[Buddha-l] How Gallup, Pew & Templeton Pro$elytize in the Guise of "Research"

[Richard Hayes]

On Dec 27, 2009, at 9:57 AM, Joanna Kirkpatrick wrote:

> Thanks for taking the time to find out where the Pew effort
> realistically is coming from--Gallup too. Now I don't need to
> bother with their flawed research efforts on religions.

Thanks for this deliciously ironic parody, Joanna. (One of the things I personally like best about buddha-l is that it provides me my daily requirement of nutritional irony.)

As Joanna does not say (but does imply through her satire) is that there are always good reasons to be wary of instrumental reasoning---the attempt to reduce complex realities to statistics of any kind. But Curt has not provided any valid reason to be wary of Pew Charitable Trusts or of the Sir John Templeton Foundation. His argument is an example of the genetic fallacy. If his argument held any water, then one should be wary of all PBS broadcasting, since much if it is sponsored by the foundations that he claims have an evangelical Christian agenda. Now there may be good reasons to be wary of the PBS News Hour and the Bill Moyers Journal. But a form of the "follow the money" argument is not among those good reasons.

\begin{plagiarism}
The genetic fallacy is a fallacy of irrelevance where a conclusion is suggested based solely on something or someone's origin rather than its current meaning or context.
\end{plagiarism} 

Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes
rhayes at unm.edu