Questioning the Integrity of the John Templeton Foundation1

All Things to All Men

The John Templeton Foundation's founder was an American self-made mutual-fund billionaire who became a tax exile in the Bahamas and so a British subject. By this route, he received a knighthood from Margaret Thatcher, and the right to call himself Sir. Not long after this, Templeton founded a prize for religion that eventually gave rise to the US$1.5 billion-endowed John Templeton Foundation. With an endowment as large as many major US universities, including the California Institute of Technology,² the Foundation dispenses US$70 million in grants every year³—money that it uses to fund other religion-science organizations.⁴

The Foundation started with the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion,⁵ which was “awarded each year to a living person who shows extraordinary originality in advancing humankind's understanding of God.” The prize was founded in 1972, and past recipients include Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Chief Rabbi of Great Britain Lord Jakobovits, Reverend Billy Graham, and author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The 1996 winner, Dr. William Bright, was founder of Campus Crusade for Christ International.

The Templeton prize has been generous from the start. According to the Foundation, “Feeling that the Nobel Prizes overlooked one of humanity's most important disciplines—spirituality—Templeton established a foundation that funds the prize in perpetuity at a level guaranteed to exceed the Nobel Prizes… It is the world's largest annual monetary prize.” Today it is worth more than US$1.6 million.

A prize for progress in religion could be seen as straightforward, but at the beginning of 2004 the name of the prize changed. It was no longer for religion, but for “progress about research or discoveries towards spiritual realities.”⁶ Neither God nor religion were mentioned on the main Templeton Prize web page—though they were still part of the goal of the prize, if you read through the purpose statement (you have to get to paragraph two to see the word “religion” and towards the bottom of the page to see any mention of God).

Today, it's just “The Templeton Prize,” with the “for” clause excised entirely. According to the Foundation, it honors a living person who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life's spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works. In practice, since the name change, the prize has been awarded to religious scientists who have either claimed that science is an insufficient explanation for, or who voiced support for religious interpretations of, human experience and how the world works. Here are the seven most recent winners, with their religious affiliation provided in parentheses:

Of these recent Templeton Prize winners, Charles Taylor is perhaps the most controversial, in that, while Salman Rushdie was hiding from the Ayatollah's death sentence in the late 1980s, Taylor questioned whether freedom of speech should be considered a human right outside of the developed West, especially in countries where religions dominate (Taylor, 1989). Specifically, Taylor argued that blasphemy laws do not inhibit a free society. Charles Colson (winner in 1993) was one of the architects of the plans to spy on the Democratic party that led to the Watergate scandal, and later became a Christian evangelist in prison and founded the Prison Fellowship.

Although the name of the Templeton Prize and the way it is publicized have changed, at no point have the organizers stated that the intent of the prize or the way in which it is awarded have been altered in any way. Templeton said⁷ that one of his goals in establishing the Templeton Prize was to “influence educated people to wake up to religion.” This agenda seems to have remained intact.

As with the prize, the stated aims of the Foundation have evolved over the years, although there is evidence that its actual aims have not. In 1996, the Foundation said about its own origins:⁸

When he was growing up in rural Winchester, Tennessee, renowned international investment manager John Marks Templeton considered becoming a missionary. He eventually turned his considerable talents to the business world where he founded the Templeton Growth Fund, one of the world's most successful mutual funds. Throughout his business and financial career, Templeton's early interest in spiritual issues remained a strong influence on his life. Noting how advances in scientific thought dramatically changed the world, he believed advances in religious thought could have a similar impact. In 1972, he established the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion to recognize frontier thinking in religion that contributes to humanity's understanding of God, spirituality and the universe. The annual prize is currently worth more than $1 million.

Sir John Templeton was knighted in 1987 by Queen Elizabeth for his philanthropic efforts. That same year he established the John Templeton Foundation to explore spiritual and moral progress through the use of scientific methods. The Foundation works closely with scientists, theologians, medical professionals, philosophers and scholars to:

• Create and fund projects forging stronger relationships and insights linking the sciences and all religions

• Apply scientific methodology to the study of religious and spiritual subjects

• Support progress in religion by increasing the body of spiritual information through scientific research

• Encourage a greater appreciation of the importance of the free enterprise system and the values that support it

• Promote character and value development in educational institutions

On the Foundation website in 1996, the general information section began with a quote from John Marks Templeton himself:

None of us has ever understood even one percent of the reality of God, the infinity, the eternity of God. All that we have learned is still tiny compared to what is still yet to be discovered if we search for it.

However, today, the Foundation mission mentions neither religion nor God, and a new Templeton quote has been chosen to represent the Foundation's philosophy:

The mission of the John Templeton Foundation is to serve as a philanthropic catalyst for discovery in areas engaging life's biggest questions. These questions range from explorations into the laws of nature and the universe to questions on the nature of love, gratitude, forgiveness, and creativity. Our vision is derived from Sir John Templeton's commitment to rigorous scientific research and related scholarship. The Foundation's motto “How little we know, how eager to learn” exemplifies our support for open-minded inquiry and our hope for advancing human progress through breakthrough discoveries.

The more we discover of science, the more we learn of spirituality.

There is no evidence that, despite this apparent change in mission, there has been an actual change in the goals of the Foundation. For instance, in addition to the Templeton Prize, the Foundation offers the Epiphany Prize⁹ for movies and television programs that are, “wholesome, uplifting, inspirational, redemptive, and moral.” Though encouraging such movies may sound like a goal of which the majority of the population, religious or not, would approve, it is worth knowing that the prize is intended to, “encourage filmmakers and television producers to create movies and television shows that help increase man's understanding and love of God.” And this is, presumably, not just any God: The prize is administered by the chairman of The Christian Film and Television Commission.

It could be argued that the Epiphany Prize and its stated mission, which sits uneasily with that of the “new” Foundation, is just a harmless anachronism. Except that, as of the beginning of 2009, the Foundation has doubled the prize money from US$100,000 to US$200,000. Among the award winners to date are The Passion of the Christ (a movie that, whatever its merits, is surely not wholesome). The Foundation also sponsors the Kairos Prize for “spiritually-uplifting” screenplays (which has only been running since 2006 offers more than US$50,000 for just three prizes).

Another program, the John Templeton Awards for Theological Promise offers US$10,000 each to a dozen researchers for their theology doctoral theses. Although some scientific research is funded by the Foundation, there is no equivalent program for scientific theses.

The Cambridge-Templeton Journalism Fellowship¹⁰ is another example of a Foundation award with a reasonable-sounding goal but that some perceive as masking a hidden agenda. The nominal purpose of the award is to “enable up to twelve journalists annually to investigate one of the leading topics of our time: the relationship between science and religion.” Attending journalists receive US$15,000.

John Horgan, a science journalist and Director of the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, wrote about his experiences attending the first Fellowship summer school in 2005. He had, he said, already accepted US$8,800 from the Templeton Foundation for writing three articles, and decided that he might as well accept the US$15,000 for an interesting summer.

He wrote about his experiences at length,¹¹ but the following quotes are particularly telling. He writes:

My ambivalence about the Foundation came to a head during my fellowship in Cambridge last summer. The British biologist Richard Dawkins, whose participation in the meeting helped convince me and other fellows of its legitimacy, was the only speaker who denounced religious beliefs as incompatible with science, irrational, and harmful. The other speakers— three agnostics, one Jew, a deist, and 12 Christians (a Muslim philosopher canceled at the last minute)—offered a perspective clearly skewed in favor of religion and Christianity.

And later:

One Templeton official made what I felt were inappropriate remarks about the foundation's expectations of us fellows. She told us that the meeting cost more than $1-million, and in return the foundation wanted us to publish articles touching on science and religion. But when I told her one evening at dinner that—given all the problems caused by religion throughout human history—I didn't want science and religion to be reconciled, and that I hoped humanity would eventually outgrow religion, she replied that she didn't think someone with those opinions should have accepted a fellowship. So much for an open exchange of views.

An interesting postscript to this story is that, if you check the Fellowship website, Horgan's name has disappeared,¹² despite the page being otherwise unchanged since he was listed in 2005.¹³ His is the only name that has gone missing in this way. I checked with him directly to see whether he had asked for this: He had not.¹⁴ One could speculate that the organizers did not want to put off potential applicants doing research into the experiences of previous Fellows.

Perhaps the clearest indication of the true agenda of the Foundation is summed up by one of their latest projects: US$2 million for the “Science for Ministry Initiative”.¹⁵ Organizers write of the project:

At the heart of the Science for Ministry program is the conviction that pastors, in the course of their preaching, teaching, writing, and care, are key catalysts in developing a more fruitful integration of science and faith among their parishioners.¹⁶

Their current goal, they say, is “Supporting effective science education programs and resources for people in active ministry.” What this means is illustrated by one of the four endorsements that they quote on their website, attributed to Alister McGrath, Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford University:

Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett have opened up a broad cultural debate which no pastor or congregation can ignore or avoid. This excellent initiative will enable the churches to address these issues from a scientifically and culturally informed perspective. We urgently need a new generation of clergy who can handle these burning issues. I believe this initiative will be of immense benefit, and commend it enthusiastically.

In other words, the program is specifically intended to do what the entire Foundation appears to be aimed at: using science and scientists to support a religious agenda.

Looking After Their Own

A striking feature of the list of Templeton Prize winners (recalling that the prize is worth over US$1.5 million) is its remarkable overlap with the Foundation's Board of Advisors. This might not seem surprising, in that you can imagine that prizewinners might be obvious recruits to the Board. But that's not the way it has worked.

In the last 12 years, two-thirds of winners were Board members or very active with Templeton before their big win. These include Francis Ayala, George F. R. Ellis, and John D. Barrow (on the Board from at least 1996 to 2009), Ian Barbour (from at least 1996–2001), Rev. Arthur Peacocke (from 1999–2005), Freeman Dyson and Rev. John Polkinghorne (from at least 1996 to present), and Charles Townes, Nobel laureate and physicist (from 1999 to 2009).¹⁷ Paul (PCW) Davies, who won the 1995 prize, may also have been on the Board before his big win (he was definitely on the board from 1996–2009), but he says he doesn't remember¹⁸ when he joined and the Foundation's website does not go back that far. We do know that he was on the Board when details were first posted online in 1996. Either way, he was certainly already friendly with the Foundation before winning the prize in that he had already contributed to a book edited by John Templeton (1994) himself.

Although we cannot know the reasoning for the awarding of any of these prizes, from the outside it certainly looks like a small club of people awarding enormous sums of money to their cronies. Although on the one hand it might be surprising if a member of the Board never won the prize, the fact that that certainly 8/13 and probably 9/14 of the winners have been Board members could be considered cause for concern.

Other winners also had relationships with the Foundation before their million-plus jackpot. 2008 winner Michał Heller published Creative Tension with the Templeton Foundation Press in 2003 and contributed to Science and the Search for Meaning in 2006 (to which Bernard d'Espagnat also contributed). This suggests that getting involved with the Foundation is akin to buying a lottery ticket with a very big prize and extremely good odds.

And it's not just about money. The Foundation is known for creating excellent platforms to promote their prizewinners and advisors. In 2004, for instance, they paid Britain's prestigious Royal Society more than US$281,000 to host a series of lectures that were supposed to end in 2007.¹⁹ There appears to have been only six lectures, which means that the Royal Society has done very well out of it, and/or it's an extremely expensive place to put on a lecture, and/or the speakers have been lavishly paid and expensed. In any case, despite the series having a seemingly non-religious and broad theme —The Nature of Human Knowledge and Understanding—the organizers appear not to have cast their net widely. Four of the six speakers were current or recent members of the Foundation Board of Advisors (George Ellis,²⁰ Martin Nowak,²¹ John Polkinghorne,²² and V. S. Ramachandran²³). Of the remaining two lectures, one had a clear religious theme: Ziauddin Sardar²⁴ talked about Islam and science. That leaves just one talk that was not obviously promoting the Foundation's Board members or agenda.

This pattern of funding events that appear to be independent but on closer inspection have a huge weighting towards people in the Foundation stable can be seen across many of the Foundation's activities. For another recent example, the Foundation was a general sponsor of the World Science Festival held in New York in 2009, and the sole sponsor of a panel discussion titled Nothing: The Subtle Science of Emptiness.²⁵ Of the four scientists who participated, three were Foundation advisors and Templeton Prize winners: Ellis, Barrow, and Davies. The fourth was Frank Wilczek,²⁶ who is on the Board of Advisors of the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi). The main source of funding for FQXi is the Templeton Foundation. Nevertheless, only one of these four mentioned Templeton at all in their biographies, and this mention did not make it to the main program page.

Keeping it in the Family

Of all the Foundation's recent activities, among the most well known are their advertisements for their Big Questions essays. This was an extremely expensive media buy: The Foundation purchased full-page and sometimes two-page spreads in some of the world's most prestigious mainstream and scientific publications, including Scientific American, American Scientist, Nature, The New Scientist, The Atlantic Monthly, Commentary, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Economist, The Financial Times, The New Republic, Prospect, the Sunday edition of The New York Times, and Skeptic magazine. Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic and participant in the project, says the media buy was over US$1 million, and that was back in 2009.²⁷ 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.

In fact, looking at the science-related questions, most of the participants were from the Foundation stable (i.e., had received direct funding from the Foundation for a project or platform) and about one-third—surely a disproportionate number—were then, or had previously been, on the Foundation Board of Advisors. For a full breakdown of which Foundation grants the various participants were named on, the Templeton Press books they authored or contributed to, and the positions they took on the essays, please see the Appendix.

What follows is a summary of participation in the three Big Questions that address science-related issues. It is notable that the Foundation-affiliated participants provided responses clearly leaning towards the religious (as opposed to scientific) side of the “argument.”

Global Warming is Not a Crisis

But global warming is not, in fact, a crisis. Here's how we know this:

• Since 2007, more than 31,072 American scientists, including 9,021 with Ph.Ds, have signed the a petition which says, in part, “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate.”

• A 2003 international survey of climate scientists (with 530 responding) found only 9.4 percent “strongly agreed” and 25.3 percent “agreed” with the statement “climate change is mostly the result of anthropogenic causes.” Some 10.2 percent “strongly disagreed.”

• A 2006 survey of scientists in the U.S. found 41 percent disagreed that the planet's recent warmth “can be, in large part, attributed to human activity,” and 71 percent disagreed that recent hurricane activity is significantly attributable to human activity.

• A recent review of 1,117 abstracts of scientific journal articles on “global climate change” found only 13 (1 percent) explicitly endorse the “consensus view” while 34 reject or cast doubt on the view that human activity has been the main driver of warming over the past 50 years.

• The mainstream of the scientific community, in other words, does not believe global warming is a crisis.

Lest it be argued that the Templeton Foundation is two steps removed from this effort and that they should not be expected to answer for the views of their friends' friends, it should be noted that, according to The Heartlander,⁴⁵ Dr. John (Jack) Templeton, the son of Sir John Marks Templeton and now head of The Templeton Foundation, is a donor to The Heartland Institute personally (i.e., not just via the Atlas Foundation).

The Heartland institute is also anti-anti-smoking. In fact, they devote a special section of their website to the subject.⁴⁶ With the headline “Tobacco and Freedom,” they say:

Welcome to the Smoker's Lounge, the place to go for sound science, economics, and legal commentary on tobacco issues. This “issue suite” cuts through the propaganda and exaggeration of anti-smoking groups by giving you access to the best available research and commentary from scores of independent research organizations, publications, and government sources.

Jack Templeton is also the US$1-million-donor, co-founder, and former Chairman of an organization called Let Freedom Ring.⁴⁷ This group has also been generally skeptical of climate change. This is clear from the tenor of their news headlines on the subject. Consider these news headlines released in early 2009, for instance:

23 January 2009: Gloom and doom over climate change “silly”⁴⁸

28 February 2009: NASA's Chief Climate Scientist Stirs Controversy With Call for Civil Disobedience⁴⁹

9 March 2009: Bucking the media trend on global warming “crisis” [Promoting Heartland Institute conference detailed above]⁵⁰

30 March 2009: Cato Institute takes out full page ad disputing President's stance on climate change⁵¹

2 April 2009: Do⁵² New Bulbs Save Energy if They Don't Work?⁵³

9 April 2009: State Department warns U.S. businesses: Take green path or face heavy economic penalties⁵⁴

14 May 2009: Memo exposes global warming dispute⁵⁵

30 June 2009: EPA did not release internal report that dissented from conclusion that carbon emissions cause global warming⁵⁶

1 July 2009: GOP: EPA hid global warming memo⁵⁷

Let Freedom Ring has also consistently cited “the sanctity of life” as one of its chief concerns.⁵⁸ What this means, in the scientific sphere, is that they are opposed to embryonic stem cell research.⁵⁹ For instance, in a statement issued on March 9, Dr. Don Wildmon stated on behalf of Let Freedom Ring:⁶⁰

President Obama has given the ok to destroy human life in the name of scientific research.

Embryonic stem cell research is immoral and ineffective. It is immoral because it destroys human life at its earliest stage of development by harvesting the stem cells for body parts. It is ineffective because it has yet to be used a single time in any therapeutic application.

Researchers must get their funding from taxpayers for embryonic stem cell research because they can't convince private sources to invest. Private investors know there are no proven uses for embryonic stem cells. It's all hype, hope and theory.

But adult stem cell research, on the other hand, is ethically benign and is already being used to treat over 70 diseases and conditions. If taxpayer dollars are going to be spent on stem cell research, that's where it ought to go.

By reversing funding restrictions on embryonic stem cell research, Pres. Obama is making every American taxpayer complicit in immoral, life destroying research. This is a terrible example of political ideology trumping sound science.

The one person talking about this techology from the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, Greg Hengler, provides a similar perspective:

Why do Obama and so many others find the “We are following the science” argument hook, line and sinker – especially when Pres. Obama follows it with a dig at moral values and ideology? Science is amoral. It does not have anything to tell us about right or wrong, good or bad, etc. The bottom line is not scientific, it is whether the experimentation on human embryos (by the way, you were one at one point of your life) is right or wrong. Pres. Obama, please don't tell me about “the science behind your decisions,” tell me about the morality behind your decisions. This lift is definitely change but not one I believe in.⁶¹

The Heartland Institute is in the same camp.⁶²

I am not aware that either the John Templeton Foundation or Jack Templeton personally has made statements on embryonic stem cell research, climate change, or tobacco. Nevertheless, one could argue that they have put their money where their collective mouths are. While on the one hand they required Michael Shermer (see earlier section) to secure a variety of views on belief in God, their funding of external organizations seems not to show the same level of diversity.