ABOVE: False Clown Anemone fish Amphiprion ocellaris among the tentacles of its host Sea Anemone, Credit: Georgette Douwma/Photo Researchers, Inc.

TOP of PAGE: Sir John Templeton photograph courtesy of Ed Wheeler.

“Scientific revelations may be the goldmine for revitalizing religion in the 21st century,” once predicted Sir John Templeton. Progressive ideas are Templeton’s specialty, having spent a lifetime encouraging open-mindedness in both financial and spiritual endeavors. Now a fulltime philanthropist, he gives away about $40 million a year — especially to projects that benefit the cooperation between science and religion. On the path from a small town in Tennessee to his home today in Nassau, the Bahamas, he has advanced a disciplined work ethic, a “humble approach” to theology, and the belief that science and theology are compatible. He is committed to a quest to find a hundredfold more spiritual information.

When John Templeton was born in rural Tennessee in 1912, automobiles were still very new; most people in the country still traveled by wagon or horse or bicycle. Telephones and radios were quite novel. Radios were so extraordinary, in fact, that when Templeton’s older brother put the first radio in their playhouse, people came from miles around by foot to see proof of how it was possible to get a message from somebody 500 miles away without a wire.

“All those things were so unknown at that time that it has given me this viewpoint about how little we know, how humble we ought to be. Even today, we know less than 1 percent of what can be known. If somebody would take the time to make a timetable, we could see that these discoveries are coming faster and faster, not slower,” he says. “We are in the period where we ought to be overwhelmingly grateful that God allowed us to be living; we are in the most productive, most progressive period ever seen.”

Templeton likes the saying, attributed to Thomas Edison, that, “If there is anything you are doing the way you were doing it 20 years ago, then there is now a better way.” Progress, he believes, “comes from a few people trying to do it better.”

He has seen enthusiasm about how new concepts contribute to greater discoveries and progress than he, or anyone, could have predicted. For several decades, Templeton has said that religion needs to be more forward-looking. “I’ve never found a religion that was enthusiastic about research and discoveries. For some odd reason, for thousands of years, every religion has wanted to discourage new concepts. That’s a pity, and that’s why religion has become less important over the years, until now it is irrelevant to many people. In medicine, suppose the doctors a century ago said that they didn’t want to make new discoveries. How little we would know about the body! Suppose in electronics two centuries ago people said that they didn’t believe that there are atoms. We would not have had television, radio, telephones or the Internet. Nobody could have foreseen what the great originators in electronics or medicine have discovered,” he says.

“Religion should be humble in the sense that no human being has yet understood even a fraction of 1 percent of what can be discovered. If we could get humanity to devote even 10 percent of their total research money to searching for the spiritual realities behind religion, the benefits to humanity would be even greater than it has been from electronics, medicine, economics, and all other fields combined.”

While many people who think of religion as unprogressive or backward-looking choose simply to abandon religion—became secular, perhaps even agnostic—Templeton’s approach has been radically different. He has tried to advance religion, feeling there is something there that is definitely worth pursuing.

So he looked, perhaps surprisingly, to science and its methods. If religious leaders have historically been uninterested in new concepts and “felt that they knew it all already and anyone who disagreed with them was wrong,” scientists agree that they know little about the universe. They know that reality is deeper than the visible and the tangible and they are eager to learn more through a process of discovery based on experimentation and research projects.

“We never started out to study science and religion. We started out to encourage progress in religion, all types of religion. We hoped that religion would become just as progressive as medicine or astronomy. For at least 40 years, I have thought that religion should be just as exciting as any other field,” he says. “Probably in the long run, the manpower and money we invest in discovering more about God should approach what goes into science. More than $1 billion a day are spent on scientific research. If one-tenth of that were spent on research on spiritual subjects, that would be $100 million a day. That would be visionary.”

So now, Templeton and his foundation are “trying one thing after another to do something that increases our knowledge of God, God’s purposes or God’s love.” Those that are useless, he knows, will die out and soon be forgotten; the useful ones will flower and be wonderful. The idea is to experiment, to find out what will prove beneficial.

Templeton has experimented with the wonderful intricacies of the universe since he was a small-town boy. When he was young, he studied horticulture and collected caterpillars, amazed by how they turned into something as beautiful as a butterfly. “My parents never gave me answers, but they gave me the literature and equipment so I could pursue the answers myself,” he says.