The John Templeton Foundation: Official statement on the false and misleading information published in the Wall Street Journal November 14
By Charles L. Harper, Jr., Senior Vice President, John Templeton Foundation.
On November 14, the WSJ ran a front page story mentioning the John Templeton Foundation in a way suggesting that the Foundation has been a concerted patron and sponsor of the so-called Intelligent Design ("ID") position (such as is associated with the Seattle-based Discovery Institute and the writers Philip Johnson, William Dembski, Michael Behe and others). This is false information. In fact, quite the opposite is true. The John Templeton Foundation has provided tens of millions of dollars in support to research academics who are critical of the anti-evolution ID position. Any careful and factual analysis of actual events will find that the John Templeton Foundation has been in fact the chief sponsor of university courses, lectures and academic research which variously have argued against the anti-evolution "ID" position. It is scandalous for a distinguished paper to misinform the public in this way.
We currently are preparing a further appendix to this statement to document a number of major programs of the John Templeton Foundation which are fundamentally critical of the characteristic "ID" position of critique of the basic scientific facts and logics of modern evolutionary biology. For example, for almost a decade the John Templeton Foundation has been the major supporter of a substantial program at the headquarters of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), one of the chief focus activities of which has been informing the public of the weakness of the ID position on modern evolutionary biology. (see:
http://www.aaas.org/spp/dser/ ) This program was founded under the advice and guidance of the prominent evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala when he was President of the AAAS, and was also supported by Stephen Jay Gould under his Presidency.
The membership of the John Templeton Foundation's Advisory Boards and Board of Trustees read as an international honor roll of the distinguished critics of the ID position. The Templeton Foundation employs rigorous processes of review using standard peer review and judging panels by distinguished experts. However, the Templeton Foundation refuses in its programs to blacklist scholars based on their ideological positions. We sponsor research and teaching across a very wide range of positions, believing in the value of widespread debate and engagement with important and controversial issues, including that of modern evolutionary biology and the debates over its meaning and philosophical significance such as are particularly intense in this country at this time.
Blacklisting is ethically inappropriate in academic contexts. The Foundation believes that proper academic adjudication of important and controversial issues is not by censorship but rather by open scholarly debate and consideration of positions and arguments on the merits or lack thereof. Research scholarship does not proceed by processes of censorship and inhibition of debate. Rather, the best contribution a philanthropic organization can make is to support and promote research and rigorous debate. Consequently, it is true therefore that Templeton Foundation funding support from time-to-time will have been used by some scholars promoting an ID position whose proposals have passed muster in independently judged review panels. This is entirely appropriate in cases where competitive review panels have found merit in course proposals and have awarded grants. Professors who are winners of Foundation grants are not kept under ideological review for purposes of blacklisting but are free to pursue and debate ideas as they see fit.
What is entirely false and misleading is the way in which the Foundation has been portrayed to have been in basic support of the ID position, when on balance the precise opposite is actually the case.
The Templeton Foundation has made several thousand grants to university researchers, the vast majority of whom have been critical of the anti-science aspect of ID's critique of modern evolutionary biology. The author selectively represented only about one tenth of one percent of these awards. It would have been responsible for the author of today's WSJ article to have reported actual and contextually accurate facts to the public. The WSJ has contributed to misinformation and public misunderstanding of an important national debate by selective, biased reporting.
For example, consider the following. A University of Washington based research astronomer, Guillermo Gonzalez, was cited in the article as an ID advocate supported with $58,000 in grants from the John Templeton Foundation. Professor Gonzalez was a grant winner in an international academic research grants competition we sponsored in 1999. This competition was named the Cosmology and Research Project (http://www.templeton.org/cftrp/ ). It was a physics and astrophysics program. It had nothing to do with evolutionary biology. It was run as an independent grants competition by a research physicist based at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Its independent panel of extremely distinguished academic judges included Michael Ruse, arguably the most powerfully insightful US-based critic of the ID position. (http://www.fsu.edu/~philo/people/faculty/mruse.html ). Among the winners of this open international grants competition (See:
http://www.templeton.org/cftrp/winners.html ) were a team at Cambridge University including the current President of the Royal Society of London, Sir Martin Rees, along with several other research scientists well-known as leaders in the field of modern cosmology. Professor Gonzalez submitted a winning proposal on the topic: Fine-Tuning of Local Astronomical Parameters for Habitability and Measurability. His co-investigators were world-renowned researchers in the fields of Astrophysics and Planetary Science based at the University of Washington. His research was well-designed to address an interesting and vital technical debate in astrophysics over the range of planetary "habitability" in the Galaxy.
Yet, the WSJ article suggests that JTF supported anti-evolution ID activity via this grant. Not so. It is true that Professor Gonzalez has since become affiliated with the Discovery Institute. We at the John Templeton Foundation certainly do not think this is a wise association. Gonzalez received a grant for astronomy research in a fair competition. We have no regrets nor would we seek to rescind our support simply based on his ideological affiliations.
We emphatically oppose any impact of this article, whether intended or not, to fan into flame a politicized ethos on university campuses. It matters not at all that the Foundation itself vigorously disagrees with the ID position. We fully support the fundamental right of university faculty to differ from mainstream views. University campuses are precisely the place where important debates involving minority views should be aired.
Indeed, it should clearly be recognized that some perspectives that scholars associated with the ID movement have brought to scholarly attention involve matters of very considerable public importance. ID scholars have been prominent critics of the abuse of evolutionary biology today by prominent philosophical interpreters arguing for modern science to be considered as if it provided a clear coherent scientific foundation for philosophical atheism. (Which it most certainly is not: such grandstanding does science a grave disservice in the United States). They also have most unfashionably, but importantly, brought to attention the catastrophic abuse of evolutionary biology by Nazi intellectuals in the 1930's and 1940's in support of racist "master race" eugenics, leading clearly and directly to the justification of genocide against the Jews. Such debates are important. They should not be suppressed. And we at the John Templeton Foundation will hold to our no-blacklisting policy. We will not distort standard proper open and fair philanthropic practices in the direction of ideological policing.
We believe the public is best served when it has the opportunity to be informed accurately of the actual state of affairs and debate. We deeply regret the negative implications about the John Templeton Foundation that were created by the WSJ article. The facts will show that in nearly every case,
Templeton Foundation money has supported critics rather than proponents of the anti-evolution ID position. The John Templeton Foundation invites any responsible and honest scholar or journalistic reporter to check this assertion.
