Read the last quoted line of a Nature editor’s recent story:
The design Debate
But external peer review hasn’t always kept the foundation out of trouble. In the 1990s, for example, Templeton-funded organizations gave book-writing grants to Guillermo Gonzalez, an astrophysicist now at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, and William Dembski, a philosopher now at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. After obtaining the grants, both later joined the Discovery Institute — a think-tank based in Seattle, Washington, that promotes intelligent design. Other Templeton grants supported a number of college courses in which intelligent design was discussed. Then, in 1999, the foundation funded a conference at Concordia University in Mequon, Wisconsin, in which intelligent-design proponents confronted critics.
Those awards became a major embarrassment in late 2005, during a highly publicized court fight over the teaching of intelligent design in schools in Dover, Pennsylvania. A number of media accounts of the intelligent design movement described the Templeton Foundation as a major supporter — a charge that Charles Harper, then senior vice-president, was at pains to deny.
Some foundation officials were initially intrigued by intelligent design, Harper told The New York Times. But disillusionment set in — and Templeton funding stopped — when it became clear that the theory was part of a political movement from the Christian right wing, not science. Today, the foundation website explicitly warns intelligent-design researchers not to bother submitting proposals: they will not be considered.
The foundation’s critics are unimpressed. Avowedly antireligious scientists such as Coyne and Kroto see the intelligent-design imbroglio as a symptom of their fundamental complaint that religion and science should not mix at all.
-M. Mitchell Waldrop, “Faith in science: The Templeton Foundation claims to be a friend of science. So why does it make so many researchers uneasy?” (16 February 2011 | Nature 470, 323-325 (2011) | doi:10.1038/470323a) [How about because some of them are new atheist fascists who basically question anyone’s right to think differently?]
Note the ambiguity: Templeton was a major supporter of what, exactly? Listening? Incidentally, the Discovery Institute did not support the Dover crowd (I know this for a fact, and if the Darwin lobbyist tells you otherwise, she (or he) is simply demonstrating lack of knowledge of the facts, while shrieking some party line). They got dragged into it by the media feeding frenzy.
So Templeton got thugged into abandoning ID guys like Dembski and Gonzalez over a controversy entirely unrelated to them or their work, and got stuck with Francisco “God ejected from biology”Ayala and John “Einstein predicted many universes” Barrow. Well, let’s just say Templeton went down, all right, but didn’t go down fighting.