John Templeton Foundation

The John Templeton Foundation is a fundraising organisation that secures money to advance "progress in spiritual discoveries".Templeton HomepagePhilanthropic Vision Founded by businessman , it was subsequently headed by his son, , 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".https://www.templetonprize.org/
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.
Templeton funds climate-change denialist groups, 26 December 2013 - "[...] a new paper in the journal Climate Change [...] shows that Templeton gives substantial sums of money to climate-change denialist organizations. And by 'substantial', I mean more than 20 milliion [sic] dollars over the eight years from 2003-2010."
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 US donors who gave generously to rightwing UK groups, The Guardian, 29 Nov 2019
==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 1990s, 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:
Year	Awardee 	Notes
1973	Mother Teresa 	extremely dubious humanitarian, who later won a Nobel Peace Prize and Catholic sainthood
1974	"Frère" Roger Schütz 	Swiss Christian monk, ecumenicist, founder of Taizé Community. Stabbed to death in 2005
1975	Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan 	formerly President of India (a largely ceremonial position), promoted peace with Pakistan
1976	Leo Joseph Suenens 	Roman Catholic who brought in charismatic/Pentecostal elements
1977	Chiara Lubich 	Italian Catholic writer and founder of Focolare Movement, an ecumenical but largely Roman Catholic lay group
1978	Thomas F. Torrance 	Scottish minister, theologian, and translator of Karl Barth
1979	Nikkyō Niwano 	Japanese Buddhist, a peace activist and promoter of inter-faith niceness; co-founder of Buddhist group Risshō Kōsei Kai
1980	Ralph Wendell Burhoe 	American academic and failed weatherman active in the whole science-religion business
1981	Cicely Saunders 	English founder of movement
1982	Billy Graham 	notorious American preacher
1983	Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 	Soviet Russian dissident, famous for saying "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened."‘Men Have Forgotten God’: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1983 Templeton Address, National Review, Dec 2012
1984	Michael Bourdeaux 	founded the which studied religion in communist countries
1985	Sir Alister Hardy 	marine biologist who sailed on expeditions to Antarctica in the 1920s; in retirement founded the Religious Experience Research Centre which collects accounts of religious experiences, and is now based at University of Wales Trinity Saint David in Lampeter, WalesAlister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, accessed Sept 17, 2020
1986	James I. McCord 	of Princeton Theological Seminary, and subject of the world's shortest Wikipedia pageJames I. McCord, Wikipedia, revision 974786998, 25 August 2020
1987	Stanley Jaki 	Benedictine priest and astrophysicist, noted for work on philosophy of science (aren't they all)
1988	Inamullah Khan 	they gave it to a Muslim! Albeit one who promotes ecumenical understanding; he was also an activist for Kashmir
1989	George MacLeod 	founder of Iona community in Scotland, a nice place on an island for religious people to think about stuff
1990	Baba Amte 	cared for those with leprosy
1991	 	former head of British Orthodox Ashkenazi Jews; proposed that if homosexuality was proven to have a genetic cause, then genetic engineering should be used to eliminate gays
1992	Kyung-Chik Han 	Korean Christian who founded some churches
1993	Charles Colson 	criminal associate of Richard Nixon, one of the Watergate Seven and instigator of the Hard Hat Riot in 1970; proposed firebombing the Brookings Institution. After going to jail for his role in the Watergate scandal, he discovered Christianity and devoted himself to proselytizing to prisoners
1994	 	American diplomat and writer. Flitted between the right wing of the Democratic Party (where he was involved with red-scare organisations like the Coalition for a Democratic Majority) and endorsing Republicans while claiming to be a lifelong Democrat
1995	Paul Davies 	British physicist, did work on quantum field theory and cosmology, proposed a one-way mission to Mars, and wrote many pop science books. Not opposed to God
1996	Bill Bright 	founder of Campus Crusade for Christ (now Cru)
1997	Pandurang Shastri Athavale	Swadhyay Movement
1998	 	Scrap metal dealer and philanthropist, founded the Three Faith Forum to promote ecumenical understanding
1999	Ian Barbour 	academic who wrote on relationship between science and religion, which is meat and drink to the Templeton dudes
2000	Freeman Dyson 	legendary physicist who sadly became a global warming denialist
2001	Arthur Peacocke 	biologist, self-described panentheist, proposer of theistic evolution
2002	John Polkinghorne 	physicist and Anglican priest. Bingo!
2003	Holmes Rolston III 	philosopher noted for work on environmental ethics; also an expert on mosses
2004	George F. R. Ellis 	cosmologist, Quaker, opposed apartheid
2005	Charles Hard Townes 	physicist known for work on masers and for religiosity
2006	John D. Barrow 	respected cosmologist, physicist, mathematician, and author of pop science books; co-wrote The Anthropic Cosmological Principle with Frank Tipler
2007	Charles Taylor 	Quebecker philosopher, writing on political philosophy, intellectual history, and how French and English-speaking Canadian communities can coexist without killing each other
2008	Michał Heller 	Polish philosopher and physicist
2009	Bernard d'Espagnat 	French academic who studied philosophical aspects of quantum theory
2010	Francisco J. Ayala 	evolutionary biologist and briefly a priest
2011	 	British cosmologist. Unusually for winners, he is an atheist although one who's nice to Christians and not in the snarky Richard Dawkins mold
2012	Tenzin Gyatso 	Buddhist leader; 14th Dalai Lama
2013	Desmond Tutu 	South African Anglican archbishop and human rights activist
2014	Tomáš Halík 	Czech priest and theologian
2015	 	French activist for people with disabilities, founder of L'Arche. In 2020, a year after his death, it was revealed that he had sexually abused six (non-disabled) women and used his theological skills to come up with "highly unusual spiritual or mystical explanations used to justify these behaviours"L’Arche International inquiry into historic sexual abuse by Jean Vanier, L'Arche, 2020
2016	Jonathan Sacks 	British Orthodox Jewish leader and occasional speechwriter for Mike PenceYou were never my Chief Rabbi, bruv, David Rosenberg, Morning Star Online
2017	Alvin Plantinga 	philosopher known for arguing that God exists, attempting to solve problem of free will, etc.
2018	Abdullah II of Jordan 	one of the less objectionable Middle Eastern leaders; he has improved human rights, but journalists and protestors are still detained, the death penalty remains, unmarried women are separated from their children, and non-Jordanians are discriminated againstJordan, Amnesty International, accessed Sep 16, 2020
2019	Marcelo Gleiser 	Brazilian-born physicist who got the prize for pop science books with twee titles like The Dancing Universe: From Creation Myths to the Big Bang
2020	 	American geneticist, former head of the Human Genome Project; author of The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief
2021	 	Primatologist, anthropologist, conservationist, and activist; seen as the world's foremost expert on chimpanzees
2022	 	Theoretical physicist and author; awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004
==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.Top Supporters of Institute of Economic Affairs, Conservative Transparency, accessed 29 Aug 2022; archive.org backupRevealed: top UK thinktank spent decades undermining climate science, The Guardian, 10 Oct 2019
==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.
==References==
Category:Organizations
Category:Religion