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May 29, 2008 |
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May 29, 2008 |
That is the Big Question posed in the latest of the Foundation's advertorials, which has been running this spring in newspapers and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. The various versions of the advertorial bring together different combinations of the thirteen distinguished scientists, theologians, and commentators who wrote essays responding to the question.
Contributors run the gamut from the journalist Christopher Hitchens, a vocal atheist; to Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, the lead editor of the catechism of the Catholic Church; to William D. Phillips, a Nobel Laureate in physics and man of deep personal faith. Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic magazine and a columnist for Scientific American, coordinated and edited the essays.
The advertorials began appearing in April and will continue through June. Readers have encountered them in the pages of the Atlantic, the Economist, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times, the Financial Times, Nature, New Scientist, Scientific American, the New Republic, Commentary, and Prospect and online at Slate, the Huffington Post, and National Review Online. The essays are available in their entirety at www.templeton.org/belief, where the full texts can be read, downloaded, or requested in a printed booklet. For the design of the advertorial and the booklet, the Foundation was pleased to work again with the famed graphic artist Milton Glaser.
An additional feature of the website is a series of debates between the contributors: Christopher Hitchens versus Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller; Michael Shermer versus Jerome Groopman of Harvard Medical School; and Harvard psychology professor and author Steven Pinker versus William Phillips. The full roster of contributors also includes Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy, Mary Midgley, Robert Sapolsky, Keith Ward, Victor J. Stenger, and Stuart Kauffman.
Pamela Thompson, the Foundation's Vice President for Communications, said that the advertorial series—this is the third one—grew out of founder Sir John Templeton's gift for asking provocative questions. "He really has one big question after another about science, philosophy, and theology. So we thought: why not get the best answers we can, from scientists and scholars of differing views, and share it all with the public?"
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The current advertorial, on the relationship between science and belief in God, has generated a remarkable response. Readers have posted thus far almost 700 hundred comments to the Big Questions website, and the Foundation has sent out, free of charge, more than 3,000 requested copies of the booklet. Nor has the conversation been limited to the Foundation's website. It has rippled outward into the blogosphere, sparking discussions on dozens of sites. The discussion also has received wide coverage in the press, from the Los Angeles Times and MSNBC to the Independent and the Times of London, whose Tim Hames and Libby Purves both devoted columns to the essays.
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Gary Rosen, the Chief External Affairs Officer of the Foundation, sees the advertorial and accompanying booklet as key tools for involving the public in JTF's activities. "They're a terrific bridge between the research we support and the enormous demand out there for informed, open-minded discussion of the Big Questions. We're thrilled with the response."
Author Jonathan Rosen was the featured speaker at a Templeton Book Forum in New York City in early May. His talk, entitled "A Birder's Guide to Evolution and Faith," drew upon his acclaimed new book The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Part memoir and part intellectual history, the book describes not only Rosen's initiation into the wonders of birding but the deep connection between the "life of the skies" and the 19th-century development of evolutionary theory in the work of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. As a student of Jewish thought and a novelist who has explored the trials of modern faith, Rosen sees birdwatching—an activity that mediates between earth and sky—as a way to shuttle between disparate worlds. "At its heart," as one reviewer observed, his account is "a consideration of the relationship between spiritual yearning and evolutionary science by a birder who tries to speak highly of both."
For a video of the Templeton Book Forum event, click here. For an original JTF interview with Rosen as he explores Central Park and explains the relationship of birdwatching to his book's themes, click here.
The headline said it all: "Scientist at Work: Roving Defender of Evolution, and of Room for God." The subject of this recent piece in the science section of the New York Times was John Templeton Foundation advisor Francisco J. Ayala. An evolutionary biologist and geneticist at the University of California, Irvine, Ayala is the author of Darwin's Gift to Science and Religion (2007) and a former Dominican priest. As the Times reported, he remains surprised "at how many Americans believe the theory of evolution is contrary to belief in God, or that the theory is erroneous or even fraudulent."
Ayala does not find evidence of "intelligent design" in nature. Indeed, he recalls that as a theology student in his native Spain, he was taught that evolution provided the grounds for defending God's goodness and omnipotence. "As floods and drought were a necessary consequence of the fabric of the physical world, predators and parasites, dysfunctions and diseases were a consequence of the evolution of life," he writes in his book. "They were not a result of a deficient or malevolent design." Ayala emphatically rejects the notion that creationism or intelligent design deserves equal time in the classroom. "We don't teach alchemy along with chemistry," he told the Times. "We don't teach witchcraft along with medicine. We don't teach astrology with astronomy."
In his new book from the Templeton Foundation Press, Keith Ward displays his characteristic scholarship and intellectual breadth. As Publishers Weekly observed in its starred review:
Ward, an Oxford theologian specializing in the history and philosophy of religion, presents an impressively insightful and well-balanced survey of major questions for science-and-religion dialogue. Ward takes on a wide range of topics, reasoning that if God is "the ultimate cause of absolutely everything—we might think that the existence of God must make some difference to how things are." The beginning and end of the universe, the origins and nature of consciousness, and human religious experience all become contact points for discussion between scientific and religious perspectives. Writing as a scholar of world religions, Ward discusses multiple traditions at a level of depth and detail that exceeds the normal standards of the science and religion literature. Atheist and agnostic perspectives also receive a fair hearing, recognized as parties to the conversation rather than merely as rhetorical foils. Throughout, Ward shows a keen ability to recognize variations and distinctions within traditions, while still drawing helpful generalizations such as his conclusion that "to believe in God is primarily to believe in the objectivity of value and purpose."
