Mick Hartley

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A cowardly evasion of intellectual duty

So Baron Rees of Ludlow, Astronomer Royal, Master of Trinity College Cambridge, former President of the Royal Society, has now decided to accept a million pounds from the Templeton Foundation, an organisation dedicated to the notion that science and religion get along together just fine. Lots of titles and lots of money do seem to go together rather nicely.

I posted last summer on what struck me as some glib pronouncements from the great man on the subject of the limits of science. As for this latest award – to add to all his others – Nick Cohen explains why it should have been refused:

As Mrs Merton knew, there are questions that answer themselves. "What first attracted astronomer royal Martin Rees to the £1m Templeton prize?" certainly looks like one of them. If an American charitable trust offered you a small fortune for "affirming life's spiritual dimension", you would need to check you had strong principles and a remarkably understanding partner before replying: "I have never been so insulted in my life."

The reasons for the John Templeton Foundation's attraction to Lord Rees appear, if anything, more obvious.

It is a well-endowed religious outfit, fed by the loot collected by the late Sir John Templeton, a ruthless financier with a pious streak.

Initially, it made no secret of its admiration for clerical hucksters and dispensed prizes to the evangelical showman Billy Graham and Mother Teresa, who sought to wallow in Calcuttan poverty rather than end it. Now it has moved upmarket and seeks to reward intellectuals who allow religion to scrape an acquaintance with science; who imply, however vaguely, that evidence-based research and ancient fable are compatible….

The religious…showered him with money because he is a symptomatic figure of our tongue-biting age. Like millions who should know better, Rees is not religious himself but "respects" religion and wants it to live in "peaceful co-existence" with it….

But the respect the secular give too freely involves darker concessions. It prevents an honest confrontation with radical Islam or any other variant of poor world religious extremism and a proper solidarity with extremism's victims. "I don't want to force Muslims to choose between God and Darwin," Rees says, forgetting that scientists "force" no one to choose Darwin, while theocracies force whole populations to bow to their gods. So cloying is the deference that few notice how the demand for "respect" gives away the shallowness of contemporary religious thought….

To stop the sceptical, evidence-based approach of science moving into the religious sphere and challenging their orthodoxies, they insist not on a defence of their truths, which cannot now be made, but on "respect"….

[T]he notion Lord Rees so casually endorses – that you must respect the privacy of ideologies that mandate violence, the subjugation of women and the persecution of homosexuals and treat them as if they were beyond criticism and scientific refutation – is the most cowardly evasion of intellectual duty of our day.

Ophelia Benson at Butterflies and Wheels also has some thoughts on this.

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3 responses to “A cowardly evasion of intellectual duty”

  1. tolkein Avatar
    tolkein

    You’re just trying to bate me.
    So a respected scientist, like Martin Rees, says that science and religion are not incompatible. John Polkinghorne, who became an Anglican priest, said that religion and science are compatible. Francis Miller says the same. So do lots of scientists. I never had difficulty dealing with evolution, or chemistry (which I loved)and being a Christian. So there’s plenty of evidence that scientists find that science and their beliefs are quite compatible. On what basis, or evidence does Nick Cohen, whose writing I enjoy, say they’re wrong and he’s right?

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  2. Mick H Avatar
    Mick H

    To be honest, Tolkien, I didn’t have you specifically in mind when I posted this.
    On what basis does Nick Cohen say they’re wrong and he’s right? Well, you have to read his article to find that out. I think he states his case pretty well.
    Individuals like yourself may quite happily hold scientific and religious beliefs, obviously, but they’re still fundamentally different ways of explaining the world. With the scientific triumphs of the enlightenment, religion, or at least the major branches of Christianity, has been forced back from its literal interpretation of the Bible to the somewhat weaker claim that in fact it’s all metaphor, and, good lord no, ha ha, God didn’t really make the world in seven days. It’s poetic licence, don’t you know. Not what they told all those poor bastards burnt at the stake for heresy, of course. And Islam still hasn’t even got that far: for Muslims the Koran is literally true – as the Leytonstone imam found to his cost when he suggested that there might be something in this evolution business.
    So yes, Anglicanism (and maybe Catholicism) had managed to reach some kind of temporary truce by making strategic withdrawals, but to my mind the conflict is never-ending. Twenty or thirty years ago I assumed that science would of course triumph in the end, but that, I’ll admit, now seems rather like wishful thinking.

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  3. Edward Spalton Avatar
    Edward Spalton

    Of course, something which claims to be a new sort of science – “post normal science” is getting together with religionists of various sorts (including Anglican bishops) to promote the world faith of Environmentalism/Global Warming/Climate Change.
    “Post normal science” is science in the service of a totalitarian ideology – like Lysenko in Soviet plant breeding or the racial scientists of the Nazi Ahnenerbe.
    Bolivia has just taken up this quasi science/quasi religion in a big way by giving “Mother Nature” and the environment constitutional rights.
    Funnily enough Christians of traditional views, including many scientists, regard this ideology as a terrible heresy and idolatry. It is certainly claiming victims.
    There is a great deal of power and money riding on it> It is well dug in at the UN and Messrs Cameron, Clegg, Huhne and Miliband are all true believers.
    If you stop for a minute to consider the number of martyrs – the last century was by far the most prolific and it produced them in the enforcement of Scientific Socialism and the brotherhood of man or the equally “scientific” theories of those guarding the purity of the Volksgemeinschaft. These ideologies, like Darwinism, are children of the so-called Enlightenment.
    Whilst I would certainly not belittle the atrocities committed in the name of religion, particularly Christianity, they are relatively trivial when set against those committed in the name of Progress and Science in a very much shorter time.
    Listening to a programme about the Eichman trial this week, I heard one of the Jewish contributors mention an all-up total of 160 million for the Twentieth century. It takes science and planning to achieve that.

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