Looking at my list of items to blog about, I see most of them have some relation to the Templeton Foundation, so this will be a blog post just about those. To get some idea of the scale of Templeton’s activities, at the end of 2014 they had about \\$3.2 billion in assets, and during 2014 had given away about \\$185 million. For comparison, the NSF budget for FY2014 for physics was $267 million and for mathematics \\$225 million.<\/p>\n
One of the main goals of the foundation is to bring together science and religion. Among the many things they are funding to accomplish this is a \\$871,000 grant to Arizona State University to fund Think Write Publish Fellowships in Science and Religion<\/a>. If you’re a hard-up writer, these people will give you the opportunity to get $10,000 to write “creative nonfiction stories about harmonies between science and religion” and help you get them published.<\/p>\n Over the next few years, as you see things like this make it into the media, realize that this is not evidence of an intellectual trend, but a reflection of Templeton money and their agenda. ASU’s Lawrence Krauss is, for good reason, not happy<\/a>.<\/p>\n To give an idea of the range of Templeton’s influence, just at ASU they’re funding several other large grants, including $745,000 for Representations of God (this<\/a> and this<\/a>), and $544,000 for emergent gravity<\/a>. When you notice conferences, seminars, public lectures, etc. about “emergent gravity” in coming years, realize that some of them are happening because of Templeton’s agenda (one of the PIs is a Templeton Prize winner).<\/p>\n One of Templeton’s largest recent grants has been \\$4.7 million to FQXI for research into “Physics of the Observer”<\/a>. Among other things, this funded a recent conference at Banff<\/a>.<\/p>\n A major interest of Templeton’s over the years has been “Genius”. Another of their large recent grants has been to the World Science Foundation for its Cultivating Genius Initiative<\/a>.<\/p>\n Finally, there will be an interesting mathematics conference related to quantum field theory<\/a> at Harvard October 8-10. I’ll likely be up in Boston visiting my brother and hope to maybe attend some of the talks. Funding for this is coming partially from the “Templeton Charity Foundation Switzerland”. I guess this is these people<\/a>, some off-shoot of the Templeton Foundation, with exactly the same interests, They say they have made \\$85.2 million in grants, a list is here<\/a>. Update<\/strong>: I keep on finding out about more of these Templeton-funded things, they are endless. Templeton is funding an Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Engagement<\/a> at Dartmouth. Themes to be investigated are “Can science alone explain the nature of reality?”, “Is there free will?” and “Is there purpose in the universe?”. Among their many activities will be an event featuring a dialogue between Sean Carroll and a Buddhist Scholar in San Francisco in February.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Looking at my list of items to blog about, I see most of them have some relation to the Templeton Foundation, so this will be a blog post just about those. To get some idea of the scale of Templeton’s … Continue reading
\n
\nUpdate<\/strong>: I was thinking of commenting that Templeton at least seemed to have slowed down its efforts to promote multiverse mania. But then I noticed this<\/a>. If you want to know why Ira Flatow on NPR keeps bringing up the multiverse, \\$150,000 in Templeton money might have something to do with it…<\/p>\n