Where’s my rusty porcupine? If you want to understand why I despise the Templeton Foundation, just read the BS from their latest hero, Martin Rees, who advocates silence in the face of absurdity.

“Campaigning against religion can be socially counter-productive. If teachers take the uncompromising line that God and Darwinism are irreconcilable, many young people raised in a faith-based culture will stick with their religion and be lost to science. Moreover, we need all the allies we can muster against fundamentalism – a palpable, perhaps growing concern,” he wrote.

So…when someone says their god (an invisible, intangible being) infused a soul (an invisible, intangible imaginary vapor) into a human ancestor at some unspecifiable date by an indescribable mechanism, hold your tongue — don’t you dare point out that that is credulous unscientific garbage.

So…when someone claims their imaginary god works miracles by diddling subatomic particles at the quantum level, and there’s no way to detect this, but he knows this is how his magic man works, you’d better not mention that he’s illogical and promoting unscientific nonsense.

So…when our politicians and bureaucrats begin their meetings by asking everyone present to beg a nonexistent ghost to sprinkle magic illusions over the participants so that they’ll do their work better, we ought to close our eyes along with everyone else—presumably so we don’t see them making idiots of themselves.

I was just listening to Lawrence Krauss talk about his new book on Richard Feynman, and he closed the lecture with a fabulously appropriate quote.

Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

Richard Feynman

At least Feynman could see the centrality of honesty in science. Too bad Martin Rees lacks that much integrity —but then, if he had it, it would have disqualified him from the Templeton Prize.