Templetonwatch
So what’s Templeton up to besides giving a wad of cash to Martin Rees for saying “religion is all right I suppose now please excuse me I have better things to do”?
Well, it’s up to asking silly questions like “Is There a Link Between Spiritual Growth and Academic Performance at College?” It’s up to funding people who investigate such questions by way of research on “spirituality in higher education.”
In 2003, we began a seven-year study examining how students change during the college years and the role that college plays in facilitating the development of their spiritual and religious qualities. Funded by the John Templeton Foundation, “Spirituality in Higher Education: Students’ Search for Meaning and Purpose,” is the first national longitudinal study of students’ spiritual growth.
This is one of the ways the Templeton Foundation contaminates or pollutes or adulterates intellectual life. It does it by funding suggestions that searching for meaning and purpose equals “spirituality” which as any fule kno is a synonym or a stealth euphemism for religion, so the upshot is a suggestion that atheists don’t know from meaning and purpose and atheism is sterile and a path to futility.
It is our shared belief that the findings provide a powerful argument for the proposition that higher education should attend more to students’ spiritual development, because spirituality is essential to students’ lives.
Assisting students’ spiritual growth will help create a new generation who are more caring, more globally aware, and more committed to social justice than previous generations…
So we learn that atheists are less caring, less globally aware, and less committed to social justice, funded by the Templeton Foundation, thank you very much.
“Is There a Link Between Spiritual Growth and Academic Performance at College?”
What? You never heard of the ‘freshman fifteen’? That’s where your spirit grows a full fifteen centimeters during your first year at college.
When I had my spirit measured before and after freshman year by the pep squad (Yes! Yes! Yes you do! You have spirit, eight point two!) it showed a growth of only six centimeters, but my academic performance was a bit off that year too.
What the hell does “spiritual growth” even mean? What is it? How is it measured? No, of course, I don’t expect them to answer this. There is no answer.
Oh they don’t want to measure it; that would be scientistic. They want to…explore it. That’s spiritual.
As research this is complete BS. You may notice that the “findings” are described in the most vague terms and there is no available reference to look up because the research has not been published in a quality peer-reviewed journal — but in a book.
Even so, you can see that the research is rubbish by the misappropriation of terms. For instance, one of the “measures” of spirituality was ecumenical worldview. To quote their website: “Ecumenical Worldview reflects a global worldview that transcends ethnocentrism and egocentrism. It indicates the extent to which the student is interested in different religious traditions, seeks to understand other countries and cultures, feels a strong connection to all humanity, believes in the goodness of all people, accepts others as they are, and believes that all life is interconnected and that love is at the root of all the great religions.”
First of all, you can see how many questions are begged here. Why does ecumenism demand “the goodness of all people” (even Hitler and Stalin?) and that “love is at the root of all the great religions” (even Hinduism and Shinto?)? But most importantly, you can see that they have misused the term “ecumenical”, a word which is essentially a very specifically Christian concept, to apply to people who would hold very non-Christian beliefs.
Argh – even worse than I thought. Right I’ll have to look at the “research” then.
That’s it?!
There’s nothing there!
A couple of pages each with a couple of paragraphs and a lot of goopy pictures, and a pdf “brochure” with a few more paragraphs and a lot more goopy pictures – and that’s it?
Oy, oy, oy.
Looking at that site is quite fascinating and strange. Actually, they do have “spiritual qualities” that they claim are measurable. They have definitions like:
and
So, that’s bizarre, biased, whatever, in itself. You can also see how those things (among others) are measured. You learn that to be a skeptic, you must not only not believe in religion, but not really care about it at all. Also, you can’t possess equanimity unless you are grateful to… something. For everything that happens to you. That has something to do with it.
Setting the weird religious stuff aside, I can say that I developed real increased equanimity in college by becoming involved in new social support groups, becoming a volunteer tutor, and to put it bluntly, through being introduced to Ritalin by a psychiatrist. Without getting into the whole social controversy about “What is ADHD, really?” and the proper role of psychoactive medications in society and all that, I can say that in my case, I had a frequent loss of awareness which was enormously disruptive to numerous areas of my life, and Ritalin granted me periods of clarity with very few negative effects. Without constantly battling with these sources of anxiety that I’d previously endured, I became much more confident and even-keeled.
This sort of situation, in which someone can become more “at peace” due to a variety of factors that have nothing to do with religion, while at the same time becoming more of a religious skeptic, is just not on their radar. I’d be interested in why they considered spirituality the natural source of equanimity, rather than social adjustment, or mental health, or any of a number of other factors.
Oh, I see that Ophelia has seen it between when I wrote my bit and when I posted it. Yes, there’s very little there, although there is a bit about their methodology. A very superficial set of surveys based on what the researchers thought all these things meant. I’m disappointed, but not surprised, that that’s the best that they could do.