Near to Templeton’s heart is the program that started as a gift to the young people in his hometown of Winchester, Tennessee. The Laws of Life Essay Contest encourages kids to write essays on the noble purpose they are planning for their future and the values and principles that will guide their life, offering prizes for the best ones. “Based on that, they had to do some thinking. They wrote stories that their classmates would read and the local papers would print,” Templeton says.
One of the biggest and most expensive of Templeton’s projects is The Institute for Research on Unlimited Love, whose mission is to increase knowledge of unlimited love through scientific research and education. “Love over the centuries has meant many things, but what we mean is called by the Greeks agape,” he says, explaining that unlimited love is “love that gives you joy and helps you grow by giving love. You don’t grow much by getting love; most growth in life is by giving love.”
Now in his tenth decade, Templeton has had the time to test his belief that those who do good in the world are rewarded. He also has the luxury of being able to look both far back and far ahead.
He still maintains that “the time my father told me that he couldn’t give me another dollar, it was the greatest benefit.” He also credits Norman Vincent Peale’s book, The Power of Positive Thinking, read 70 years ago, with making him realize that “what I had become in my short lifetime was mainly dependent on my mental attitudes — a mental attitude of looking for the good will bring good to you; a mental attitude of giving love will bring love to you. I like everyone else should give a lot more thought to how to be more loving, more love-giving. The example of Mother Teresa is excellent. She was the first winner of the Templeton Prize in 1973 because she provided the greatest example of lifetime love.”
Templeton was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1987 and decorated a Knight of St. John in 1995. He continues to work hard, devoting his time and giving not only money, but also concepts and ideas. All the while, he is driven by an enthusiasm for his projects and the belief that “there is an exciting opportunity throughout the world to encourage enthusiasm for applying scientific methods to the discovery of over a hundredfold more about spiritual realities.” In the coming years, Templeton says rapid progress “is going to be in the realities that are not tangible or physical.”
He knows that no one can know the total truth, everything about God, or the intricacies of our beautiful universe, “but a rigorous method can start movement in the right direction.” Scientific research, he says, is part of God revealing himself, and God reveals himself to those who seek and Sir John seeks, believing that is the way to learn more about the purposes, the reality, or the infinity of God than we ever could have imagined.
“I believe there is much more that we can learn about God,” he says. “No human being yet has known 1 percent of what can be known about God. If there is still 100 times more to learn, let’s try to learn it and not give up!”
