Huffington Post
August 31, 2010
In his endearingly titled blog, "Michael, we hardly knew ye," the venerable evolutionary biologist and slayer of creationist dragons Jerry Coyne (author of Why Evolution is True) wonders if I've gone 'round the bend over capitalism and sold my skeptical soul to the Templeton Foundation, the alleged evil subsidizers of religious and capitalist propaganda. Allow me to set the record straight (again) for all my critics out there (and in reading the comments to Jerry's blog there's more than I thought, and many of them are darned right caustic!).
First, on the Templeton Foundation, I was invited to write a monthly column for their new magazine, Big Questions Online, and as with my work for them in years past, I'm allowed to write just about anything I like. It is interesting that Jerry and his commentators would hone in on this, my second column, ignoring my first column, which was a stinging rebuke of religion in general and Deepak Chopra's New Age spirituality in particular. No one could possibly read my list comparing God 1.0 to God 2.0 (omnipresent--nonlocal; fully man/fully God--wave/particle duality; miracle--wave function collapse, etc.) and conclude that I'm the pay of a religious propaganda machine. And if that doesn't seal the deal for ya, the God critique was originally my second column, but the BQO editors liked it so much that they bumped it up to number 1, and it was, in fact, the most popular article on the site for the entire month. So there!
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