The Templeton Prize has to be the most efficient publicity campaign ever. The Templeton Foundation gives a million British pounds to a scientist who is willing to say that science and religion are compatible, and in return they get many times that value in publicity. (The formal citation is “for making an exceptional contribution to investigating life’s spiritual dimension”) Atheists should really just refuse to talk about it, but — can’t resist!
This year’s winner is Sir Martin Rees, one of the world’s leading theoretical astrophysicists. Like everyone else, I have nothing but enormous respect for Sir Martin’s work. He focuses mostly on “physical” cosmology — that part that involves actual known laws of physics, like galaxy formation — but is more willing than most folks in that game to think about speculative ideas concerning the multiverse and the Big Bang. He describes himself as non-religious but church-going, and would rather science and religion just get along than be constantly at each other’s throats. You can read an extremely awkward interview with him by Ian Sample in the Guardian — it’s clear Rees has no interest at all in talking about science/religion issues, but that’s going to come up when you win the Templeton prize.
But the really telling thing is this companion piece at the Guardian‘s website by Mark Vernon. (Another piece by Jerry Coyne provides some balance.) The real problem with the Templeton Foundation, in my view, is that it works very hard to give people a false impression that science and religion are actually reconciling, not just that they should be. If you want to see the publicity machine at work, this piece is a perfect example. Here’s the money paragraph:
But with Rees’s acceptance, the substantial resources of the Templeton Foundation have, in effect, been welcomed at the heart of the British scientific establishment. That such a highly regarded figure has received its premier prize will make it that little bit harder for Dawkins to sustain respect amongst his peers for his crusade against religion.
There you go — now that such a distinguished and respectable scientist has accepted the Templeton Prize, we may conclude that “the British scientific establishment” is rejecting Dawkins and his fellow noisome atheists in favor of warm and fuzzy Templetonianism. That’s exactly the publicity effect they are hoping for.
In unrelated news, Mark Vernon spent time at Cambridge in a journalism fellowship paid for by the Templeton Foundation. Have to hand it to them, these guys know how to get a message out.
Hello Sean. I resisted posting a comment here for a few years but today I cannot resist anymore.
It is utterly unfair to critisise Martin for his honest Victorian agnosticisim which compared to the Talibanistic (and naive, lets be honest) new-atheism of people like Dawkins sounds almost pro-religion.
Just compare Martin with Steven (Hawking). Martin is super-moderate and serious. People who know the Cambridge intellectia well (like me and perhaps Mark Trodden who took Part III with me), know that most people laugh with Steven’s (Hawkings) moving circus and his convenient endorsements of various scientific garbage (the latest being notable the multiverse and new-atheism) just because it pays them their coffee and cookies (50.000 pounds I am told!).
..and if I am allowed an educated comment here: someone said that reality is something that you can’t get rid of however hard you try. The human thirst for religion and belief in something transcendental is one such very real thing – much more real that extra dimensions, the multiverse and Lorentz by your “aether” – dear Sean. I am afraid you are in negation all this time. Remember, it is reality we are after; and belief in human beings is certainly part of our reality!
(btw the “aether” thing could be an interesting phenomenological idea if it could be consistently combined with compactification since it changes the spacing of KK modes and hence modifies the effective potential i.e. it is not simply a theta-function anymore and perhaps could relax the size of extra dimensions – I had a student looking at it but did not go very far..)
Sir Martin Rees has quite the dry, impish sense of humour and I’m sorry that interviewer didn’t seem to ‘get it’ (or maybe they did — remember, it IS text and was edited). We all will find things there that fit in with our worldviews, which is as it should be, but our analyzes of it will always be our choice.
About the “Religion vs. Science” thing…*chuckle* On my boilerplate of my blog, I have a quote by the great American writer Tom Robbins. It says:
“…the notion that inspired play (even when audacious, offensive, or obscene) enhances rather than diminishes intellectual vigor and spiritual fulfillment, the notion that in the eyes of the gods the tight-lipped hero and the wet-cheeked victim are frequently inferior to the red-nosed clown, such notions are destined to be a hard sell to those who have E.M. Forster on their bedside table and a clump of dried narcissus up their ass. Not to worry. As long as words and ideas exist, there will be a few misfits who will cavort with them in a spirit of approfondement–if I may borrow that marvelous French word that translates roughly as “playing easily in the deep”–and in so doing they will occasionally bring to realization Kafka’s belief that “a novel should be an ax for the frozen seas around us.”
There will always be people who forget that life is a ride, that we’re all here to play well with others, that get so stuck in their own worldview that they believe the furrows on their brows are real and their anxious sweats are true. I see religion as art; there are lots of things that are irrational and not based on evidence; I believe we need the irrational to help keep sane (poetry, koans, asthetics, etc etc).
Einstein had it right and people should stop following the minority of people who have lost sight of their sense of play and gotten all solemn.
(in fact, I think one of the reasons for all this fundamentalist hurt going on around the world IS because of a lack of humour/too much solemnity — so many people getting hurt and dying for a non-existent punchline)
cretan (?cretin) “Remember, it is reality we are after…” Really? Which reality? The reality of understanding what makes the Universe tick, its constituents, how it works, or the social construct reality of human beings that includes superstition, tribalism, and religious delusion?
The quote about reality is mangled–it is actually ” Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”–
Philip K. Dick, “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later”, 1978
That could be modified to ” that which when you believe something without evidence doesn’t change the underlying reality, just propagates stupidity.”
I do agree though that Martin is a serious scientist and has every right to accept the award, and that Dawkins was rude and out of place calling him a compliant quisling (not about this award) The problem is the reflected validation that the Templeton God group get from the association.
Aleksander–you are wrong. Steven Weinberg certainly understands quantum mechanics probably better than virtually anyone. Biologists do seem the most vocal, but they are hardly the only vocal atheists. Stephen Hawking understands QM, as does Lawrence Krauss, as does Sean…there are many, many more.
And what is this “new atheist” crap. Somehow new atheists are Talibanistic, rude, aggressive—new atheists are old atheists. Read John Stuart Mill. Somehow it is considered rude to point out flaws in religious reasoning. Virtually nothing else gets a free ride from criticism—certainly not atheism, particularly in the U.S. where proclaiming you are an atheist (ie a rational being) will totally eliminate you from running in or certainly winning any election to office, while constantly referring to how close to God you are is considered a necessity and in certain States, throw in a speaking in tongues along with a Rapture.
@Gordon
To conveniently disentangle the different constituents of reality (e.g. the elementary particles on one side and human behavior on the other) and call one part “the reality” and the other “delusion”, is simply negation. Last time I checked, humans are part of the Universe (.. or the multiverse for the loonies..) Honest scientist do not do so (and also do not call the others cretins without prior investigations.) Thanks for reminding the name of P. Dick – that quote makes my point even stronger.
Nevertheless, I sympathise with you Americans that have to live with neo-cons, creationists and a million others weirdos. I then understand some of your naive new-atheism as a natural reaction to those crazy people carrying the cross and the gun with the same hand. Well, you will mature eventually..
Btw, S.Weinberg does not really understand QM better than anyone ( just ask M. Veltman about it), but even if he did, we all make mistakes when we try to talk about things we dont practice. He would better keep calculating (wrongly, I am afraid..) the tensor perturbations and leave philosophical issues for the professionals.
Dear Gordon,
Richard Feynman said that nobody understands quantum mechanics, and people like Weinberg and other particle physicist understand QM at the technical level, i.e. how to calculate scattering amplitudes and effective actions. However if you ask more fundamental questions like is the electron particle or a wave or what happens when a wavefunction collapses, Weinberg and company have nothing to say – or they might say “shut up and calculate”. From my research experience it is clear to me that the nature of reality is more complex and that it cannot be reduced to a theory of everything. Superstring theory cannot explain everything.
Martin Rees made these comments in 2003 (which some here may know of):
“The possibility that we are creations of some supreme, or super-being, blurs the boundary between physics and idealist philosophy.”
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/rees03/rees_print.html
He recently said also that Stephen Hawking was theologically/philosophically naive so I think this keeps other options on the table apart from the universe being meaningless.
Although he is not traditionally religious, perhaps his comments above about “some supreme, or super-being” aren’t actually religious at all but fit in with physics somehow.
I am also quite interested in the fact that he has used the concept of the Ouroboros in one of his talks as has his colleague Prof. Bernard Carr, the cosmologist, who is trying presently to bridge the gap between mind and matter in his own studies.
For what it’s worth, as an atheist and a physicist, I feel obliged to saythat I have no problem whatsoever with Martin Rees winning the Templeton Prize. I think dialogue between religion and science – and between many other things – is a profoundly good thing.
It’s interesting to observe that recent winners of this prize – John Barrow (my PhD supervisor, in fact), George Ellis, Paul Davies, John Polkinghorne and Martin Rees all established their scientific reputations working in the United Kingdom. I don’t think this is a coincidence. I think over here religious fundamentalism is far less prominent than in the United States, and religion plays a much smaller part in our political and cultural life. It took centuries of strife to get to this position, of course, but this does seem to have led to more reasoned dialogue between believers and non-believers.
I think that science and religion are basically orthogonal activities and there’s nothing to be gained by setting them in opposition. Sean’s post conveys the impression that the Templeton Foundation is some kind of evil conspiracy. I don’t see it that way at all. My own lack of belief does not diminish my respect for, and indeed interest in, the faith expressed by others. Dialogue is always better than conflict.
P.S. If there’s anyone from the Templeton Foundation reading this, please make next year’s cheque out to “Professor Peter Coles”.
I agree with Peter Coles. I’m an atheist invested in Templeton World Fund.
They make me money. We don’t have to agree on anything else.
I disagree with Peter Coles. Indigenous religous fundamentalism in the US is anymore a very minor concern of mine.
I’m more inclined to concern over the cultism of fellow atheists; increasingly ever more indistinguishable from organized anarchists.
ps. Actually it’s Lord Rees these days, not merely “Sir Martin Rees”…
If one is to understand this place all is fair game. A decision that something is accurate and something else is not will not lead toward full understanding because everything exists as a viewpoint of something. It is a perceived reality and is always accurate within that viewpoint. There is simply always MORE right, more information, more viewpoint to see. That goes for all of us. My opinion.
Kevin,
Within the local horizon, absolute truth is approximately what some agree that it actually is, even as others that agree that it’s actually not.
Mostly it’s populist truth here, after the actual science is offered by learned peers with personal agendas.
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” – Philip K. Dick
I like to think that this helps the cause of reason. Every time that someone points out that the religious have to offer bribes to get some scientists to praise them, we win a little bit more.