This is exactly the kind of thing Templeton is ceaselessly angling for – recognition among real scientists – and they use their money shamelessly to satisfy their doomed craving for scientific respectability. They tried it on with the Royal Society of London, and they seem to have found a compliant Quisling in the current President, Martin Rees, who, though not religious himself, is a fervent 'believer in belief'.
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Richard Dawkins (23 March 2010), Shame on the National Academy, retrieved on 2013-04-11
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on the US National Academy of Sciences hosting the announcement of the 2010 Templeton PrizeMartin Rees
At the time of his death Crookes was called the greatest of British scientists in the realm of exact knowledge. Knighted in 1897, he also received the Order of Merit in 1910; the Royal Society elected him president from 1913-15. Ubi Crookes ibi lux!
William Crookes
There is no such thing as a Scientific Mind. Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics. What sort of mind or temperament can all these people be supposed to have in common? Obligative scientists must be very rare, and most people who are in fact scientists could easily have been something else instead.
Peter Medawar
While the vast majority of America's philanthropic heavyweights choose to address traditional and tangible social needs — feeding the hungry, curing the sick, subsidizing the arts — Templeton has something else in mind. He wants to make an impact on the world of ideas.
Templeton's controversial goal: to reconcile the worlds of science and religion. ... When he hears scientists quarrel with believers, he thinks both sides are missing the broader point. "What I'm trying to do is say: 'Don't try to argue — maybe you're both right'..."John Templeton
Crookes received the high British distinction of the Order of Merit in 1910, and in 1913 he was elected President of the Royal Society. Crookes was esteemed not only in scientific circles but by the general public, and the tag Ubi Crookes, ibi lux reflected popular feeling.
William Crookes
In recent years, many men of science have come to realize that the scientific picture of the world is a partial one -- the product of their special competence in mathematics and their special incompetence to deal systematically with aesthetic and moral values, religous experiences and intuitions of significance. Unhappily, novel ideas become acceptable to the less intelligent members of society only with a very considerable time-lag. Sixty or seventy years ago the majority of scientists believed -- and the belief caused them considerable distress -- that the product of their special incompetence was identical with reality as a whole. Today this belief has begun to give way, in scientific circles, to a different and obviously truer conception of the relation between science and total experience.
Aldous Huxley
Rees, Martin
Rees, Nigel
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