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Are you there, God? | page 1, 2
Templeton also believes the world's religions offer attitudes worthy of emulation such as optimism, even-temperament and productivity, ideal qualities for a corporate employee. And like the effects of prayer, Templeton believes scientific laws can explain these attributes. Also Today Crisis of faith In a recent interview with Wired, Oxford planetary scientist and Templeton grant-award committee chairman Charles Harper described the qualities needed by a successful shoe salesman: "You are still reading Stendhal novels," he said, "and you are not selling so many shoes. So you stick in a cassette tape while you are commuting and you stick these maxims in your mind, and, lo and behold, it helps!" Otherwise put, drop your useless Stendhal and pick up your copy of the Templeton Foundation's spiritual manual "Worldwide Laws of Life: 200 Eternal Spiritual Principles." Instead of boring old character analysis and psychological acumen, you'll find the merry, uplifting saws of Johnny Mercer and Henry Ford. Although our culture is obsessed with pretentiously scientific explanations for all human emotions, most people would concede that spirituality is a rather different matter. It's a tricky and ambiguous affair, honed by rather unscientific things such as suffering, instinct or a lifetime's cultural knowledge. It is neither a matter of information nor of neurology, and it is unquantifiable. Why, then, do foundations, committees, willing scientists and philanthropists -- an entire class of well-paid international Dr. Panglosses -- devote millions of dollars to futile research into the nature of something that is by its very nature elusive? But Templeton's project mirrors our corporate culture's view of human personality and fulfillment where everything is rational and nothing is elusive. Sex, pain, passion: Read the conflict resolution manual. Simon the Stylite, climb down off that pillar and accentuate the positive! One is struck by the similarity of this tinny view of the inner life and its Soviet equivalent. The Soviets, too, were "scientific" materialists who understood the persuasive power of spiritual kitsch. And they believed in that great red herring of the Enlightenment, scientifically determined happiness: a perfect recipe for unhappiness (not to mention vast amounts of bad prose). A chilling example of this vision of scientifically engineered human contentment is provided by another Templeton endeavor. Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford neurobiologist, has been studying a troop of baboons in Kenya. The dominant male baboons had all been poisoned by contaminated refuse at a garbage dump, which the other members had not consumed. All at once, the troop became less violent, less hierarchical and calmer. The remaining baboons' blood pressure went down. Templeton agreed to fund Sapolsky because he was intrigued by this metamorphosis and thought it could give clues to similar transformations among humans. After all, didn't these baboons seem to be accentuating the positive? Blood tests confirmed that they were indeed "happier," and that although the decease of the dominant males had been an accident, it created a permanent mutation. Perhaps one could suggest euthanasia for jocks? Attempting to draw social moralisms from biology is banal at best. Do we really need baboon experiments to tell us that violence is not very nice and harmony lowers our blood pressure? At worst, the endeavor to give a scientific basis to our utopian wish-fulfillments and religious passions is highly suspect. When science becomes the willing handmaid of social utopias and personal therapy, it becomes a dislikable and bossy accessory of the Higher Twaddle. "I do believe," says the physicist Polkinghorne, "that religious belief can explain more than unbelief can." Science has proven very little about our inner life, because the latter is the result of incalculable experiences. Can a Positive Feelings Index or a Productive Emotion Graph really tell us what goes on in the psyche of someone praying for a dying relative? It does not seem very likely that the current Templeton prayer study will tell us very much about some future health care directed by priests, vicars and rabbis -- or even optimistic venture capitalists. In other words, give science and religious feeling their very dissimilar dues, have a good laugh at Pangloss, then quietly pick up your Stendhal.
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