Early in Templeton’s prosperous career, Princeton Theological Seminary, crown jewel of Presbyterianism, recruited Templeton to its board, eventually as its chairman… “In 30 years on the board, very few new ideas came to us. A doctor today would never prescribe the treatments that my grandfather used as a surgeon in the Confederate Army, but a minister says pretty much the same thing today that a minister would have said back then.” The chief handicap of religious people, he told me, is that “they tend to start with all the answers and don’t change them, while scientists start with questions.” To encourage progress in religious thought, in 1971 he set up the annual Templeton Prize, $1.5 million to a ‘living person who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life's spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works’.
(“The 2016 prize laureate was Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks former Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth. The 2015 prize laureate was Jean Vanier, the founder of L’Arche, a revolutionary international network of communities where people with and without intellectual disabilities live and work together as peers. The 2014 prize recipient was Tomáš Halík, a Czech priest and philosopher who risked imprisonment for illegally advancing religious and cultural freedoms after the Soviet invasion of his country, and has since become a leading international advocate for dialogue among different faiths and non-believers. In 2013, Desmond Tutu, the former Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, won the Templeton Prize. His teachings combine the theological concept that all human beings are shaped in the image of God with the traditional African spirit of Ubuntu, in which humanity achieves personhood only through other people. In 2012, the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, received the prize for his work regarding connections between the investigative traditions of science and Buddhism, specifically, by encouraging scientific reviews of the power of compassion and its potential to address the world's fundamental problems.” ~ Wikipedia)
Astrophysicist Freeman Dyson won for his brilliant synthesis of scientific evidence that atoms behave “like active agents rather than inert substances” and that “the universe as a whole is weird, with laws of nature that make it hospitable to the growth of mind. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension.” So the excitement in science is a function of moving beyond comprehension, beyond the confident laws of 19th-century physics into the divine uncertainties of today’s chaos and string theory. That’s just the kind of serene and searching mind Sir John hoped to nourish when he when he set up the Templeton Prize as “my first major program to encourage other people to become more humble.” His larger goal is “making people get over the concept that they’ve got the total proof. To get them to feel, ‘Gee, I want to learn more. I want to hear anybody who can tell me something in addition to ways I already know about God or my spiritual principles.’”
Sir John is genially aware of the irony he creates with an innovation award in a field that mainly looks into the rear-view mirrors of Scripture. That’s his point. “If we become increasingly humble about how little we know, we may be more eager to search.” Sir John does not attack anyone’s religious belief (“That would be egotistical,” he says) but his humbling mix of theology and science puzzles folks who know all about God and are sure He wrote it all down for us in the Bible. And certainly Templeton’s effort to encourage more modest claims on truth among less assured denominations has led him to many disappointments, but he is careful not to talk about them in public. Here’s one humility challenge he doesn’t have to work for. He would never have guessed that his life’s passion would nourish more thinkers outside the Church than inside.
Nevertheless, the scientists who now team with theologians under one of his new grant programs live in a more exciting, richer world than they knew before. And their theological partners discover that scientists on the cutting edge work, as they do, with evidence of things unseen and in fact with phenomena for which we don’t even have metaphors in the visible world, only abstract equations. The fact that some of this collaboration is already paying off in medicine, from Harvard and Duke to Mayo and California’s Scripps Clinic, means that the intellectual ferment is not wasted. Sir John says, “We may find the divine to be 3,000 times what we think it is now,”
~ T George Harris, Spirituality & Health
~ Sir John Marks Templeton (1912 –2008) was an American-born British investor, fund manager, and philanthropist. In 1954, he entered the mutual fund market and created the Templeton Growth Fund. In 1999, Money magazine named him "arguably the greatest global stock picker of the century. Templeton attributed much of his success to his ability to maintain an elevated mood, avoid anxiety and stay disciplined. Uninterested in consumerism, he drove his own car, never flew first class and lived year-round in the Bahamas. Templeton became known for his "avoiding the herd" and "buy when there's blood in the streets" philosophy. He also was known for taking profits when values and expectations were high. He was a lifelong member of the Presbyterian Church. Templeton was one of the most generous philanthropists in history, giving away over $1 billion to charitable causes.
“We are trying to persuade people that no human has yet grasped 1% of what can be known about spiritual realities. So we are encouraging people to start using the same methods of science that have been so productive in other areas, in order to discover spiritual realities.” — Sir John Templeton, Interview with Financial Intelligence Report
Photo ~ Sir John, His granddaughter Heather and great grandson, 2005
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