Like Jerry Coyne, I'm an atheist. Like Coyne, I'm also intensely irritated by religiously motivated attacks on science and appalled by religiously fuelled bigotry and intolerance around the world. (It should hardly need adding that I'm equally appalled by nonreligious bigotry and intolerance.) Unlike Coyne, however, I don't see a bogeymen round every religious corner, and I don't feel compelled to denounce the Templeton Foundation as a enemy of science.
Coyne's charge sheet sounds damning, but it's both hyperbolic and misleading. Coyne says: "Templeton plies its enormous wealth with a single aim: to give credibility to religion by blurring its well-demarcated border with science … [and] goes to scientists who are either religious themselves or say nice things about religion."
Is this true? Templeton pursues a diverse range of activities and doles out money for a number of different uses: research grants, journalism fellowships and the massive Templeton prize. Let's look at the research that Templeton funds. According to Coyne, this is funded to "give credibility to religion by blurring its well-demarcated border with science". So who gets Templeton funding, what sort of work do they do, and do they fit the bill of being people who are "either religious themselves or say nice things about religion"?.
Take Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia. Haidt is a leading social and cultural psychologist, and also an unabashed atheist. One of Haidt's research interests is in the long-neglected positive emotions. Haidt has received Templeton funding into positive psychology, but the published work that has arisen from this has nothing to do with giving "credibility to religion". And while Haidt is not religious himself, does he "say nice things about religion"? Well, yes, he does occasionally say some positive things about the role of religion in morality and social evolution – but he also says negative things about religion too. Should we, then, dismiss Haidt and his research simply because he doesn't say solely negative things about religion? Is the ability to move beyond black-and-white thinking now a sign of intellectual weakness?
Perhaps Haidt is an anomaly, so what about other researchers? As Coyne points out, "Templeton funds many other scientists who study Big Questions … These include studies of cosmology, human altruism, spiritual healing, and the contribution of faith to human virtue."
So who are these scientists benefiting from Templeton's largesse? They include Dacher Keltner, another leading researcher in positive psychology, and evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson both of whom have received Templeton funding for their research. Likewise, Herb Gintis, a prominent game theorist and behavioural economist, and Michael Gazzaniga, one of the world's most famous neuroscientists, have participated in Templeton projects. And what kind of work does Templeton fund? The highly respected evolutionary biologist Günter Wagner of Yale University was awarded a grant to study the "genetics and the origins of organismal complexity" (a topic that should be right up Coyne's street). Behavioural geneticist Robert Plomin of Kings College London received money to look into the genetics of high cognitive abilities. Paul Zak received funding to study the effects of oxytocin on social behaviour.
Coyne's claim is that all this work is funded to pursue "a single aim: to give credibility to religion".
This is untenable. Take Wagner's work in evolutionary genetics, which has been a major contribution to the field of evolutionary-developmental biology (how evolutionary changes are brought about through alterations in the developmental processes that build bodies), which is essential for understanding "evolvability" (the capacity of species to respond to evolutionary pressures). Wagner's published work has nothing to do with giving credibility to religion. It's just good science, and we should be grateful that it's being done. Is Coyne prepared to go on the record and say that Wagner, Haidt, Keltner, Sloan Wilson, Gintis, Gazzaniga, Plomin and Zak – among many others – are either willing or unwitting puppets in the promotion of religion? If so, on the basis of what evidence? More fundamentally, where's the evidence from the published work of these researchers that they were funded with the aim of giving credibility to religion?
Coyne goes on to say that "Templeton's mission is a serious corruption of science". What does Coyne mean by this, exactly? Perhaps the most clear-cut cases of corrupting science occurs in biomedical and pharmaceutical research, when supposedly independent scientists receive corporate funding to study the effects of new drugs and either consciously or unconsciously manipulate data so that it promotes the sponsor's favoured outcome.
In these cases, the science is simply not reliable – and that's the sense in which it's been corrupted.
Does Coyne have any evidence whatsoever that similar corruption has occurred in the case of the researchers alluded to above? Is Coyne seriously suggesting that the body of papers they've published are junk, because of their association with Templeton? If not, and the science is sound, then it what sense is science being corrupted? Would science be better off it this work wasn't done?
Coyne may well reply by claiming that it's not the specific scientific projects funded by Templeton that are corrupted, but the whole scientific enterprise – as if mere contact with Templeton was enough to catch intellectual cooties that then spread within the scientific establishment. But this comes close to simple prejudice, little more than saying "I don't believe the same things about religion and it's relation to science as Templeton, and so no one should have anything to do with them".
This complaint would carry more force if Templeton held clearly malicious beliefs (just as we might raise questions about a geneticist who received funding from an overtly racist organisation). When Richard Dawkins compares people who work with Templeton with fascist-appeasing quislings he appears to be taking such a view, but does the belief that science can illuminate the religious and spiritual experiences of humans really put you in the same moral category as a genocidal regime?
Again, I say to Coyne: "Show me the money!" – where is the evidence that the mere existence of Templeton, and the facts of its funding activities, have corrupted science in any sense?
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