Massimo calls out Templeton

November 10, 2011 • 5:44 am

Well, Massimo Pigliucci and I have had our differences, but we’re together on one issue.  According to Rationally Speaking, Massimo found out that the publisher of an academic book he was writing wanted to co-publish it with the John Templeton Foundation. After doing some poking around on the Templeton website (I’d recommend this only to those with a strong stomach), Massimo declined. He found too much woo, too much invidious political conservatism, too much dubious “scholarship.” Go read what he found.

And then he questions some of his colleagues who take Templeton money about why they did it. We hear the usual dissimulations and rationalizations, and Massimo calls them out, listing the three reasons he hears most often:

* “I’m independent anyway.” The first response is that there is a distinction between the agenda of the funding source and what one does as an independent scholar. This is certainly true, and I was assured (and have no reason to doubt) that Templeton would have had no editorial say whatsoever in what I would have written in my book. Then again, research into the practice of science does show that the source of one’s money makes a difference (often unconsciously) on the outcome. The case in point is that of medical research that is much more likely to find a given drug effective if the researchers received funding from the pharmaceutical industry rather than from government agencies. At the very least one ought to be aware of the danger and not just dismiss the possibility out of hand. (This, of course, is a separate point from the one I made above concerning one’s name lending credibility to an institution whose ideological positions one may not share.)

I’ve found this first reason the most common. Templeton’s endowment is said to be around a billion dollars, and they dispense $70 million dollars per year to scientists purporting to answer “The Big Questions.”  Among scientists who take Templeton money are the physicist Brian Greene (it funds his World Science Festival) and Martin Nowak at Harvard, whose research center nabbed an astounding $10.5 million over four years. And even the prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), has an 18-year, $5.3 million dollar grant from Templeton to promote a “dialogue on science, ethics, and religion.”

As to whether the money corrupts the research of its recipients, who knows? Of course they’ll deny it, but so do politicians who take money from lobbyists and PACs.  As Massimo points out in the comments, the effect of Templeton funding on research outcome hasn’t been studied. We do know that Templeton fundees often produce books that are completely congenial to Templeton’s aims: these include recent books by Elaine Ecklund and Martin Nowak.  Ecklund, in particular, seems to have consistently  misrepresented her research findings to convey the impression that scientists are more religious and spiritual than we think. And there’s at least one instance in which Templeton apparently vetted for approval the contents of a book it funded: Nicholas Wade’s The Faith Instinct.

But we really don’t need to know the effect on research to point out that taking money from a right-wing organization, one that unashamedly promotes pure woo as well as science, gives the appearance of conflict. And it’s that appearance that should be reason enough to abjure Templeton funds.

Massimo continues:

* “It’s the same with the federal government.” NIH, NSF and other governmental agencies also have agendas, the argument goes, because the federal government has an agenda, and these days that agenda is significantly tilted toward an anti-science, pro-religion trajectory, largely because of the influence of Congressional Republicans. I find this argument rather specious. I am not aware of any evidence of this sort of influence in the pattern of NSF funding (with which I am most familiar), and that’s probably because there are many layers between Congressional Republicans and, say NSF or NIH officers, and because the funding process is entirely handled by professional scientists. Of course, one could very reasonably question funding amounts and priorities at the level of the entire federal research budget, and that discussion would indeed be political and ideological. But at the very least we are talking about a government of elected officials, not a private outlet that is free to push whatever agenda it wishes to push. There is also, of course, the question of whether a scientist should accept money from specific federal agencies whose goals may be ethically questionable, such as the Department of Defense. And indeed I am sympathetic toward scientists who do reject such funding, and somewhat critical of those who accept it.

* “Someone else would do it anyway.” This is the ethically most naive response I have encountered. First, this may not be true, as Templeton has gained influence and credibility precisely because a good number of legitimate scientists and other scholars have accepted their money. The Discovery Institute (the Intelligent Design “think” tank based in Seattle), on the contrary, has not succeeded in part because legitimate scientists have ostracized them. Second, one’s integrity is not helped, nor is one’s ethical responsibility diminished, by the thought that someone else would have stepped in and gotten the money, so we might as well. If we adopted that sort of standard, all kinds of unethical behavior would become acceptable on pragmatic grounds, the academic version of realpolitik.

To paraphrase Richard Dawkins on why he wouldn’t debate William Lane Craig, “It looks good on Templeton’s c.v., not so much on yours.” Scientists who take Templeton money become prize horses in their Augean Stable, trotted out on the Templeton website and paraded around to show the scientific credibility of the organization.

Massimo then asked his erstwhile editor a question:

. . . why exactly do you guys need the JTF, particularly as you have an excellent reputation and the JTF people will have no editorial input into the series? Answer: because Templeton has money, and money buys publicity, and publicity sells books. There is capitalism at work, my friends.

As I pointed out in a comment on Massimo’s site, the argument that “I’m independent and the money is being put to good use” is disingenuous.  How odious must a funding source be before a scientist will refuse to take money from it? Would you take money from the Council of Conservative Citizens (a descendant of the White Citizens Council) to study ethnic differences?  Lots of scientists take money from the Defense Department; I wouldn’t.

The fact is that scientists are so greedy for grants, and the funding climate is now so dreadful that no matter how tainted one’s grant money will be, scientists will always line up with their hands out, eager to receive the largesse.  And they’ll always be able to rationalize it.  As Darwin said about another issue, “Great is the power of steady misrepresentation.”

Once again (and probably in vain), I call upon my scientific colleagues to reject money from the Templeton Foundation.  And if they do take it, as have Martin Nowak and Brian Greene, I ask them to publicly justify how they can take the money in light of the other conservative and pro-woo activities of Templeton.

With Templeton, it’s always about the money.  We’ve known this for a long time, and it’s curious that it took Massimo so long to realize it. Maybe he hasn’t been paying attention, but kudos to him for calling Templeton out.

h/t: Michael

New York Times recalcitrant on OkapiGate

November 10, 2011 • 4:48 am

Yes, I pick nits too, and the other day I criticized a New York Times science piece by Douglas Quenqua on okapis because it claimed that “Okapis are the only known relative of the giraffe, but with the silhouette of an antelope.”  What he meant was that okapis are the closest living relative of the giraffe, but of course okapis have many “known relatives,” including, say, every other species on Earth.

As a total pedant, I asked one of my friends who works at the NYT to convey this to Quenqua. I assumed he’d admit the sloppiness and correct his piece. No dice: while he responded to me by email, he’s digging in his heels.  From his email:

I see from your blog post that you already know that okapi and giraffes are the only two species in the mammal family Giraffidae. It was in that respect that we classified the okapi as the only living relative of the giraffe.

“In that respect”?  Thers’s no respect in which it’s okay to make an inaccurate statement about evolutionary relatedness.

I’ll be watching Quenqua for recidivism.

At last: how to tell a Biblical metaphor from a Biblical truth

November 9, 2011 • 9:02 am

Over at Sneer Review, the estimable Sigmund has finally solved a long-standing problem of Biblical exegesis: how to tell a metaphor from a real “truth” (granted, Andrew Sullivan sees a distinction between the “real” and the “true”).

It’s a new tool, The Metaphorical Illuminator, and Sigmund uses it, with wonderful effect, on the Catholic Nicene Creed.  At last—science itself can parse scriptural truth from the fiction!

Here’s one result:

Go see how it works.

Oh, and also see how Sigmund highlight’s John Haught’s big mistake in our debate in Kentucky.

Religion of peace firebombs a paper for satire

November 9, 2011 • 8:17 am

The offices of a French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, were firebombed last week one day after it announced an issue making fun of Islam, including cartoons of Mohamed, a mock title (“Charia Hebdo”) and the naming of the prophet as a “co-editor” of the issue.

To their credit, French prime minister Fillon and a Muslim leader condemned the attack without qualification:

“Freedom of expression is an inalienable right in our democracy and all attacks on the freedom of the press must be condemned with the greatest firmness. No cause can justify such an act of violence,” he said in a statement.

The head of the French Council of the Muslim Faith, Mohammed Moussaoui, also condemned the attack.

But of course some journalists couldn’t let it be; they had to condemn the magazine for instigating predictable violence through satire.  These include Bruce Crumley of Time Magazine. Although he makes the gratuitous condemnation of violence, he ends by condemning the magazine:

It’s obvious free societies cannot simply give in to hysterical demands made by members of any beyond-the-pale group. And it’s just as clear that intimidation and violence must be condemned and combated for whatever reason they’re committed—especially if their goal is to undermine freedoms and liberties of open societies. But it’s just evident members of those same free societies have to exercise a minimum of intelligence, calculation, civility and decency in practicing their rights and liberties—and that isn’t happening when a newspaper decides to mock an entire faith on the logic that it can claim to make a politically noble statement by gratuitously pissing people off.

Defending freedom of expression in the face of oppression is one thing; insisting on the right to be obnoxious and offensive just because you can is infantile. Baiting extremists isn’t bravely defiant when your manner of doing so is more significant in offending millions of moderate people as well. And within a climate where violent response—however illegitimate—is a real risk, taking a goading stand on a principle virtually no one contests is worse than pointless: it’s pointlessly all about you.

This seems like doublethink to me. Given the tendency of some Muslims to respond with violence to even the most unpredictable “provocation” (like naming a teddy bear “Mohamed,” which, of course, is the name of many Arab men), Crumley would advise self-restraint for the mildest criticism of Islam. And, after all, isn’t that what he says we should avoid—”giving in to hysterical demands made by members of any beyond-the-pale group”?

But, thank Ceiling Cat, James Circhick at Britain’s Index on Censorship sets things straight. (Note that the current title of the Time article is “Firebombed French paper is no free speech martyr.”)

The original title of Crumley’s piece, still viewable in the website URL, was “Firebombed French Paper: A Victim of Islam, Or Its Own Obnoxious Islamaphobia?” If a reader, so offended by Crumley’s excuse-making for theocratic nutcases, bombs TIME’s Paris Bureau, would that make Crumley a “victim” of his own obnoxious cowardice? If there was ever cause to deport someone from the Republic of Letters it would be Crumley’s article, for in it he committed treason against his trade by showing himself to be a man eager to rat out his fellow writers and sell them down the river in a heartbeat.

Though he fashions himself a bold truth-teller, Crumley’s justification of violent extremism isn’t new. It’s just the latest iteration of a tired excuse for terrorism, expressed by everyone from Noam Chomsky to Ron Paul, which is that the victims of terrorism have it coming. What made Crumley’s entry into the genre singularly poisonous, and what I believe elicited the widespread disgust from journalists of all political stripes, is that it was written by a working journalist, not an academic, politician, or anti-“Islamophobia” activist.

Crumley is a discredit to his profession.  Maybe the satire was obnoxious but, let’s face it, there’s a lot of bad things about Islam, just as there are a lot of bad things about Catholicism. The difference is that offended Muslims bomb and kill, while offended Catholics usually just fulminate, often through Bill Donohue of The Catholic league.  So it’s okay to make fun of Catholics, but if you go after Islam, you get what you deserve.

What this means, of course, is that the bullying tactics of Islam—not just the extremists, but the “millions of moderate people” who enable them by failing to speak up—is the one thing that makes it unacceptable to criticize Islam but perfectly all right to criticize the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, or Chief Rabbi Sacks.  And if we stop criticizing only Islam because of those threats, the Muslim bullies win, and it becomes off limits to go after that one brand of religion.

Nobody has the right not to be offended. The remedy for this thuggery is not the silence of the press, but more mockery.  People like Crumley should find another line of work.

Auroras!

November 9, 2011 • 4:56 am

Canadian Yuichi Takasaka takes photos and time-lapse videos of the aurora borealis and the night sky.  Here are a couple;  you’ll find many more on his website and his YouTube channel.

I so want to see this display before I die.

Judging by the star trails, the first photo is  long time-lapse (as it must be given the display!), while the second exposure is very short.  Click to enlarge for full awesomeness.

And here’s one of his videos.  Go see his channel; it’s full of great time-lapse movies—and hardly anybody has visited!

A good short piece on science, philosophy, and religion

November 9, 2011 • 4:49 am

On Nov. 1 the Bristol University Atheist, Agnostic, and Secular Society met to hear three talks:  Julian Baggini on philosophy, Sheikh Ramzy on religion, and David Colquhoun, a pharmacologist at University College London who spends  lot of time refuting pseudoscience and alternative medicine, on science.

Colquhoun’s talk wasn’t recorded, but he’s transcribed it over at his website, DC’s Improbable Science.  After the mish-mash of theobabble we’re used to, this piece is short, straight, and to the point. And he takes issue with Baggini’s criticism of New Atheism. An excerpt:

Dr Baggini, among others, has claimed that the “new atheists” are too strident, and that they only antagonise moderate atheists (see The New Atheist Movement is destructive, though there is something of a recantation two years later in Religion’s truce with science can’t hold).

I disagree, for two reasons.

Firstly, people like Richard Dawkins are really not very strident.  Dawkin’s book, The God Delusion, is quiet and scholarly. It takes each of the arguments put forward by religious people, and dissects them one by one.  It’s true that, having done this, he sets forth his conclusions quite bluntly. That seems to me to be a good thing. If your conclusions are stifled by tortuous euphemisms, nobody takes much  notice. Just as in science, simple plain words are best.

The second, and more important, reason that I like Dawkin’s approach is that I suspect it’s the only approach that has much effect.  There is a direct analogy with my own efforts to stop universities giving BSc degrees in subjects that are not science. Worse, they are actively anti-science.  Take for example, homeopathy, the medicine that contains no medicine.  I started by writing polite letters to vice chancellors.  Usually they didn’t even have the courtesy to reply.  All efforts to tackle the problem through the “proper channels” failed.  The only thing that has worked was public derision.  A combination of internal moles and Freedom of Information Act requests unearthed what was being taught on these courses. Like Westminster’s assertion that “amethysts emit high Yin energy”.  Disclosure of such nonsense and headlines like

“Professor Geoffrey Petts of the University of Westminster says they “are not teaching pseudo-science”. The facts show this is not true

are certainly somewhat strident. But they have worked.  Forget the proper channels if you want results. Mock what deserves to be mocked.

I’m getting pretty tired of the stridency argument.  I challenge anyone who makes this argument to produce a list of offensively strident comments from, say, God is Not Great, The God Delusion, The End of Faith, or Breaking the Spell, and then I’ll make a list of equally (or more) strident statements from theologians and preachers. What offends me is how accommodationists—even the atheist ones—focus exclusively on the former and completely neglect the latter.  It’s another example of the hands-off-faith position, in which “lack of faith” isn’t given the same consideration.

Colquhoun also refers to his October 28 piece that will certainly rile up people, “Why philosophy is largely ignored by science.”

I have in the past, taken an occasional interest in the philosophy of science. But in a lifetime doing science, I have hardly ever heard a scientist mention the subject. It is, on the whole, a subject that is of interest only to philosophers. . .

“Personhood” amendment defeated

November 9, 2011 • 3:23 am

Ceiling Cat has blessed us!  Not only has Mississipi’s “personhood” amendment been rejected by voters (you’ll recall that that measure would have defined a fertilized egg as a “person”), but voters also nixed other conservative ballot measures as well.  Those include an anti-labor law in Ohio that would have weakened the right of public employees to engage in collective bargaining.  And Maine approved same-day voting registration at the polls, a measure opposed by Republicans.

Further, in Arizona voters recalled (i.e., threw out of office) state senate president Russell Pearce, architect of that state’s notorious law “SB 1070,” which gave law officers the right to snoop into people’s immigration status without any provocation.

I’m happiest about the defeat of the “personhood” amendment, which could easy have spawned a bunch of copycat legislation throughout the US (several similar measures are already in the wings in other states). But if it’s defeated in conservative Missippi, there’s hope elsewhere.

And look at the sneakiness of the Catholic church:

“The message from Mississippi is clear,” Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, said in a statement. “An amendment that allows politicians to further interfere in our personal, private medical decisions, including a woman’s right to choose safe, legal abortion, is unacceptable.”

The push for a personhood amendment split the country’s anti-abortion movement. Traditional leaders including the Roman Catholic bishops and National Right to Life opposed it on strategic grounds, fearing it would lead to a United States Supreme Court defeat and set back to their efforts to chip away at abortion rights.

Baggini moves closer to the Gnus, totally derides sophisticated theology, MacDonald dissects

November 8, 2011 • 9:42 am

Slowly but surely, Julian Baggini is moving closer to the New Atheist position, one he’s strongly derided in the past. His conversion is taking the form of very strong critiques of religion, including the newest at the Guardian, ” ‘You don’t understand my religion’ is not good enough.”  It has a deep resonance with me because of my debate with John Haught, who maintains that his faith is above criticism by those who haven’t been grasped or “personally transformed” by it.  As Baggini notes, that kind of “in-group” thinking, designed to render faith immune to criticism, is bogus:

Most obviously, it cannot be the case that the views of someone who is most immersed in or knows most about a religion always trump those of a relatively uninformed outsider. People who live and breathe a faith know more about it than those who do not – but this quantitative advantage does not guarantee better qualitative judgements. If it did, by the same logic, we should take the word of the earnest astrologer of 40 years’ standing over the clear evidence that it’s all baloney. Indeed, being deeply immersed may be a positive disadvantage, in that it might make it impossible to take a clear-sighted, impartial view. . .

But embracing this mystery comes at a price. If, like the archbishop of Canterbury, your faith is a kind of “silent waiting on the truth, pure sitting and breathing in the presence of the question mark”, then think very carefully before you open your mouth. Too often I find that faith is mysterious only selectively. Believers constantly attribute all sorts of qualities to their gods and have a list of doctrines as long as your arm. It is only when the questions get tough that, suddenly, their God disappears in a puff of mystery. Ineffability becomes a kind of invisibility cloak, only worn when there is a need to get out of a bit of philosophical bother.

Baggini promises more articles on the “religion debate” in the next few weeks, and I’ll be interested to see where he’s going.

I was going to post on Baggini’s piece (he is a bit sympathetic to this kind of obscurantism), but over at Choice in Dying Eric MacDonald just put up a long analysis, “Julian Baggini on mystification.”

Here’s just a snippet:

Baggini says that “[t]oo often I find that faith is mysterious only selectively.” But if, at the heart of faith, there is something that passes understanding, then there is nothing more to be said. The thing that distinguishes religious belief from a kind of pure, meditative spirituality, is that it is about something, and even if, with Tillich, we want to say that that something is not really a “thing” at all, but something beyond existence, if belief is to be belief that something is true, then it must have some ontological status, however that status is described. But if it does really disappear into mystery, then even saying as much as Tillich does about the “Being beyond Being” becomes meaningless twaddle. And what would a religion, at least an institutional religion, be, if it had no beliefs? But if those beliefs are to be based on something that disappears into mystery, then how are we to distinguish beliefs which are worthy of belief from those which are not?

I await with interest the coming articles in Baggini’s series on the new heathenism, but it seems to me that this is what the new atheists have been saying all along. So far as I can tell, people like Dawkins, Harris, Coyne, Hitchens, Dennett, Myers, and so on, have been demanding clarity from the religious. What is it that you believe? On what do you base your belief? Why should we believe what you believe on this basis, when others (say, Jews, Muslims and Hindus — since so far the new atheist challenge has been directed mainly towards Christianity) believe quite different things on arguably a similar basis?

In the end, it’s all about evidence, and whether one has good reasons for holding one’s beliefs.   A constant demand for those reasons is the hallmark of New Atheism, which in the past Baggini has excoriated.  But now he’s by our side, criticizing the lack of good reasons for believing that God has certain traits, or even exists.

And, as Eric points out, if your God, like Haught’s, is so ineffable that you can’t say anything about it, then you have no reason to accept the tenets of your faith.  That’s especially true for Haught’s Catholicism, which has many official positions on the soul, marriage, Jesus, heaven, divorce, homosexuality, and so on.  I would love to ask Haught which of those positions he agrees with, and why.  Does being “grasped by your faith” give you the answer? If so, why do Catholics differ so much in their answers?