The Templeton fundies.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

HOW MUCH does it cost to determine scientifically why people believe in God?

Oxford, the oldest university in the English-speaking world, thinks it can do it for about $4 million. Well, not Oxford per se, but the researchers at Oxford's Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion and the Centre for Anthropology and Mind who have been granted 1.9 [pounds sterling] million by the Templeton Foundation to try to answer the question of belief.

The Templeton Foundation was founded by Sir John M. Templeton (he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1987) who became a billionaire in the mutual fund business. Templeton, born in 1912 in Tennessee, was about sixty years old when he started using his wealth to promote religion and spirituality. In 1972 he established the Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries About Spiritual Realities. Initiating the association with scientific endeavor, he stipulated that it should pay more than the Nobel Prize.

In 2007, $1.5 million went to philosopher Charles Taylor, whose contribution toward progress "about spiritual realities," said John "Jack" M. Templeton Jr., has been his argument that problems such as violence and bigotry can only be solved by considering both their secular and spiritual dimensions. A purely secular viewpoint, Taylor has argued, leads to fragmented, faulty results. It appears to be irrelevant to the awarding body that a purely religious viewpoint has, in fact, led to more violence and bigotry, rather than less. It is also irrelevant that the term "spiritual"--which seems to convey a warm, fuzzy feeling to many people--is left undefined and is rarely used with any precise cognitive meaning. The point is not whether the recipient is right or wrong, clear or vague, but whether his or her work can be used to further the propaganda purposes of the Templeton Foundation.

The 2008 winner, Polish priest and cosmologist Michael Heller, should help further the Templeton agenda with his question, "Does the universe need a cause?" Heller posits:

   If we ask about the cause of the universe we should ask about a
   cause of mathematical laws. By doing so we are back in the Great
   Blueprint of God's thinking .... 'Why is there something rather
   than nothing?' When asking this question, we are not asking about a
   cause like all other causes. We are asking about the root of all
   possible causes.

Heller has resurrected Thomas Aquinas's conundrum regarding the cause of an effect versus the cause of a chain of causes and effects that is not itself part of the chain. He has couched the conundrum in modern mathematics, which led Jack Templeton to proclaim: "Michael Heller's quest for deeper understanding has led to pioneering breakthroughs in religious concepts and knowledge as well as expanding the horizons of science" Heller's nominator, Karol Musiol, had this to say: "It is evident that for him the mathematical nature of the world and its comprehensibility by humans constitute the circumstantial evidence of the existence of God."

Heller himself says that science is "but a collective effort of the human mind to read the mind of God" If by God Heller means nature, then he's right but this is certainly not something we can assume.

The Templeton Foundation's endowment is currently estimated at $1.1 billion. According to well-known science journalist John Horgan, the Templeton Foundation has spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars "on prizes, academic programs, publications, broadcasts, lectures, conferences, and research on topics such as the neurobiology and genetics of religious belief; the evolutionary origins of altruism; and the medical benefits of prayer, church attendance, and forgiveness." The Templeton Prize is awarded in Buckingham Palace each year and even ex-convicts are eligible as long as they've found God. Charles Colson, Nixon's chief counsel during Watergate who went to prison for his troubles, was the winner in 1993. Colson got religion while in prison and it has provided him with a source of purpose and income ever since. Cambridge cosmologist and mathematician John Barrow won the prize in 2006 for his work defending the anthropic principle, the idea that it is unlikely the universe came about by chance. Or, as physicist Bob Park put it: "If things were different, things would not be the way things are."

In addition to its signature prize, Templeton awards ten smaller prizes and numerous grants to fund, as their website delineates, "rigorous scientific research and related cutting-edge scholarship on a wide spectrum of 'Core Themes.'" How Oxford plans to use the millions its been granted provides a further window into the goals of the foundation. In a press release dated February 19, 2008, Oxford stated that the money is going to be used "to draw together and promote the latest scientific ideas about the meaning of religion and its origin in the human mind." The press release includes a photo of a child at prayer with the caption: Nature or nurture? Science will tell. Dr. Justin Barrett will be playing a lead role in the study. He is described as "a psychologist who has been at the forefront of the development of the cognitive science of religion" According to Barrett: "Cognitive science can help to explain the origin and nature of human religion. [Is there any other kind?] For example, developmental psychology has been instrumental in determining that belief in religion seems to be an integral part of human nature--it is found across all cultures and is something that we grasp from a young age."

The notion of human nature is a slippery one. Humans might trace their ancestry back several million years, say, to some pre-hominid. Or, we might trace our ancestry back to hominids emerging some 100,000 or 50,000 years ago. In any case, there was no religion for most of the evolution that evolutionary psychologists say determined the best part of "human nature." Since the Oxford group is doing cognitive science, I assume that it intends to find the meaning of religion and its origin in the human brain. Wouldn't a scientific approach leave it an open question as to whether religion originated in the brain, whatever that might mean?

Oxford says that it is going to use a good amount of the grant money to teach quantitative skills, which should come in handy for scientifically determined theologians bent on quantifying spirituality. It might help them understand, for example, whether a color patch on an fMRI signifies the presence of a god, an angel, impure thoughts, or methane gas. According to the Oxford release:

   A large part of the award, 800,000 [pounds sterling], will be used
   to run a 'small grant competition' providing 41 grants to support
   work by a range of scholars carrying out diverse individual
   research projects that will be the building blocks of the further
   development of the field.

Perhaps they will prove once and for all that quantum physics is God's code for understanding not only divinity, but also ESP and crop circles.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Of course, no one who cares about science and freedom of inquiry should complain about other people spending their own money to study religions in a scientific way. But Oxford seems bent on using the money to prove certain things about religion and to validate the value of religion, which seem to be the very same goals of the Templeton Foundation. Most of the scholars who will apply for these grants probably believe religion is good, natural, and true, so using the money to investigate these issues may seem proper to them. But what kind of science is it whose goal is to confirm a bias?

The question, according to Barrett, is this: "is religion a part of the selection process that has helped us survive or merely a by-product of evolution?" This is science on the cutting edge. Everybody seems to be doing it, so it must be good science. Even mental disorders have been defended as good for the species. Dr. Paul Keedwell, an expert on mood disorders at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, argues that depression has helped the human race become stronger. This must be so, he says, otherwise depression would have been eradicated by evolution. The same thing must be true of religion. It must be good for us or it would have gone extinct by now. The thing is, some religions have gone extinct and it may be just a matter of time until the rest join them. Just because something has survived to the present doesn't mean it won't go extinct in the future. In the beginning, all religion was magical thinking. It still is.

Does magical thinking have an evolutionary advantage? So far so good, we might say, but the human species is, after all, still evolving.

By all accounts, John Templeton is a decent man who has chosen to give a lot of money to people who will promote or support his belief in spirituality. Since 1995 his organization has been headed by his son and namesake, a former pediatric surgeon. Many secular universities and scientific organizations have accepted Templeton money. Taking money from Templeton might compromise the critiques of some participants, says John Horgan (who, incidentally, accepted the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship in Science and Religion and later published an article titled "The Templeton Foundation: A Skeptic's Take" in The Chronicle of Higher Education). For example, several scientists told Horgan privately that they avoided challenging the beliefs of religious speakers at a Templeton-sponsored conference at Stanford University, titled "Becoming Human: Brain, Mind, and Emergence," for fear of offending them and the hosts.

"The dialogue was nominal," Horgan writes. "Each side listened politely to the other's presentations without really commenting on them."

Even so, some atheists are invited to Templeton-funded events. They're not invited to promote atheism and attack religion, of course, though that is what the unapologetic Richard Dawkins did at one such event. Dawkins and two other renowned atheists, philosopher Daniel Dennett and physicist Steven Weinberg, have either spoken at or attended conferences supported at least in part by the Templeton Foundation. The only scientist I am aware of who has publicly stated he won't take any money from Templeton is Sean Carroll, a physicist at Cal Tech. According to Carroll, "the entire purpose of the Templeton Foundation is to blur the line between straightforward science and explicitly religious activity, making it seem like the two enterprises are part of one big undertaking."

The money given to Oxford should blur the line between science and religion even further, while promoting another of the foundation's premier goals: anti-secularism. Jack Templeton suggested as much in his comments on the worthiness of the 2006 prize winner:

   Throughout his career, Charles Taylor has staked an often lonely
   position that insists on the inclusion of spiritual dimensions in
   discussions of public policy, history, linguistics, literature, and
   every other facet of humanities and the social sciences.

The subtext is clear: secular science alone can't solve our problems. We must seek our answers in a realm that includes the non-secular.

Templetons anti-secularism is also evident from the fact that Taylor was nominated for the Templeton prize by the Rev. David A. Martin, Ph.D., emeritus professor of sociology at the London School of Economics and author of A General Theory of Secularization, which, among other things, laments the way religion has been ignored by sociology and pushed to the periphery of significance in some quarters. (Taylor wrote a blurb for the back cover of Martin's follow-up: On Secularization: Towards A Revised General Theory, published in 2005.) Taylor's latest work, A Secular Age, was published last September by Belknap Press. It is being promoted as "the definitive examination of secularization and the modern world." At 896 pages, it is certainly the heftiest examination of religion in the modern world.

Those who argue that our only hope for peace on earth is to become purely secular will never win the Templeton prize. To win, one must be selective and focus on those aspects of spirituality that don't involve bigotry, hatred, ignorance, or superstition. If you ignore many of the beliefs and practices of many religions you can come up with a fine set of ideas supporting the notion that spirituality must be situated at the center rather than the periphery if we wish to live free in a new golden age. I look at it a little differently than Charles Taylor or John Templeton. In my opinion secularism is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for peace on earth and for understanding the things of this universe; religion, on the other hand, is a sufficient but not a necessary condition for continued misery and obfuscation of even the simplest truths.

For a million dollars, I might tell them why that's so. For another million, I'll do it in nine hundred pages instead of four.

Robert Todd Carroll received his Ph.D. from the University of California at San Diego and taught in the philosophy department at Sacramento City College from 1977 until his retirement in May 2007. He is the author of becoming a Critical Thinker and The Skeptic's Dictionary, and maintains The Skeptic's Dictionary website at www.skepdic.com. He has also been an invited speaker at the Amazing Meeting and the CSICOP conference.