About the Templeton Foundation
Evolutionary Psychology, the online journal that hosts this blog, published an interesting article last week on the John Templeton Foundation by Sunny Bains of Imperial College London, “Questioning the Integrity of the John Templeton Foundation.”
She reports her evidence that Templeton “is not what it represents itself to be,” as follows. First, she notes that the Foundation began explicitly pro-religion, and she claims that they still are. Second, she documents cronyism, showing that people associated with the Foundation tend to win the Foundation’s prizes and answer the Foundation’s “Big Questions.” Third, the Foundation’s chairman gives money to groups which Bains characterizes as “anti-science.” Fourth, the Foundation pays other groups to run events, but often those who are associated with the events don’t know that the Foundation is behind it.
Based on Dawkins’ remarks in The God Delusion, I was unfavorably disposed toward Templeton, and I expected to be ready to hop on the anti-Templeton bandwagon, but… shmeh.
Is Templeton still pro-religion? Well, as Bains notes, they do support an award called the Epiphany Prize, which has a bunch of God and stuff in there, so that seems to point to some religion being in the mix, but the prize is for art (movies and television), not science. Bains also indicates that they just funded a project that talks about “a more fruitful integration of science and faith.” So, yes, maybe the Foundation seems to fund some religious stuff.
She also documents what she calls cronyism. They tend to give their prize money to people on their Board, but I have a little trouble making much of this. It’s a private organization, and it seems to me that they can do with their prize money whatever they want. Sure, they give it to people who served on their board, maybe as a little ($1.5 million) thank you, but I just can’t get exercised about that. Having served on grant panels that the NSF and NIH, it seems to me that people are serving up federal dollars to their friends and allies – and keeping their enemies’ snouts out of the public trough – and this seems a lot worse because these aren’t private dollars, but public ones. If we are to boycott any organization with cronyism – which I would say is basically all of them – we’re all going to be funding our research with checks from our parents. (Also ruled out if we’re not comfortable with nepotism.) As for the “Big Questions,” again, I can’t get too worried about who answers these. I mean, heck, they paid for the ads – a hefty amount – so it seems that they can’t really be faulted for picking who answers their Questions. Bains writes that “The tenor of these advertisements or advertorials was that there are diverse views on these so-called big questions, and that these views had been solicited from an equally diverse range of people in the scientific community,” but I don’t really know what “tenor” refers to here.
Bains also discusses the fact that Jack Templeton – but not, as far as I could tell, the Foundation itself – funds some sorts of things that some people wouldn’t be too pleased about –climate change skeptics, in particular – but, you know, that seems to me to be a different issue, and it seems reasonable to distinguish what the Foundation funds from what the guy running it does.
Lastly, Bains charges that Templeton hides the fact that they are behind events, with intent to draw people in who would otherwise not participate. Along similar lines, she claims that people who “unknowingly participate in Foundation events… are listed every two years in the Foundation’s ‘Capabilities Reports.’” In a piece that otherwise includes a fair bit of documentation – including a lot of web links – there was no footnote for this claim. If it’s true, yes, that’s quite irritating.
But, honestly, although I was prepared to be convinced that Templeton really was That Bad, overall, I actually wasn’t really persuaded. Yes, Templeton funds some stuff which certainly sounds awfully silly, such as the project called, “Establishing an Institute for Research on Unlimited Love.” (Can I be a subject? Sounds fun.)
But, well, I don’t know. They don’t seem all that bad, from this article. Yes, I’d rather they not fund stuff that seems to mix science and religion. But, you know, I wouldn’t want to defend the NSF’s funding record either. They have been known to mix science with cultural anthropology…
So, my conclusion — with apologies to anti-Templeton purists – is that it doesn’t really seem all that bad. Yeah, it’s lame if they list people as Templeton-funded if the people who took the money didn’t realize the source; they should be transparent about such things. But on the basis of this paper – and not having dug deeper for the moment – I have to say that I’m more likely rather than less likely to consider applying to Templeton.
For my taste, there’s too much cronyism at the NSF anyway.
(Note. Joshua Rosenau has a much more meticulous post about this article in particular and Templeton in general. I recommend it for people who want to get into these issues more deeply.)
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