A reader sent me an email he/she got touting a new project by the Templeton Religious Trust, one of the big-money-granting foundations that arose from the largesse of gazillionaire fund manager John Templeton. You can see the initiative by clicking on the screenshot below. Note that the subheading reprises the original purpose of the Templeton Foundation: to find evidence for God in science. And of course they maintain the accommodationism that science and religion can be “mutually reinforcing”, which is ridiculous:
The grant for this project, which was a munifent $3,033,427, ended last October, and now they’re public. The email gave a summary, and we find no surprises there. David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist, apparently was part of this project (he appears at 1:35 in the video below). I’m not going to discuss it in detail, as it’s incredibly boring and tendentious, so click the screenshot above if you want an eyeful.
The only thing I’ll mention about the palaver below is the old rotten assertion that both science and religion are “belief systems”. No, religion is a belief system, a “way of believing what you can’t confirm, but science is, as Carl Sagan notes below, a “way of thinking.” The claim that science and religion are coequal as “belief systems” is one way that people like those at Templeton try to simultaneously do down science and elevate religion. It hasn’t worked: Christianity and Judaism are rapidly waning in the West as “nones” grow in number.
This is from the Templeton email; all bolding is theirs:
Can both science and religion help us find meaning?
Dominic Johnson at Oxford, and Michael Price at Brunel University say they can. Through a grant from Templeton Religion Trust, Johnson and Price have funded 18 research projects around the world to study how religious and scientific beliefs evolve over time and provide systems of meaning for people and whole communities.
“We are interested in the origins of two very important belief systems; religion and science; how these systems are compatible or incompatible, and what the implications are for society,” says Price.
To Price and Johnson, religion and science are both sources of wonder, awe, and life, and help satisfy the human need for meaning and purpose. Through this cross-cultural, interdisciplinary study, they have shown that many of the assumptions we have made about the relationship between religion and science have been wrong all along.
Doesn’t that remind you of sociologist Elaine Ecklund (who’s also been copiously funded by Templeton, making a career of osculating faith)?
“The findings that surprised me the most were that science and religion are not only not incompatible, but are actually mutually reinforcing,” continues Price. “The people who got the most benefits from science and religion were the people who subscribed to both belief systems.”
Science and religion are not in conflict, they’re stronger together.
For more information, watch this video
Who are they kidding? How is science, which operates without using the notion of gods or the supernatural, “stronger” because of religion? Well, here’s a 5-minute video, and the last 30 seconds tells us how science and religion are mutually reinforcing. But it’s a con.
Another big-time waste of money. What’s your meaning system?
