The BBC osculates religion and touts accommodationism—with a little help from Templeton

Reader Mark Jones called my attention (as did other readers) to this three-part BBC show with an accommodationist theme (click on screenshot), whose first part aired yesterday morning in the UK. Mark did some digging on the show and its host, Nick Spencer, and found substantial Templeton influence and dosh behind it. His summary is […]

Templeton gave big money to climate-denialist organizations

Reader Robert called my attention to a 2013 paper in Climatic Change (described by Drexel University as “one of the top 10 climate science journals in the world”) that tracked the source of money given to American climate-denialist organizations. While the results may be out of date, it shows that over at least seven years, […]

Templeton Prize winner spouts more nonsense in Scientific American

The other day, theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser of Dartmouth College won the £1 million Templeton Prize for “affirming life’s spiritual dimension.” At the time I used his quotes reported by the media to show that, while Gleiser may be a good physicist, he’s not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer when it comes to […]

Templeton Prize awarded to physicist for blending science and woo

Well, once again the canny John Templeton Foundation has awarded its million-pound Templeton Prize to someone who’s not a religious figure but a scientist who enables religion and criticizes materialism and atheism. This time the Big Dosh went to Marcelo Gleiser, a professor of Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth College. He’s a theoretical physicist and […]

Another big Templeton grant for philosophy (religious philosophy, of course), and a note on Templeton’s corruption of the field

A certain philosopher who could be mistaken for Santa Claus called my attention to this article in the Daily Nous, a website devoted to the profession of philosophy—and by “profession” I mean “job”. Below you can read yesterday’s announcement of a big new John Templeton Foundation (JTF) grant by clicking on the screenshot, but I’ve […]

Templeton gives half a million dollars to demonstrate that science and religion can help each other find truth

Lest you think that the Templeton foundations have changed their mission, have a gander. As you may recall, when Sir John died in 2008, he left much of his fortune—acquired by creating investment funds and moving to the Bahamas to avoid taxes—to his own foundations, with the aim of showing that science and religion are […]

New York Times op-ed: Science can learn from religion

UPDATE:  If religious practices promote well being, one would expect that more religious countries would have happier inhabitants. But the graph below (prepared by reader gluonspring) shows that this is not the case: the most religious countries score lowest on the UN’s “happiness index.” Of course this is a correlation and not necessarily a causal […]

FIRE is supported by Templeton

What do you do when an organization you admire gets money from an organization you detest? I’ve just found out that FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a free-speech group whose work I admire, has gotten lots of dough from the John Templeton Foundation. To see the article on the FIRE website, click […]

A “Sinai and Synapses” writer tries to show that religion gives us truths that science cannot, fails miserably

I mentioned the project/website “Sinai and Synapses” (S&S) a few days ago (oy, what a name!). It came up in an accommodationist article written by Brian Gallagher, editor of a Nautilus blog and also a S&S fellow.  Checking out the S&S site, whose mottos are below, I see it’s the Jewish equivalent of BioLogos: a […]

A bogus reconciliation of science and religion from Nautilus

Nautilus Magazine is an online site that bills itself as “a different kind of science magazine.” And indeed it is—for it’s partly supported by the John Templeton Foundation (JTF). The Foundation is largely dedicated to showing that religion and science are compatible,—even in harmony—for Sir John left his dosh to the JTF to fund projects showing […]