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Furcas comments on Bloggingheads: Yudkowsky and Aaronson talk about AI and Many-worlds - Less Wrong
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Like I said, they're a sneaky bunch. Out of 13 contributors, they invite three or four forthright atheists, just to make it seem like they're being fair. The rest are theists (one Muslim and lots of Christians) or 'faitheists', agnostics and pantheists who believe in belief.
First, the Templeton Foundation's current president, John Templeton Jr., is an evangelical Christian. The softboiled pantheism you think you're seeing is Christianity hidden by prodigious volumes of smoke.
Second, whatever happened to caring about the truth? Would you also say that belief in a cube-shaped Earth might just be the way to cut the knot between angry round-Earthers and angry flat-Earthers?
It's interesting to compare the 1996 Templeton site:
to the current site:
Another one. Old:
New:
ETA: I wonder what LessWrong will look like in 13 years. :)
If you look at the history of the Templeton Prize and their other endeavors, you will find that they never gave an award or a grant to anybody who came up with the "wrong answers". I mean, if they were really interested in "engaging life's biggest questions" they would have given a Templeton to Dawkins for "The God Delusion".
Thank you!!! That's exactly what I've been looking for (on and off) for the last 20 minutes.
I did a little poking on Wikipedia.
Given the demographics of the population at large and the content of the question the contributors were answering, I think four actual Christians out of thirteen contributors is very modest.
Look at the past winners of the Templeton prize. If you look at the winners before 2000, a lot of them were evangelists who had nothing to do with science+religion: Pandurang Shastri Athavale, Bill Bright, Billy Graham, Chuck Colson, Kyung-Chik Han Mother Theresa.
Like I said, three or four forthright atheists (depending on what you think of Michael Shermer), the rest are theists or faitheists.
I mean, just take a quick look at the essays (not the titles). Only three answer the question, "Does science make belief in God obsolete?" with a clear Yes. Shermer is less clear, but let's count him as a Yes. The remaining nine answer with No.
The question was not, "Does science make it clear that it is an error to believe in God?" I have not read the essays, but if I were answering the question about whether religion is obsolete, I doubt my answer would be interpreted as an unambiguous Yes. Obsolescence isn't about accuracy, it's about consensus of historicity over contemporary usefulness.
I must say, I'd answer "No" straightforwardly to that question. While it may be the case that belief in God is 'obsolete', I think what that question means at least needs some unpacking (How is a belief obsolete? Is that a category mistake?), and I don't think science is necessarily what makes that belief 'obsolete'.
Reason, perhaps, or good philosophy, might do the trick.
Well most of the pantheism I've encountered comes from the Christian worldview. And that sounds like an ad-hominem to me... the Foundation doesn't seem to be coming from an evangelical Christian viewpoint in general, and it's certainly not its stated mission.
If nothing really turned on the question of the Earth's shape, then sure.
To give the classic Pragmatist example, people used to kill each other over the question of transubstantiation of the Eucharist. One side said that the Eucharist is just bread, symbolizing the body and blood of Christ. The other side said that the Eucharist is really the body and blood of Christ, but for all practical purposes (and under any scientific scrutiny) is indistinguishable from bread. It seems like insisting that one side or the other was wrong on this question is the wrong way to go, as nothing really turns on it and they're both saying roughly the same thing.
Better to just 'live and let live' and let 'truth' go this time, in favor of actually making things better. If people do end up making 'God' mean something vacuous, then there's no harm in letting them say it.
Taking a person's most fundamental beliefs into account when trying to figure out what their true intentions are is not an ad hominem, it's common sense.
That's short-sighted. Nothing may really turn on the question of transubstantiation, but a there's a lot that turns on the cognitive processes that led millions of people to believe that a cracker is the body a magical Jewish half-deity.
I'm all in favor of "actually making things better", but the middle-of-the-road solution that the Templeton Foundation is (outwardly, deceitfully) espousing won't do that. Middle-of-the-road solutions are easy, they allow us to avoid sounding shrill, strident, and militant, but easiness is not effectiveness.
There is harm, because people who don't mean something vacuous by 'God' like to give the impression that they do to shield themselves against criticism. And thanks to 'pragmatism', it usually works.
If theists need to pretend to be atheists to be taken seriously, then we've already won.
I didn't think that by a vacuous God you meant a non-existent God.
Obviously, theists don't need to pretend to be atheists: Theism is respected by everyone except a small minority of neo-militant ultra-materialist fundamentalist atheists. To be taken seriously, theists merely need to be (or pretend to be, in the presence of critics) moderates, i.e. believers in a God that acts in a very subtle way and conforms to modern secular morality.
So no, "we" haven't won. The limited form of insanity we call faith is still the norm and is still respected.