “spiritual: function. Dan Dennett, however, would, but he was told by a JTF official that that isn’t in the cards. (It would ruin the Foundation’s mission.) Here’s some correspondence I got from Dan that he gave me permission to share on this site. These are Dan’s words:

I was at a meeting at Santa Fe Institute. I asked the major Templeton exec there (alas I can’t recall his name, but he was more or less the top dog at the time) if it would be difficult or impossible to split the foundation. Not at all, he said. In fact, the Templeton money was already split into 3 distinct legal entities (he didn’t give the details). But he said they wouldn’t consider such a split, renaming the projects.

I was taken aback when reader Dom told me that New Scientist had published an article—an accommodationist article—by a theologian.  It’s not online, so I had to go digging for it in our e-library, but I found it: “God vs. the multiverse,” by Mary-Jane Rubenstein, published in the December 19th issue. Rubenstein is Professor and Chair of Religion at Wesleyan University and a “core” faculty member in the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program.

I’m baffled why New Scientist published what is essentially a discourse on theology—natural theology—but of course I’ve disliked that journal anyway, and have disliked it since it published the “Darwin was wrong” article on horizontal gene transfer. This piece further tarnishes what reputation the journal has. A science journal should not be publishing theology.

It turns out that Rubenstein published a book on this issue last year: Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse, and its contents are summarized on Amazon:

Hence the allure of the multiverse: if all possible worlds exist somewhere, then like monkeys hammering out Shakespeare, one universe is bound to be suitable for life. Of course, this hypothesis replaces God with an equally baffling article of faith: the existence of universes beyond, before, or after our own, eternally generated yet forever inaccessible to observation or experiment. In their very efforts to sidestep metaphysics, theoretical physicists propose multiverse scenarios that collide with it and even produce counter-theological narratives. Far from invalidating multiverse hypotheses, Rubenstein argues, this interdisciplinary collision actually secures their scientific viability. We may therefore be witnessing a radical reconfiguration of physics, philosophy, and religion in the modern turn to the multiverse.

Yeah, right. The radical configuration of religion will be, as it always has been, to contort its theology to harmonize with new findings of science. There is no finding of science, I claim, that would make people like Rubenstein give up her belief in God.

In the New Scientist piece, she implies that multiverse theory was constructed to solve the “fine-tuning” problem,and therefore to push God out of the scientific picture. As we know, though, that’s not true: multiverse theory is a consequence of regular physics theory, and wasn’t designed to obviate God at all. Rubenstein says this:

Modern physics has also wrestled with this “fine-tuning problem”, and supplies its own answer. If only one universe exists, then it is strange to find it so hospitable to life, when nearly any other value for the gravitational or cosmological constants would have produced nothing at all. But if there is a “multiverse” of many universes, all with different constants, the problem vanishes: we’re here because we happen to be in one of the universes that works.

No miracles, no plan, no creator. As the cosmologist Bernard Carr puts it: “If you don’t want God, you’d better have a multiverse”. But is that really our only choice Is there another way to think about divinity?

Rubenstein’s “solution” turns out to be pantheism: the Universe IS god. But she arrives at that solution after a short but tedious disquisition on the ancient Greeks, Nicholas of Cusa, and Giordano Bruno.  She touts them as pantheists as well, making some physics mistakes along the way. I’ll quote her. How many physics errors can you find in the following?

Everything is in motion all the time, Cusa suggested, and so “it always appears to every observer, whether on the earth, the sun, or another star, that one is… at an immovable centre of things and that all else is being moved.” If everything is moving, then there’s no particular centre. Start from any cosmic body, Cusa suggested, and the visible area around it is what we call a world.

This starts to sound a lot like the modern version of the multiverse: our “universe” is just the visible portion of a much greater cosmos. Like the multiverse, Cusa’s universe is spatially boundless, having nothing outside itself that might bind it. But unlike modern theorists, Cusa refused to call the cosmos “infinite” because it is dependent on its creator. In Cusa’s terminology, God alone is “absolutely infinite” whereas creation is a “contracted infinity”.

This distinction aside, Cusa is getting close to Stoic heresy, with a universe that looks much like God. Like God, the Cusan universe has no limits. Like God, the universe contains everything that is, as well as the seeds of what will be. As Cusa puts it, “It is as if the Creator had spoken, ‘Let it be made,’ and because God, who is eternity itself, could not be made, that was made… which would be as much like God as possible.”

Traditionally, Christian doctrine has taught that humans are made in the image of God. Cusa disrupted this idea by saying that the universe, not man, bears the image of God. And if humans are not particularly godlike, then God is not particularly humanoid. God doesn’t look like a patriarch in the sky: he looks like the universe.

That’s pantheism, pure and simple. But Cusa got the nature of the Universe wrong, so why is he one of the “solutions” to the problem? It looks as if Rubenstein is just coopting the ancients to support her own pantheistic solution to the “dilemma”.

But you don’t need to rely on theological authority to arrive at that “solution.” After all, there have been lots of pantheists throughout history. But they are in a minority, for there have been many more believers and theologians who see god as a Body-less Mind.  To settle on one far from universally accepted conception of God as a way to reconcile the multiverse theory with the divine is simply making a virtue of necessity.

Rubenstein then describes Bruno as a pantheist as well:

In the course of his trial, Bruno made some half-hearted efforts to say that the universe was in some sense different from God, and that Christ was more special than anyone else, but the Inquisition wasn’t fooled. What he really meant was that this infinite universe is the source of all things, the life in all things, and the end of all things – or what everybody means by God. This is, in short, pantheism. Not Stoic pantheism, with its infinite cycles of rebirth, but it’s no less threatening to the theological order.

In fact, such pantheisms are even more theologically threatening than atheism, precisely because they change what it means to be God. Not an anthropic creator beyond the world, but the force of creation within it.

Yes, pantheism threatens to the many people who conceive of God as personlike, or at least some thing that has compassion and feelings. After all, if you believe the Jesus myth, God must have had personlike qualities, for he sent down his son as a sacrifice. You have to have a mind that can make plans to do stuff like that. The Universe itself has no son and cannot create human sacrifices to help us expiate our sins. If you can rename the Universe “God,” then you can rename anything God, and that’s why believers don’t like pantheism. After all, you could rename Earth “God.”

Here, then, is Rubenstein’s “solution”:

So we don’t need to choose between God and the multiverse. Rather, we might rethink what it is we mean by those old godly terms like creation, power, renewal and care. Is it possible that modern cosmology is asking us, not to abandon religion, but to think differently about what it is that gives life, what it is that’s sacred, where it is we come from – and where we’ll go next.

What she’s doing is just forcing God into a box that comports with science, redefining him/her/it as the Universe or the multiverse. If you think that way, then, yes, you can harmonize religion with any finding of science. But most believers won’t go along with you. Remember that between 65% and 85% of Americans believe in the reality of things like Satan, Heaven, Hell, the divinity of Jesus, angels, and so on. And the percentage of literalists is much higher among Muslims. Has Rubenstein considered Islamic theology?

Rubenstein is no dummy. She has  as B.A. in religion and English from Williams College, a masters degree in Philosophical Theology from Cambridge University, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy of Religion from Columbia University. Them’s weighty credentials! What is she doing wasting her time with this nonsense? She could have been a contender, or at least a productive member of society! And what is New Scientist doing publishing an article on pantheism and theology? The journal should, to paraphrase Hitchens, be mocked and reviled for its stupidity.

Here’s Rubenstein giving a nine-minute lecture on “Asceticosmologies: Modern science as religious practice.” I’ll leave it to readers to comment.