templeton’s search for religious inspiration
The Templeton Foundation just published a new book which it’s been aggressively pushing on science sites and blog networks. Knowing the history and the goals of the organization, one can reasonably surmise that whatever the question the work tries to answer, religion will be worked in as an integral and mandatory part of the answer either by declaring that religious ideas helped give rise to some field of science or by exploiting a gap in our knowledge and insisting that there must be something of metaphysical importance in that gap. The task of doing both while describing the lives and motivations of scientific and theological figures fell to Marco Bersanelli, an astrophysicist, and Mario Gargantini, an electrical engineer to give Templeton Press the much needed veneer of science behind which to tuck the vaguely implied and typically irrelevant apologetics.
But of course all books need a review of some sort and the California Literary Review was given an advance copy which failed to make a good impression on reviewer John Guthrie who found that the book is not well organized and quite transparent in its intentions, lacking the sort of subtlety one would expect.
The authors’ stated intent is, “to catch the experience of those who have lived and still live the adventure of research in the first person.” More realistically, the book might be titled, “How Religion Inspired Science.” And there is the point, sidled up to again and again as a sort of stealth agenda: Religion, in particular Christianity, provided the inspiration for great science and great scientists. As the authors state, “Science, as we have noted, had its historical roots in Christian soil.” […]
The long lists of writings from scientists’ works address, more or less, the awe-inspiring qualities found in their study of the natural world as well as, occasionally, the unity of science and theology. This is achieved in part by including such notables as the Dominican Albertus Magnus and the Jesuit theologian-paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
Theological considerations are also emphasized in many cases by the authors adding religious commentary after the quote from the scientist who may in fact be, like Albert Einstein, (”For me, God is nature.” he once said.) a thorough going humanist.
So in other words, everybody has to be motivated by religion and if the authors have to reduce the complex or profoundly deep quotes of great minds to do it, then this is what they’ll have to do. Also note how scientists are paired with theologists and priests, given the same goal and treated by the same standard. In the world which Bersanelli and Gargantini try to craft, the vague, abstract theologian shares the same lab with an inventor who uses experiments and brutal peer review as a gauge for the validity of his ideas. That may be how the world is built in the mindset of Templeton’s directors and authors but it’s simply not how things work in reality.
Look, there are a lot of very moderate religious people who use their ideas of the supernatural to find purpose in a chaotic world. To them, faith is an important but ultimately, not an overriding part of life. They love science, they respect the scientific method as an important tool for investigating the world and they’ll never push any of their beliefs on you. And because I know so many people like this, it’s precisely why I object so much to all the efforts by Templeton and groups like it to force feed us their religious beliefs, no matter how high brow or how veiled they might be. Rather than let us come to our own conclusions about spiritual matters, they insist on a formal recognition of religion wherever we go and regardless of whether invoking it is appropriate.
