Nature is taking some flak this week for an editorial published in July on the Templeton Foundation, which gives sizeable grants for research on the crossover of science and spirituality. Some of that flak is coming from our own letters page.

The take home message of the editorial was “The Templeton Foundation’s exploration of science and faith merits tolerance, not outright rejection.” In a letter in this week’s Nature biologists Matthew Cobb and Jerry Coyne take issue with this. They were, they write “perplexed by your Editorial”:

You suggest that science may bring about “advances in theological thinking”. In reality, the only contribution that science can make to the ideas of religion is atheism.

Over on RichardDawkins.net SteveN is fairly typical of those weighing in on the Cobb-Coyne letter. “Throwing money at religion/spirituality in an attempt to give it scientific credibility is, I feel, deluded at best,” he says. “I was therefore disappointed by Nature’s editorial when it first appeared and applaud Cobb and Coyne’s direct and forthright letter.”

There’s a rather longer set of comments on this article on Pharyngula. Of course very few of them are about the debate and rather a lot of them are expletive ridden diatribes against previous comments, as evidenced by this Wordle picture showing almost as many people discussing commenter Max as those discussing God. Poor old ‘Nature’ barely gets a look in.

UPDATE

Brian Switek, on the Laelaps blog, has weighed in on Nature’s side. Accusing Cobb and Coyne of the henious crime of quote mining, he says, “Now along comes a letter by Matthew Cobb and Jerry Coyne who use the article on the Templeton Foundation to launch into an attack on religion. The somewhat sneering tone of the correspondence suggests that Nature tacitly supported the aims of the Templeton Foundation, whereas a reading of the original article shows that this is not so. Cobb and Coyne try to support their position, however, by quote mining the original article.”