John Templeton Foundation

Richard, if you ever fall on hard times...

The John Templeton Foundation is a fundraising organisation that secures money to advance "progress in spiritual discoveries". Founded by businessman (1912-2008), it was subsequently headed by his son,  (1940-2015), who quit his medical practice in 1995 in order to work full-time for the organisation.

The Foundation acts a source of funding for numerous scientific studies to address what it calls the "Big Questions", such as genetics, "cognitive creativity" (whatever that is), and It is best known for the "Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities".

In practice, it appears to aim to corrupt the public discourse concerning science in the interests of religion, by swaying academics by offering much more money than they'd get any other way. Anything or anyone funded by Templeton should be viewed in this light. Of late, the Foundation has expanded beyond religion to funding climate-change denial.

It has also donated to a variety of right-wing causes in the UK, including the Legatum Institute ($1.5m), Adam Smith Institute ($1.4m), and Institute of Economic Affairs ($497,000).

The Templeton Prize
The Templeton Prize includes a monetary award of £1,100,000 sterling. It is given to a living person who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works. The prize has been given annually since 1973, when it misguidedly honored Mother Teresa for charity work, despite her actual work being to cause misery and suffering to poor and sick people in Calcutta while flying to Switzerland for her own medical care.

Since then, the prize has been awarded to a variety of scientists and theologians selected as nominees for their "substantial record [s] of achievement that highlights or exemplifies one of the various ways in which human beings express their yearning for spiritual progress… affirming life's spiritual dimension". Although they claim to award it to anyone of any faith, any "creed" and "men and women alike" the majority of Templeton laureates are old, male, white and Christian. The 1992 laureate was Kyung-Chik Han, whose only qualification for the prize was spreading Christianity throughout South Korea. Since the late 90s, there is a slight trend toward giving the prize to anyone who is a tenured professor but also goes to church occasionally; it helps if you also write flowery popular-science bestsellers about seeing God in starlight. Martin Rees appears to be the only person with no religious faith to have won it (in 2011), probably as a rebuff to more militant atheists like Richard Dawkins. Arthur Peacocke, who did some work on DNA in the 1970s, seems to have received the 2001 prize just for being ordained as a minister.

In its own words:

Laureates include:

Money talks
There are concerns that the Templeton Foundation is attempting to subvert scientific process by giving large sums of money with ideological strings attached.

Another critic, P Z Myers fears the Templeton Foundation blurs the edges between science and superstition.

To some extent the Foundation spreads its largess to people and groups with good scientific credentials, is connected with well-respected scientific conferences, and advertises in scientific magazines. This tends toward giving spurious scientific respectability to its pseudoscientific agenda of fostering "spiritual discoveries."

Jerry Coyne, also a prominent New Atheist, criticized the Templeton Foundation's attempt to reconcile science and religion as harming science itself:

It has also funded climate change denialism, donating money to British right-wing lobbyist/thinktank the Institute of Economic Affairs, despite the IEA's long history of attacks on climate change science and environmentalism.

The Great Prayer Experiment
One of the Foundation's most famous investigations was into the "Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer". It found no beneficial correlation between prayer and health. Unfortunately for the Foundation, it had already been publicised widely enough that they couldn't just leave it in the file drawer.