13AR18-25

( - previous issue - )

Apologia Report 18:25 (1,161)

July 3, 2013

Subject: Templeton grants and "a Christian-philosophy renaissance"

In this issue:

APOLOGETICS - the Templeton Foundation focus on the 'Big Questions'

------

APOLOGETICS

God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet, by Nathan Schneider [1] -- this book tours the history of arguments for and against the existence of God, which is interesting in and of itself <www.ow.ly/mvxfV>. However, Schneider himself turns out to be even more interesting, as you'll see from the above link. (Don't overlook his recent teaser for the book: <www.ow.ly/mvxzi>.)

Yet, it is our concurrent discovery of Schneider's article, "The Templeton Effect: Why are so many analytic philosophers starting to receive multimillion-dollar grants?," that really caught our attention. It's almost a year old - and it's an eye-opener.

Schneider begins with a review of who has received Templeton grants of late. First up is Alfred R. Mele, a philosopher at Florida State University, who received a grant "for a $4.4-million study of free will." And, "$5-million went to John Martin Fischer, a philosopher at the University of California at Riverside, to study the concept of immortality."

What lies behind this? Schneider explains that "in the past few years, Templeton has been stepping up the number of its six - and seven - figure awards for people in the discipline to study what the foundation calls the 'Big Questions.' These 'Big Questions' are the kinds of out-there topics that make philosophy seem bold and exciting to a college freshman but can feel thoroughly desiccated after a few years in graduate school: free will, the universe, evil, hope, consciousness.

"Controversy, though, always follows money, especially when it's Templeton money. Partisans of Richard Dawkins and his fellow New Atheists have long despised the foundation, interpreting its interest in dialogue between science and religion as an attempt to buy undeserved credibility for the latter at the cost of the former. ...

"It's true that one tends to hear more Templeton-branded talk of 'Big Questions' - spoken as if capitalized, and without irony-on the lips of philosophers with religious commitments, at religious institutions. When I met Christian Miller two years ago at a Society of Christian Philosophers conference at Wake Forest, the historically Baptist university where he teaches, he was still glowing from news of the three-year, $3.7-million Templeton grant he'd just received. Its purpose is 'to promote significant progress in the scholarly investigation of character,' and $2-million of it will go to empirical psychological research, alongside accompanying investigations in philosophy and theology.

"Miller wasn't the only Templeton beneficiary in the room. Also at the Wake Forest conference was Samuel Newlands, a University of Notre Dame philosopher who had just begun spending the $1.8-million he'd received to investigate the problem of evil - that is, the problem of whether worldly pain and suffering can coexist with a perfectly good God. ...

"Barry Loewer, a philosopher at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, isn't likely to turn up at a Society of Christian Philosophers meeting with Newlands and Miller. 'I myself have no interest in philosophy of religion and am not a religious person,' he says. ...

"The idea at first was to do a project about quantum mechanics and the foundations of physics, which was an interest of Loewer's group. Templeton had other ideas. The foundation pointed the group in the direction of cosmology, with the prospect of a much bigger grant, and the researchers jumped at the idea. They realized that cosmology encompassed the questions of time and physical laws that had concerned them all along. ...

"The nearly $1-million grant his team received from Templeton last year coincided with another, slightly larger one called 'Establishing the Philosophy of Cosmology,' which was awarded to scholars at the University of Oxford. Despite the change of plans at Templeton's behest, Loewer stresses, 'They've been really helpful, and totally noncoercive in terms of any agenda that they might have. I had my eyes open for it.' ...

"'Templeton picks some people whose Christian epistemology I might not share,' Brian Leiter says, 'but there's no quarreling that they're serious philosophers.' Suspicions about some secret religious agenda tend to lessen the more widely the foundation's substantial sums begin to spread.

"The phenomenon under consideration here can be traced to two others gradually converging over the past few decades: the rise of the John Templeton Foundation itself, and the quiet coup hatched by religious believers within analytic philosophy. ...

"As [John Marks] Templeton's net worth grew into the billions, he turned his attention to a new kind of investment. He had always lived by an eclectic and homemade brand of spirituality, blending Presbyterian respectability with the New Thought-influenced mysticism of his mother, and those with the pie-chart evidentialism of the boardroom. He was also enamored of science. 'What might we learn,' he wondered, 'if we applied the same intensity of research energy to the pursuit of spiritual information that has been devoted to scientific inquiry?' The terms of his eclectic vocabulary - 'spiritual information,' 'humility theology' - framed the charter for the John Templeton Foundation, formally established in 1987. The materialism of modern society cast its 'maximum pessimism' on the possibilities of spirit.

"The foundation's flagship program has been the annual Templeton Prize, always pegged to be a little larger than the Nobel. This year's prize went to the Dalai Lama; the British physicist Martin Rees won it last year. Meanwhile, Templeton has bankrolled an infusion of spirituality into medical-school curricula, new scientific studies on the efficacy of prayer, sociological research on young adults and Pentecostals, and top-notch theorizing about the origins of the universe. ...

"John Templeton died in 2008, and was succeeded by his son John Jr., a devoted neoconservative and evangelical Christian who finances Tea Party causes on his own dime. The foundation now holds an endowment of more than $2.3-billion. 'Spiritual information' and 'humility theology' have given way in its messaging to the more marketable 'Big Questions.' And philosophy seems to be its latest market.

"The architect of projects like Mele's and Loewer's is a philosopher named Michael J. Murray ... a product of what has often been called the 'renaissance' of Christianity in analytic philosophy. So is Dean Zimmerman, the one who connected Murray with Loewer. ...

"In the 1960s and 70s, while the atheistic straitjacket of logical positivism was loosening, smart, young Christian philosophers like Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff began crafting new ways of defending Christian faith from the deliverances of the latest epistemology and modal logic. They formed the Society of Christian Philosophers <societyofchristianphilosophers.com> to help coddle their conversations and cultivate successors, and they ascended to chairs in eminent departments - Plantinga at Notre Dame, Wolterstorff at Yale. Soon, thanks to them, the world of analytic philosophy that was once decidedly hostile to religious believers became significantly less so. More science-savvy students soon followed suit, crafting their own sophisticated defenses of faith in terms of physics, neuroscience, and biology. Michael Murray, who earned his Ph.D. at Notre Dame, has played a part in this, including as editor of a 1998 book, Reason for the Hope Within [2], which triumphantly summarizes the fruits of the renaissance so as to equip lay Christians to defend their faith.

"Follow these contours, and Templeton's recent projects-even those led by people outside the Christian-philosophy fold-seem to follow a certain apologetic logic. ...

"Much as Notre Dame served as the headquarters of the Christian-philosophy renaissance ushered in by Alvin Plantinga, a 104-year-old evangelical institution on the outskirts of Los Angeles called Biola University has cleared the way for one of the ren­aissance's most spirited and ambitious outgrowths. Biola supports the Evangelical Philosophical Society <epsociety.org>, a more doctrinally austere cousin of the Society of Christian Philosophers and it houses the country's largest philosophy graduate program, which is devoted to sending Christian students with its master's degrees to leading Ph.D. programs. For a few weeks each year, Biola is graced by an intensive course by William Lane Craig, the master of public 'God debates,' who famously trounced Christopher Hitchens in 2009.

"This summer Biola received the largest foundation grant in its history - a $3-million Templeton award to support a new Center for Christian Thought...."

Schneider concludes by noting that "in the modern research university, where money rules and money tends to go straight to hard science and lucrative business, what Templeton calls the 'Big Questions' of meaning, judgment, and value are usually relegated to a quaint afterthought. A few million dollars carefully placed here and there might at least - to try on another metaphor - level the playing field, offering philosophers a chance to hold their own." The Chronicle of Higher Education, Sep 3 '12, <www.ow.ly/mvvZQ>

Schneider also has an interest in New Religious Movements: <www.ow.ly/mvyEw>.

Just out: Schneider's feature article "The New Theist" - on "How William Lane Craig became Christian philosophy's boldest apostle," wherein he notes that "The Biola master's program [in philosophy] is ... a strategic intervention designed to resound everywhere." The Chronicle Review, Jul 1 '13. <www.ow.ly/mz8ig>

-------

SOURCES: Monographs

1 - God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet, by Nathan Schneider (Univ of Calif Prs, 2013, hardcover, 272 pages) <www.ow.ly/mvyhW>

2 - Reason for the Hope Within, Michael Murray, ed. (Eerdmans, 1998, paperback, 445 pages) <www.ow.ly/mz7SD>

------

( - next issue - )