A December 4 article in the NY Times included the following comments -
The Templeton Foundation, a major supporter of projects seeking to reconcile science and religion, says that after providing a few grants for conferences and courses to debate intelligent design, they asked proponents to submit proposals for actual research.
“They never came in,” said Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president at the Templeton Foundation, who said that while he was skeptical from the beginning, other foundation officials were initially intrigued and later grew disillusioned.
“From the point of view of rigor and intellectual seriousness, the intelligent design people don’t come out very well in our world of scientific review,” he said.
In his blog, Uncommon Descent, Bill Dembski responded with the following -
I know for a fact that Discovery Institute tried to interest the Templeton Foundation in funding fundamental research on ID that would be publishable in places like PNAS and Journal of Molecular Biology (research that got funded without Templeton support and now has been published in these journals), and the Templeton Foundation cut off discussion before a proposal was even on the table. What has disillusioned Templeton about ID is not that it failed to prove its mettle as science but that it didn’t fit with Templeton’s accommodation of religion to the science of the day and Templeton’s incessant need to curry favor with an academic establishment that by and large thinks religion is passé.
[My emphasis added]
In response to a query from someone about that claim, Dembski stated (see comment #11 in his article) that he was referring to the work of Douglas Axe.
Well this led to a follow-up comment by Ed Brayton on his blog, “Dispatches from the Culture Wars“. He ridicules Dembski’s alleged claim that Axe’s work supports ID and refers to a much earlier (Feb. ’05) article by Matt Inlay on the Panda’s Thumb blog that provided a fairly detailed analysis of one particular Axe paper, published in the Journal of Molecular Biology in 2000. Inlay’s article also refers to a discussion on the ISCID forum in which Dembski acknowledged that the 2000 Axe paper was not conclusive with respect to ID.
There are a couple of things about this debate that are interesting. First, Dembski did not state in his recent blog article that Axe’s work supported ID, only that the research was based on a proposal that was pitched to the Templeton Foundation but eventually got funded without their support.
Secondly, he does not actually specify precisely which work by Axe he is referring to. A check on PubMed indicates six publications by Axe since 1987. This is an unremarkable record by most standards, and there is only one other paper since the one in 2000. However the point is that the 2000 paper is not the only one there is. So it’s difficult to interpret Dembski’s comment decisively.
I have yet to read Axe’s 2000 paper, so I can’t offer an opinion on it (assuming I can even understand it). However I note that Stephen Meyer from the Discovery Institute references both Axe’s 2000 and 2004 papers in his August 2000 paper in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington (this was the paper that created such a furore when it was published – see this NPR article and the website of the Proceedings editor Richard Sternberg which has all the details of his tribulations).