Over at The Philosopher’s Magazine, Ophelia Benson has a long, dispassionate analysis of the Templeton Foundation and its effects on science. The piece ends with a question:

This is the issue in a nutshell. Are philosophy, science and theology different branches of the same kind of inquiry into life and being, which can be usefully and happily united? Or are they fundamentally different kinds of thing, with substantively different ways of inquiring and evaluating the results of inquiry? Templeton clearly considers the first answer correct, while the irreligious tribe of philosophers mostly (but not unanimously) opt for the second. With so much Templeton money hinging on the answer, it could be the $6 million question.

I’d go with the second answer, for the many reasons I’ve discussed previously, but I’d exempt philosophy.  The “knowledge” that religion produces isn’t at all comparable to scientific knowledge, for religious “truth” differs among different faiths, is based on revelation rather than rationality, and, most important, is impervious to disproof. In other words, religion has no way to adjudicate competing truth claims or to disprove any truth claim. Philosophy, on the other hand, comes with rational ways to weed out error, and propositions can be disproved.

Over at Metamagician, Russell Blackford disagrees a bit on the either/or question:

I’m not quite with her on this. I (and probably a lot of other philosophers) actually think that philosophy and science are continuous with each other, and it’s not clear where one ends and the other begins. They are part of the larger realm of rational inquiry, and the divisions made within this realm are more practical and pedagogical than anything else.

Theology is a mixed bag. Lot of different and ill-matching stuff gets shoved into theology. Insofar as it includes, for example, rigorous historical-textual analysis of the holy books, it is part of the larger field of rational inquiry. But the core of it is, indeed, something fundamentally different. Still, it can conflict with philosophy and science because it often makes claims that these have the resources to contest.

I’m not sure I’d agree with Russell that theology includes Biblical scholarship.  I’ve talked with some of the Biblical scholars at the University of Chicago Divinity School, and I assure you that they’d take great umbrage at being described as theologians! (In fact, they’ve set me straight when I made that mistake.) Biblical scholarship that involves dissecting and analyzing the historical and textual sources of the scriptures is a rational endeavor, and that puts it in line with science, which, after all, is just organized rationality.  The woo part of theology, i.e., the part for which Templeton awards millions of dollars, is clearly not a way to gain knowledge.

I’ve challenged people over and over again to tell me what “truths” religion offers that could not be apprehended by science and rational thinking.  I’ve never gotten a satisfactory answer: the usual response involves moral prescriptions like “Love your neighbor”, which of course are neither truths nor the exclusive results of faith.

Religion, then, isn’t a way of knowing; it’s a way of believing.

Finally, Bob Park, a professor of physics at The University of Maryland, has a couple of short takes on Templeton: “Sir John Templeton: the man who tried to buy science,” and “A bigger prize: how much would it take to buy the NAS [National Academy of Sciences]?”

Priest and accommodationist John Polkinghorne, previously a physicist at Cambridge University, and author of some of the most muddled apologetics I’ve ever read, gets interviewed by In Character.

And he reveals that quantum physics has been just great for theology, because a stupid old Newtonian universe would testify only to a deistic, wind-up-the-universe-and-let-it-go kind of God.  Quantum physics, however, provides a theistic God, one who changes the world by tweaking electrons. You have heard this before, of course, from Kenneth Miller, Francis Collins, and many other souls desperate to find evidence for a personal, interactive God in a world that appears to behave materially, predictably, and deterministically on the human plane.

Polkinghorne:

If the world were simply mechanical, as people thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, it would just be a gigantic piece of cosmic clockwork, and its creator would be an unseen cosmic clockmaker. That’s the creator who just makes the clock and lets it tick away. Quantum theory is something more subtle than that. We can believe a world in which we ourselves interact — we’re not clockwork at all — and we can believe in a world in which God interacts. We can believe in a God who doesn’t just sit and wait for it to happen but is involved in the unfolding of creation.

Isn’t this the worst sort of conflating science with superstition?  Quantum physics as evidence for a theistic God!  Even Ayala, I think, would diagnose Polkinghorne as mixing his magisteria.

And don’t these people ever, ever consider that they’re grasping at straws here—making a virtue of necessity by demoting their God to someone who changes the world by messing with subatomic particles? Isn’t it incumbent on them to explain why God would act this way instead of on a more macroscopic level? Is he trying to hide himself?

It’s hardly necessary to add that Polkinghorne won the Templeton Prize in 2002.

In today’s New York Times, Paul Krugman describes the irrational and petulant behavior of Republicans over their defeat on the health care bill. Racial epithets, death threats to Democrats, warnings of Armageddon, even juvenile refusals to work past 2 p.m.—all this should all be an embarrassment to thinking Republicans (or perhaps that’s an oxymoron).  How can Armageddon come from allowing people with pre-existing medical conditions to get insurance coverage?  In all my life I’ve never seen either political party behave in such an immature and irresponsible way.

Krugman:

For today’s G.O.P. is, fully and finally, the party of Ronald Reagan — not Reagan the pragmatic politician, who could and did strike deals with Democrats, but Reagan the antigovernment fanatic, who warned that Medicare would destroy American freedom. It’s a party that sees modest efforts to improve Americans’ economic and health security not merely as unwise, but as monstrous. It’s a party in which paranoid fantasies about the other side — Obama is a socialist, Democrats have totalitarian ambitions — are mainstream. And, as a result, it’s a party that fundamentally doesn’t accept anyone else’s right to govern.

And, especially delightful in view of the death threats, Sarah Palin’s PAC has put out a map with pro-health care Democrats targeted with—get this—gunsights:

And Palin’s blurb for her Facebook page urges dispirited Republicans to “reload”:

Unbelievable.  I’m sure Palin’s not calling for treating Democrats like she treats wolves, but still, isn’t this a bit . . . unseemly?

Surprisingly, Francis Collins didn’t get this year’s Templeton Prize. In retrospect, one might have added evolutionary geneticist Francisco Ayala as a contender, but that’s the wisdom of hindsight.  Ayala, at least, is not nearly as woo-laden as Collins.  And although he used to be Dominican priest, I’m not at all sure if he still believes in God, a deistic God, or a theistic God (I haven’t followed his talks or read his book Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion, which Russell Blackford reviews here). And, in contrast to Collins, he doesn’t go around mixing faith with science.

On the positive side, he’s done a lot to promote straight, unsullied evolutionary biology and to battle creationism and its country cousin intelligent design.

But he got the prize not for science but for accommodationism.  Despite my respect for Ayala’s scientific accomplishments and his public defense of evolution, I nevertheless oppose his assertion that religion is “a way of knowing” that is complementary to science.  (Ayala helped write the NAS’s statement to that effect).  Here’s part of his statement for the Templeton Prize:

In a statement prepared for the news conference, Ayala forcefully denied that science contradicts religion. “If they are properly understood,” he said, “they cannot be in contradiction because science and religion concern different matters, and each is essential to human understanding.” Referring to Picasso’s Guernica, he noted that while science can assess the painting’s massive dimensions and pigments, only a spiritual view imparts the horror of the subject matter. Together, he explained, these two separate analyses reveal the totality of the masterpiece.

I respectfully disagree, for this statement assumes that there is a “proper” way to understand religion.  As I have written incessantly on this website, a huge number of believers—probably at least half of the Christians in America—don’t understand their religion in this way.  Is Ayala then going to tell these folks that their faith is “improper,” and they simply have to modify it so that it comports with science?  That advice would offend them far more than any amount of shrill and militant diatribes from new atheists!

And, of course, what Ayala means by a “proper”  religion is one that cannot contradict science, presumably because it makes no empirical claims about the world.  That makes his NOMA-like harmony a semantic rather than an empirical or philosophical issue. How many Christians, for instance, have a “proper” Christianity that denies the virgin birth, the Resurrection, the efficacy of prayer, or any other way that a theistic deity could affect the world? Certainly not Kenneth Miller or Francis Collins! They are theists, and that’s a form of religion that does contradict science.

As for Guernica, a painting that I love, well, you don’t need religion to be moved by it.  You don’t even need “spirituality,” whatever that means.  All you need is the purely human emotion of being sickened by the horrors of war and their effects on innocent people.  Both atheists and the faithful can fully appreciate the “totality” of this painting, and I don’t see that being religious helps you appreciate it more.

If religion is “essential to human understanding,” then what, exactly, does it help us understand? And would Ayala diagnose his fellow Europeans, who are largely atheistic, as lacking some important component of human understanding?

UPDATE:  As Paul points out in the comments below (gleaned from CalGeorge at Pharyngula), Ayala was formerly on the Board of Advisors of the John Templeton Foundation.  This means that he joins the large-ish group of members of that Board who won the Templeton Prize after their service as advisors. I believe that these include at least six of the last thirteen winners, but I may be wrong.

UPDATE DEUX:  According to the online (UK) Times, Ayala hasn’t lost any time attacking Dawkins for espousing “scientific fundamentalism.” Ayala says this:

“The scientific fundamentalism proposed by Dawkins implies a materialistic view of the world. But once science has had its say, there remains much about reality that is of interest. Common sense tells us that science can’t tell us everything.”

Perhaps, but what can religion tell us about reality? Please, somebody, just give me one thing!

Jack Szostak, at Harvard, won last year’s Nobel Prize for his work on telomerase, the enzyme that maintains the ends of chromosomes.  His main research interest has now turned to understanding the origin of life.

Szostak just sent a letter to Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences, protesting the use of its space to host today’s Templeton Prize award.  Here, with Jack’s permission, is the letter he sent.  I am not sure whether he was aware that it was Cicerone himself (at least according to the Guardian) who nominated today’s awardee, a NAS member.

Dear Ralph,

I was surprised and upset to see that the NAS is allowing the Templeton Foundation to announce  the winner of the Templeton Prize in the historic Lecture Hall of the Academy.   It is inappropriate and counter-productive for the NAS, a scientific organization, to interact in this way with an overtly religious group such as the Templeton Foundation.

We are not a faith-based organization – we ask questions and seek the answers in evidence.  In a country plagued by ignorance and superstition, the NAS ought to be a beacon of coherent rational thinking and skeptical inquiry. If science is, as George Ellery Hale stated, our guide to truth, then religion is clearly incompatible with science, as should be apparent from considerations of faith versus inquiry.

Organizations that promote faith and religious belief have no place in the NAS, and to see the NAS hosting a Templeton event sends the message to the public that science and religion are completely compatible and indeed that science-religion interactions should be fostered.  I disagree strongly, and I am very disappointed by this action of the NAS.  Indeed, to host such an event encourages a misrepresentation not only of the organization, but of the members.  Just last night Rabbi Wolpe publicly claimed that over half of the elected members of the Academy are theists.  More critically, the Academy is misrepresented by this event. Our mission is to inquire into issues of national import and to do so as scientists.  We have no mandate to accommodate any position of faith whether based in religion or other prejudice.

The fact that the winner is an NAS member is irrelevant.  A small minority of NAS members may be religious, but  they should promote their personal religious views separately from the NAS.

At the least a statement from the NAS is needed at this time, clarifying its independence and, I would hope, declaring the decision to host this event a mistake.  The Academy’s image needs to be mended both for the public and its members.

Sincerely,

Jack W. Szostak

by Matthew Cobb

This morning’s edition of the Times Literary Supplement plopped through my letter-box this morning, containing a review of Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini’s What Darwin Got Wrong by Samir Okasha, Professor of the Philosophy of Science at the University of Bristol. The review isn’t available on-line for the moment, and is extremely long – and thorough and fair. The final paragraph – transcribed by my own fair fingers – will give you a flavour of the thing:

“The upshot of all this is that their critique of neo-Darwinism comes to nothing. The biological discoveries they take to refute the neo-Darwinist theory do not do so; they are easily accommodated by it. The notion of adaptation is in perfectly good shape; the distinction between selection-for and free-riding is just the ordinary distinction between causality and correlation. Evolutionary biology is not ‘logically flawed’, and is not a mere collection of historical narratives, but rather a science that produces genuine causal explanations, and indeed one of the most successful sciences we have. What Darwin Got Wrong makes for entertaining and engaging reading, but is the sort of thing that gives philosophy of science a bad name.”

[EDIT: The full review is now available on-line here; however, it’s subscription only. I’ve asked the folk at the TLS to make it available to everyone, and they’re thinking about it… I’ll keep you informed. I also fixed Piattelli’s name which was inadvertently misspelled – my apologies. MC]

Ian Sample, science correspondence for the Guardian, just wrote a piece about tomorrow’s announcement of the 2010 Templeton Prize at the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the National Academy of Sciences. And the most distressing news was this:

Some scientists were disturbed when it emerged that Ralph Cicerone, the president of the NAS, personally nominated the winner.

What? The president of the National Academy nominated the winner of a prize for conflating science and faith?  The Guardian published my reaction:

Jerry Coyne, a biologist at the University of Chicago, said: “It is shameful that the president of the premier science organisation in America has endorsed a prize for conflating science with religion, indeed, has nominated someone for doing the best job of blurring the boundaries between science and faith. The job of the NAS president is to promote rationality, not pollute it with superstition.”

There were two other critics:

“For the National Academy of Sciences to get involved with an organisation like this is dangerous,” said Sir Harry Kroto, a British scientist who won the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1996 and later joined Florida State University.

“The National Academy should look very carefully at what the majority of its members feel about the apparent legitimising of the scientific credentials of the Templeton Foundation.” he said. . .

. . . The NAS said it agreed to host the event because the winner was an NAS member. Sean Carroll, a physicist at California Institute of Technology, said: “Templeton has a fairly overt agenda that some scientists are comfortable with, but very many are not. In my opinion, for a prestigious scientific organisation to work with them sends the wrong message.”

Gary Rosen of the Templeton Foundation said: “This year’s prizewinner is a distinguished scientist who has made a profound contribution to the science-religion dialogue. The NAS is a perfect place to celebrate his achievements.”

Hmm . . . now who could be a National Academy member who has spent a lot of time trying to unite science and faith?  This rules out Kenneth Miller, who’s not in the Academy.

I’m putting my money on Francis Collins.

If it’s Collins, I wonder exactly what “profound” contribution Templeton sees him as having made to the “science-religion dialogue.”  It couldn’t be his book, The Language of God, which by any standard—academic, theological, or scientific—is as far from profound as you can get.  That leaves one achievement: Collins is an evangelical Christian and a high-ranking scientist who isn’t shy about publicly mixing his job with his faith.

USA Today quoted a couple more shrill and militant atheists:

“The U.S. National Academy of Sciences has brought ignominy on itself by agreeing to host the announcement,” wrote well-known scientist and author Richard Dawkins, on his blog Wednesday. “This is exactly the kind of thing Templeton is ceaselessly angling for — recognition among real scientists — and they use their money shamelessly to satisfy their doomed craving for scientific respectability.”

University of Minnesota, Morris, biologist P.Z. Myers also weighed in, saying “Bad form, NAS,” on his Pharyngula blog.  Spats over science, religion and atheism have flared up frequently among opinion writers in recent years, notably with last year’s appointment of genome expert Francis Collins, an evangelical Christian, as head of the National Institutes of Health.

By  hosting this prize, but especially by nominating someone for this prize, the National Academy has put its official imprimatur on superstition and woo.  It’s a huge embarrassment, but nobody will be more embarrassed than the 93% of physicists and biologists in the Academy who are atheists. Bad form indeed.