That ain't no accident, it's physics baby.

March 10, 2005 6:50 PM

Nobel Prize Winner Charles Townes, co-inventor of the laser wins this year's Templeton Prize Toward Research or Discoveries About Spiritual Realities. The award is given each year to those who "...encourage the concept that resources and manpower are needed to accelerate progress in spiritual discoveries, which can help humans to learn more than a hundredfold more about divinity." Past winners include these fine folks.
posted by DeepFriedTwinkies (12 comments total)

Townes was on NPR this morning, and, while listening, I had the same exasperated feeling I get whenever I hear any high profile person speaking authoritatively in a forum with a broad audience about how science and religion must, inevitably, complement each other and alluding to fundamentally fallacious concepts like the anthropic principle.

It appears that one of the unfortunate consequences of humans evolving in the presence of and under theistic belief systems for so many generations is that otherwise intelligent people, to whom necessarily non-supernatural science (in whatever form) is understandable, graspable and powerful, still feel the need to bend and misshape what they know to be the single best method at discerning truth from falsehood just so they can plug their God-hole.
posted by gramschmidt at 7:32 PM on March 10, 2005

What a load of hooey. This is the worst kind of pseudoscientific nonsense imaginable.
posted by aerify at 7:54 PM on March 10, 2005

Once again, Pharyngula says it better than I can:

What bunk. Science differs from religion in that it rejects faith as a source of information or as part of the process of acquiring evidence. We replace it with skepticism. Emphasizing faith as a component of science tells us nothing but that Townes doesn't know much about what he's doing.

posted by Laen at 7:59 PM on March 10, 2005

gramschmidt: My intent was to speak to what you just wrote, but I couldn't say it any better than you just did.

As a non-practicing Catholic, while I still believe in God, I must follow scientific rule. Although I have seen perceived "miracles" in my life, I have never witnessed a miracle overrule scientific method.

God forbid, haha, that ritualistic beliefs from 2000 years ago could possibly be taken more seriously than what we have learned over that time.

If "God" gave me intelligence, shouldn't I use it? To save the planet? My Children?
posted by snsranch at 8:08 PM on March 10, 2005

Here's what annoys me most about the Templeton Prize: "The prize’s monetary value is in keeping with Sir John’s stipulation that it always be worth more than the Nobel Prizes to underscore his belief that research and advances in spiritual discoveries can be quantifiably more significant than those recognized by the Nobels."

Christlike humility, baby!

(Oh yeah, and gramschmidt wrote what I wanted to say, only better.)
posted by Guy Smiley at 10:20 PM on March 10, 2005

Pharyngula, too.
posted by Guy Smiley at 10:22 PM on March 10, 2005

Metafilter: Plugging Up Your God-Hole
posted by jonp72 at 11:59 PM on March 10, 2005

here is the article for which he won the prize - although i guess people have already read it from the comments they're making.
posted by andrew cooke at 4:18 AM on March 11, 2005

> although i guess people have already read it from the comments they're making.

Read the article? Knees were too busy jerking to read comfortably.
posted by stp123 at 7:05 AM on March 11, 2005

In that article, Townes talks about how science is about universal order, whereas religion is about universal purpose. The fallacy is that the quest for purpose need not take the form of religion. The underlying utility of organized religion is social control, cohesion and communality. Spiritualism, OTOH, is only incidental to religion, in that metaphysical matters, given their a)striking a chord by embodying the deepest questions, b)adaptability and flexibility, c)lack of empirical verifiability (specifically disproof), are the best tools to achieve the above. Furthermore, science is a method, not a domain. The purview of science is extended to a new field of inquiry as that field becomes amenable to modeling. Science and religion aren't complementary, because the former's domain is not fixed, and may enroach upon the latter. There's no guarantee that religion will be left intact. Two caveats: the core beliefs espoused by religion may be true, either by sheer chance or by deliberate providence, but that's a different matter. Second, I don't think science, fundamentally, can answer the core questions. Doesn't mean that religions do, although they purport to.
posted by Gyan at 8:16 AM on March 11, 2005

The award is given each year to those who "...encourage the concept that resources and manpower are needed to accelerate progress in spiritual discoveries, which can help humans to learn more than a hundredfold more about divinity."

The real problem here is that Townes's work has only increased our understanding of divinity about seventy-fold (plus or minus threefold).
posted by straight at 3:20 PM on March 12, 2005

straight: You forgot to account for inflation.
posted by Gyan at 3:58 PM on March 12, 2005