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 […]

Religiosity and atheism: American scientists versus American public

There’s one sociologist who has made her name solely on accommodationism—funded by Templeton, of course. That’s Elaine Ecklund of Rice University, whose 2010 book Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think, is a masterpiece of spinning one’s data to fit one’s ideology (and pecuniary master), namely, that scientists are more religious than one thinks. On […]

AAAS continues its incursion into accommodationism and theology

UPDATE: Dr. Swamidass has responded to my criticisms in a comment below (here), but my concerns are not allayed, as you can see from my response. _______________ The American Association for the Advancement of Science is America’s most famous umbrella organization for scientists, and publishes the influential journal Science. In the past few years, though, […]

Templeton poisons Aeon magazine with Catholic dogma

I believe I’m back on solid ground again with this post about the Templeton Foundation (in this case, the Templeton Religion Trust) and their incursion into Aeon magazine, a secular site devoted to “ideas and culture.” What we have here is an article by Manini Sheker whose work apparently wasn’t underwritten by Templeton—which would mean that […]

Templeton wastes $ 630,791 on “biology” research, finally making its anti-evolution agenda explicit

The John Templeton Foundation has announced yet another big grant for “biology” research, except that its principal investigators are a theologian (Christopher Southgate) as well as a biologist (Niles Lehman). Click on the screenshot to go to the announcement. As you see, the grant, which just started, will last 32 months, and eat up over […]

The University of Edinburgh and the John Templeton Foundation royally screw up evolution and science (and tell arrant lies) in an online course

Reader Simon sent me this video, which is a short (8-minute) lecture that’s apparently part of an online Coursera course on Science and Philosophy sponsored by the University of Edinburgh, the EIDYN Research Center run by Edinburgh’s Department of Philosophy, and the John Templeton Foundation. The presenter of this talk on creationism and evolutionary biology, S. […]