RE: Tech billionaire gives $100M to Stephen Hawking’s search for aliens
August 4, 2015 at 3:11 am
(This post was last modified: August 4, 2015 at 3:12 am by Fake Messiah.)
Yeah talking about worse initiatives to spend money on, what about Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, a $70 million yearly in grants and fellowships to make religion into science?
Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion is given to “[honor] a living person who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works.” It goes to a single individual, who gets £1.1 million (roughly $1.8 million), an amount deliberately set to exceed that of the Nobel Prize. The prize is now also given to religion-friendly scientists like the evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala and the cosmologist Martin Rees.
Templeton, for instance, funded the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion at Cambridge, which also runs a program for children, “Test of Faith,” showing how Christianity comports with science. Templeton funds the BioLogos Foundation, which is designed to show evangelical Christians that they can accept both Jesus and Darwin. Templeton funds the Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a curiously theological arm of a large scientific organization, one designed to promote the idea that the relationship between science and religion is purely positive.
There is, for instance, a three-year, $5.1 million “Immortality Project,” devoted to studying the afterlife, its possible manifestation through near-death experiences, its influence on people’s behavior, and its characteristics. Such a mixture requires not only the labor of sociologists, but also the lucubrations of theologians. Templeton awarded $5.3 million for a project called “The Science of Intellectual Humility,” which is heavy on theology and light on science. It gave $1.7 million for the project “Randomness and Divine Providence,” with a combination of physicists, mathematicians, and theologians studying how randomness in nature might be consistent with the existence of a loving god. And $4.4 million went for the study “Big Questions in Free Will,” involving philosophers, neuroscientists, and, of course, theologians.
One of Templeton’s biggest grants—$10.5 million over five years—was awarded to a group of scientists a study titled “Foundational Questions in Evolutionary Biology” led by Martin Nowak at Harvard University. And while some of that money was directed toward valid scientific questions, like studying the conditions that promote the evolution of cooperation, the project included some distinctly nonscientific components:
The Foundational Questions in Evolutionary Biology initiative at Harvard University seeks to generate new kinds of knowledge and understanding in core areas of biology. FQEB encourages researchers to explore such topics as the origins of biological creativity, the deep logics of biological dynamics and biological ontology, and concepts of teleology and ultimate purpose in the context of evolution. Such knowledge is directly relevant to a wide range of philosophical and theological discussions and debates.
The notions of ultimate purpose and “teleology” (an external force directing evolution) are simply not part of science: this mixing of the scientific with the metaphysical is characteristic of Templeton’s approach. One would think that scientists would be wary of participating in programs that dilute and even distort science in this way, but one would underestimate scientists’ need for research money. And Templeton benefits as well, for the funded scientists are paraded on its Web site like prize horses, evidence of serious purpose and of a fruitful dialogue between science and faith.
Besides funding science and accommodationism, Templeton also gives money to purely religious projects, such as the television show The American Bible Challenge and the $100,000 Epiphany Prize awarded for “the best wholesome, uplifting and inspiring movies and television programs.” (That prize was once awarded to the gruesome and anti-Semitic movie The Passion of the Christ.) Templeton also gave a $3 million grant to Biola University (formerly the Bible Institute of Los Angeles), an evangelical Christian school in California, to found a Center for Christian Thought. It was the largest foundation grant in the school’s history.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"