Templeton Report: 2010

A decade ago, building contractor Allan Barsema looked at the homeless people on the street outside his Rockford, Illinois, business, and saw the man he used to be.

When we think of freedom fighters in our time, the image that comes to mind is often a political, religious, military, or social leader. We would do well to remember that artists such as playwright Václav Havel and novelist Aleksander Solzhenitsyn have been at the forefront of defending liberty against its fiercest enemies in the modern era.
 

Support the queen at all costs! That is the prime directive in an ant colony, the mission to which all its members are committed, even though it means sacrificing their own reproductive capacities. This kind of hierarchical social organization—in which the individual exists radically for sake of the collective—is called eusociality. Eusociality, which is also observed among bees and other species, has long been thought difficult to explain in terms of standard evolutionary theory. After all, the purpose of biological life is to reproduce itself.

Faith abhors a vacuum—or so one might conclude from events in China since 1979, when the government lifted some of the restrictions on organized religion. “Religions have been growing, some of them really fast, especially Protestantism,” says Fenggang Yang, a professor of sociology and the director of the Center on Religion and Chinese Society (CRCS) at Purdue University. But it is not only Protestantism. Buddhism, Taoism, and Chinese folk religions have all seen a big boost as well.

Do human beings possess free will? The question has vexed philosophers and theologians for ages, to say nothing of generations of undergraduates arguing late into the night. In recent decades, science has had its say too. Neuroscientists point to experimental results suggesting that the subconscious mind acts before the conscious mind, making free will more or less impossible. And many social psychologists contend that free will is largely an illusion because environmental factors so powerfully condition our decisions.

That is the question answered by thirteen distinguished neuroscientists, psychologists, philosophers, and theologians in the latest Big Questions essay series sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation. Advertisements publicizing the project have been running since early May in the print and online editions of the Atlantic, Discover, New Scientist, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, and other leading general-interest and scientific publications in the United States and the UK.

In 1900, three-quarters of Africans identified themselves as members of a traditional African folk religion. Christianity and Islam were marginal faiths. Today, however, about 90 percent of Africans say they are either Christian or Muslim, according to a report published this month by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion and Public Life with the support of a $793,000 grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

Francisco J. Ayala, an evolutionary geneticist and molecular biologist who has vigorously opposed the entanglement of science and religion while also calling for mutual respect between the two, was named the winner of the 2010 Templeton Prize at a news conference last week at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. “It is only when assertions are made beyond their legitimate boundaries that religion and science—and evolutionary theory in particular—appear to be antithetical," Ayala said in a brief statement.

When a catastrophic earthquake struck Haiti in January, one television preacher declared that the disaster was God’s punishment of the wicked. Modern-day heirs of Voltaire and Hume cited the calamity as evidence that a God who would permit such destruction could not exist. Other philosophers and theologians mused that the ways of divinity are surely inscrutable to us mortals.

When most people think of slavery, they imagine the wrenching experience of Africans brought in chains to antebellum America. But slavery remains with us today, even though it is largely hidden from the view of the Western public. Modern slavery is far more complex than the chattel servitude familiar to us from the history books. It includes debt-bondage, involuntary domestic servitude, sex trafficking, and shocking varieties of child enslavement.