Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.

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Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I am your host, Massimo Phil Lucci, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Galeff.

Julia, what are we going to talk about today?

On today's episode, we're going to take a look at a phrase that's come up quite a bit recently in public debate over the compatibility between science and religion. And that's the term accommodationist. It's a label that gets applied to people who argue that either a scientific worldview is compatible with a religious one or that, at the very least, science can't fully disprove religion. Massimo, do you want to give some examples of the people who you feel best

characterize the sort of group of accommodationists and their counterparts, the anti-accommodationists?

Yeah, it's a complex landscape.

Right.

And I think it's readily easy to identify some of the characters, the main characters that have been part of this debate.

So people like Chris Mooney, for instance, who is an atheist, but who has very recently, for instance, gotten money from the Templeton Foundation for some of his writings, which is a controversial thing in and of itself.

As you know, the Temple of the Foundation is this large organization that gives a lot of money to scientists who, shall we say, write

favorably about religion. That's not the way they put it. Their money is supposed to be

furthering the scientific understanding of science. In reality, they've been given the Templeton

price, which is hefted in Nobel Prize at this point, and a series of science. In reality, they've been given the temperate prize, which is hefted

the Nobel Prize at this point, and a series of grants. That's what Mooney got a grant, not the

price. Two scientists or writers who are sort of more or less sympathetic toward a reconciliation

between science or religion. So Mooney has been accused of being an accommodationist. John Wilkins, who is a philosopher of

science, has also been explicitly accused of being accommodations. I am being accused of being in the

same category, and I'm guessing that people like Eugenie Scott at the National Center for Science

Education will fall into that category as well. Then there are people like Ken Miller, my colleague at Brown University,

who has been a prominent fighter against intelligent design

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