templeton thinks science is just too simple

According to the finest minds Templeton could assembly, science is for lazy chumps. Aesthetics and theology is where all the hard work really is.

Photo by Giammarco Boscaro

Speaking of the previously mentioned religious condescension towards scientists, here’s something from another prominent Templeton mouthpiece, the oft confused and highly diluted “counterweight” to the likes of the Discovery Institute conceived by Francis Collins, Biologos. Time and time again, the site demonstrated that using Latin words in your organization’s name to sound enlightened doesn’t work. This mix of obfuscation and hostility towards scientists was spotted by Jerry Coyne, and states that science is only straightforward in its methodology and results compared to philosophical navel-gazing only because it’s just so easy compared to the difficult tasks tackled by aesthetes, literary critics, and theologians…

Science also has many ambiguous and unsettled “truths.” This is not to say that religious truths are thus now on the same playing field with scientific truths. Science purchases its great success by choosing easy problems and thus will always provide a clearer model for thinking than, say theology, or literary criticism, or sociology, or aesthetics.

Remember my fellow members of STEM disciplines, the post-modernist hipster who waxes poetic about the subjectivity of reality and how there’s like no such thing as proof for anything while unable to explain anything about gravity or chemistry, and whose highest accomplishment in math was passing statistics, is actually far smarter than we’ll ever be. Why we’re only accumulating knowledge and working with the machinery powering the modern world so our post-modernist could assume The Thinker position and pontificate from on high as to the impossibility of ever understanding the “meaning of gravity.” You see, science exists to serve all the philosophers working away at solving our existential dilemmas by rephrasing them day in and in day out, and the reason why scientists and engineers must advance our understanding of the universe and the technology to survive and thrive in it so these wise sages, those founts of post-modernist babble, don’t have to sully their precious hands to actually invent something new, or answer a question about our place in the universe with a tangible, empirical investigation, or hard data.

Thank you, oh Templeton’s masters of abstract, quasi-theistic esoterica, for putting all of us uppity nerds back in our proper place by declaring our work so inferior to yours. By the way, how’d that effort to prove if Adam and Eve actually existed in a literal sense work out for you? I’m sorry, I couldn’t catch that over all the noncommittal and fearful doublespeak about the need to reconcile faith with science and not knowing anything for sure. I was going to point you to some studies which show that the ancestral Adam and Eve lived tens of thousands of years apart in communities which diversified into modern humans who retained their genetic markers, you know, as per genetic evidence collected from thousands of individuals and analyzed in great detail, but that’s the intellectually lazy slacker’s way to answer an existential question. Right?