A FUNDAÇÃO TEMPLETON E O DIÁLOGO CIÊNCIA RELIGIÃO

Destaque semanal para a coluna WHAT’S NEW do físico norte-americano Robert L. Park:

THE EPIPHANY: DOES THE TEMPLETON FOUNDATION MAKE YOU UNEASY?

It certainly makes me uneasy. An excellent News Feature in this week's Nature by Washington editor Mitch Waldrop gives some of the reasons why it should, but something important was left out. (Much of what follows was drawn from my book Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science (Princeton, 2000)). As Waldrop points out, the Templeton Prize was not originally created "to pursue Templeton's goal of building bridges between science and religion." Indeed, the first Templeton Prize winner in 1973 was a fanatic Catholic nun who founded the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta and wore a cilice. A bridge to science, Mother Theresa certainly was not. But then, neither were the next 26 winners of the prize, most of whom had founded religious movements that few scientists have ever heard of, except for Billy Graham who founded the Evangelistic Association, and Charles Colson of Watergate fame who founded the Prison Fellowship. Later, the nicety of a prize committee would be added, although Templeton seems to have remained in total control. The first notable exception was Paul Davies in 1995, a theoretical physicist who authored the Mind of God, and numerous other popularizations of cosmology. Templeton wrote little and we know almost nothing first-hand about what was going on in his head during this period. He appears to have had an epiphany. In 1999 the prize went to Ian Barbour, a physicist who had been Enrico Fermi’s student at the University of Chicago and who played a major role in building the first the nuclear reactor. Certainly the most interesting winner of the Templeton Prize, Barbour was disillusioned by the atomic bombing without warning Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After finishing his doctorate at Chicago, Barbour dropped out of physics and took a degree in theology from Yale. At Carleton College he taught both physics and theology and is generally credited with having created the Dialogue Between Science and Religion. Barbour marked a sharp change in Templeton prize recipients. From that point on, recipients have been, almost without exception, physicists or cosmologists who, as Dawkins put it, "say something nice about religion." Sir John died in 2008, but things have changed little under his son. The 2009 prize went to a physicist; 2010 to biologist Francisco Ayala.

SELLING SCIENCE: THE PROBLEM WITH DISPROPORTIONATE WEALTH

Sir John Templeton saw Ian Barbour’s "dialogue between science and religion" and he coveted it. There is no point in being one of the richest men in the world if you can't buy the things you want. So the Templeton Foundation bought a magazine, Science and Spirit, and devoted it to publicizing the dialogue, but who reads Science and Spirit? So next, Templeton went to the American Association for the Advancement of Science with an offer of one million dollars to create the AAAS Dialogue between Science and Religion. That still sounds like a lot of money to scientists. The AAAS later backed out, but it serves to remind us that, however obtained, a disproportionate share of the world's wealth, even in the hands of the well-intentioned, is a threat to us all.

Robert L. Park