FEATURE: Faith, reason and the Templeton Fellowship

The Science Editor of the Daily Mail, Michael Hanlon, gives his take on the Templeton Journalism Fellowships.

Like a former Prime Minster’s aide, I have never ‘done’ God. I went to a soppy Anglican Primary School, with a liberal vicar, no hellfire or brimstone, no guilt-trips nor eternal torments. But even so, all that stuff about fluffy clouds and heaven, people getting nailed to posts and rising from the dead, the tricks with the bread and fishes … it all left me cold. At least the Tooth Fairy was good enough to provide tangible evidence for her existence.

Since childhood my atheism has waned and waxed. I went through a brief, and frankly risible, flirtation with faith in my early teenage years, mostly sparked by a pretty but unforthcoming girl in a bible study class, but that was that. The stony road of atheism for me ever since. But faith is a fascinating thing and so, when the Templeton Foundation approached me in late 2008 to ask if I would consider applying to be a Cambridge-Templeton Journalism Fellow for 2009, my curiosity was pricked.

The Templeton fellowships are run by the Templeton Foundation, a think-tank founded by the late Anglo-American billionaire Sir John Templeton ‘to encourage dialogue between science and religion’. In Sir John’s country of birth, this dialogue has become something of a tedious slanging match, with ‘science’ pitted against fundamentalist Christianity. Here of course things are a tad more subtle.

I went to a Templeton meeting in the 1990s in Washington and was impressed to find not the bunch of religious loonies I was expecting but impeccably secular cosmologists, philosophers and, in short, proper people. People like Cosmologist Neil Turok, protégé of Hawking. Here also Jill Tarter of SETI; if Earth’s alien-finder general could take the Templeton shilling then this had to be half respectable. But even so I had my reservations. The old Sir John died last year, and the Foundation is now headed by his son, John Jr, who is of a far more traditionalist Christian bent than his dad (John Jr has donated money to an anti-gay-marriage campaign in California). Then there is the Dawkins issue. Prof Dawkins, High Priest of the Atheists, actually spoke at a Templeton Fellowship a few years ago but now clearly regrets it, calling the Foundation a berth for ‘scientists who have nice things to say about religion’. More of Dawkins later.

In the end I decided my reservations were not enough to put me off. This sounded interesting at the very least, useful and contact-building almost certainly and, just possibly, intellectually enlightening to boot. Oh yes, and there is cash: $15,000, plus a books allowance and all expenses covered. Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. So I agreed to apply.

So what is the Journalism fellowship and how does it work? Set up, I was told, in response to the 2001 Al Qaida attacks it attempts to allow a small group of ten journalists, selected annually, to ‘examine the dynamic and creative interface of science and religion’. No, I had no idea what that means either but I jumped through the hoops of the selection process (which include a rather formal interview and the writing of a studenty essay - in my case on Cosmology) and early this year I was informed that I was in.

The ‘fellowship’ is a curious beast, run jointly between the Foundation and Cambridge University, which was to be our temporary home. Intensive and demanding, it is every bit an American take on ‘English Academia’ – i.e. to a Brit intensely, and fascinatingly, foreign. First of all, it must be said, it is tremendous, rather theatrical, fun. You get to hole up in a posh hotel (the Garden House) for a fortnight at someone else’s expense and spend dreamy summer days in King’s College listening to world-class philosophers, biologists and cosmologists giving their take on the great issues of faith and reason.

In the evenings there is the rather camp air of the 18th Century Salon, with semi-formal dinners in various colleges with guest speakers holding forth on topics as diverse as Darwin’s correspondence and Isaac Newton. On one occasion, the Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees dropped in, no religious nutcase he. My fellow Templetonians were a diverse lot, representing a swathe of upmarket American and Canadian media, from a senior editor at Time magazine to the Literary Editor of the Toronto Globe and Mail. They will have to speak for themselves but I think I can fairly say that we all found the experience delightful and bewildering in equal measure. I certainly learned some stuff.

I found the palaeontologist Simon Conway Morris’s talk on evolutionary convergence truly fascinating. Sarah Coakley’s take on the evolution of co-operation was dense and demanding but all pretty much new to me. The philosopher Richard Swinburne mounted a forensic attack on the interpretation of the famous Libet experiments, which appear to show that free will is an illusion. My fellow Templetonians for the most part found Swinburne impenetrable and incomprehensible, a throwback to the 1930s perhaps. I agreed, but not that this was a bad thing. For me he was one of the highlights of the whole course.

Looming over the whole shebang the shadow of Richard Dawkins, whose name was often invoked. It is true we had some atheist input (from the excellent Simon Blackburn) but I got the impression that the Templeton ‘club’ sees Dawkins as persona if not entirely non grata then certainly rather beyond the pale. Some speakers were better than others. Tariq Ramadan, a controversial Muslim academic, gave a rambling talk on Islam. I found the neurobiologist Steven Rose dogmatic and unconvincing and the cosmologist John Barrow, whose talk I had been much looking forward to, rather impenetrable. But for the most part the speakers had prepared well and gave excellent value for money.

The Fellowship is controversial. When one of the Fellows, Edwin Cartlidge, a Rome-based British freelance, approached Anthony Grayling and Daniel Dennett for cooperation in his project (on materialism) they refused and mentioned the request to Dawkins, who writes about it on his website. Dawkins once spoke at one of the Templeton Fellowships but clearly regrets having done so, stating: “I see him [Cartlidge] as in much the same position I was in when I agreed to go, a victim of exactly the kind of subversion of science that Templeton is making its speciality.”

Well, I don’t think anyone tried to subvert me, nor my belief in reason and ‘science’. There was certainly no overt religiosity, no discernable prejudices espoused. Nobody tried to convert me, to Christianity or any other religion. Most of all (and again I am speaking only for myself) I felt and continue to feel under no pressure whatsoever to write in a particular way or take a particular line on anything whatsoever. We are supposed to get our theses published, in some form or other, in the papers or magazines for which we write but, again, how we do so and in what form any such writing appears is completely left to us and our editors.

As to the people whose shilling I took? Well, I don’t like John Jr’s take on gay marriage, but who can afford to examine the views and prejudices of all the directors and proprietors of the organisations for which we work? For its faults, the Templeton Foundation does at least appear to be encouraging people to think, and to think about some of the most intractable and fascinating problems facing both science and religion. And that cannot, surely, be a bad thing.

Michael’s new book is Eternity, Our Next Billion Years - recently published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Fabian's world

Daylight saving exacerbates global warming

Don’t you wish you were the editor of the Arkansas and Democrat Gazette You could really make your mark in that paper. Consider the editorial it ran at the end of March.

“You may have noticed that March of this year was particularly hot. In fact I understand it was the hottest March since the beginning of the last century. This should come as no surprise to any reasonable person because as you know, daylight saving times started a month early this year. You’d think that members of Congress would have considered the warming effect that an extra hour of daylight would have had on our climate. Perhaps this is another plot by a liberal Congress to make us believe that global warming is a real threat.”

Man beats dinosaurs in race for vegeburger

The reason why dinosaurs died out is becoming clear now, following the implications offered by the new Creation Museum in Kentucky. It appears that both they and Man and Woman were created on the same day (Saturday), and the dinosaurs were vegetarian, otherwise they would have eaten Adam and Eve. So the race was on for the flora.

These animals weighed hundreds of tons or tonnes, whichever is the larger, and there was fierce competition for fruit and vegetables especially after Eve had eaten all the apples, and flora had only started growing five days previously. This was no problem for Man who could eat hamburgers. McDonald's was created on the eighth day, so Man and Woman had to make do with doughnuts for just one day. But McDonald's didn’t come up with vegeburgers until about 2002, by which time it was too late for the dinosaurs; despite a copious intake of chips and salad, there just wasn’t enough bulk to keep the poor creatures going.

That is the lesson of creationism; vegetarianism leads to extinction. Eat five portions of meat a day.

How do they know that?

Many years ago I was at a press conference held by Mrs Thatcher when she was Minister of Education and one brave journo (not me) said to her: “Some people would call you stubborn, Mrs Thatcher.”

She replied; “Name one.”

I covered my head in my briefcase with embarrassment for nearly two years afterwards, but it taught me that fatuous observations have their limits. So what about this headline from the BBC website “Camels' milk could hit UK shelves”? Not particularly fatuous although it conjures up some bizarre images, particularly if it were frozen. No, the real fatuity is in the caption to a camel’s mugshot. It says; “Camel’s milk is thought of as nectar in many Arab countries.”

How do they know that?

Can you imagine a reporter (maybe the same one who spoke to Mrs T if he’s not dead by now) trotting round Saudi Arabia or Egypt asking camel herders what they thought of camels' milk. Suppose one of them were patient enough to reply to this daft question. Can you imagine him smacking his lips and saying “It’s just as good as nectar”? Coca Cola more like.

Bring on the horses

I’ve always been a man for the unit of horsepower; it’s so much more evocative than the metric equivalent. No disrespect to Mr Watt, but I don’t even know what he looks like, so I can’t form any image of him pulling a cart or pushing a train. But everyone knows what a horse looks like. Even the French, with their icy cold logic towards metric units have (or had) a cheval vapeur, and what could be more evocative than that?

These thoughts were prompted when I went to a recital recently at the Royal Albert Hall where the recently refurbished organ was the main instrument. I wondered about the volume of air that must be forced through those large pipes at high velocity and how quickly the air valves would need to be operated. Open a valve too quickly when it’s under pressure it and it starts a minor earth tremor. But slow isn’t an option for an organ. And even if you do open it quickly you still might have wait five or six seconds for the final chord while compressors labour away trying to get up enough vapeur to excite the pipes. The conductor meanwhile standing frozen with his baton raised waiting for a signal from the organist. So somehow they’ve solved this problem at the Albert Hall.

One usually unreliable source told me that the compressors were driven by a 500 hp motor. Being the gullible chap that I am, I believed him. It seemed quite plausible, and I spent a bit of the time during the concert working out how, in the event of an extended power cut, one could organize five hundred horses to work the bellows.

Trying hard to look as if I were absorbed by the music, I was imagining how all the listeners in the stalls would have to be replaced by horses and their drivers, and how much hay they would have to consume before a concert. We could accommodate the hay and water and perhaps and on-duty farrier in the physics department of Imperial College, which is conveniently close, and stable the horses in the college car park.

Or maybe we could draft in people serving community orders to man or women the bellows. How about Paris Hilton? She’s in a pious mood at the moment.