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ABOVE: Multiverse: A new view of our universe–only one of many, Credit: Al Granberg/New York Times.
TOP of PAGE: Design: God is the light of Heaven and Earth—Ahmad Moustafa, Courtesy of the Modern Islamic Art Development and Continuity.
| | |  | The symposia are part of the Foundation's Humble Approach initiative. The goal of the initiative is to bring about the discovery of new spiritual information by furthering high-quality scientific research. The “humble approach” is inherently interdisciplinary, sensitive to nuance, and biased in favor of building linkages and connections. It assumes an openness to new ideas and a willingness to experiment. Placing high value upon patience and perseverance, it retains a sense of wondering expectation because it recognizes, in Loren Eisley's haunting phrase, “a constant emergent novelty in nature that does not lie totally behind us, or we would not be where we are.” A fundamental principle of the Foundation, in the words of its founder, is that “humility is a gateway to greater understanding and open[s] the doors to progress” in all endeavors. Sir John Templeton believes that in their quest to comprehend ultimate reality, scientists, philosophers, and theologians have much to learn about and from one another. The humble approach is intended as a corrective to parochialism. It encourages discovery and seeks to accelerate its pace.
Sit down before fact as a little child,” said Thomas Huxley, “be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever nature leads, or you will learn nothing.”
Huxley’s insight about the role of humility in the search for knowledge is shared by all great thinkers who know firsthand that the immediate prerequisite to learning is humble admission of ignorance. “It is impossible,” said Epictetus, the philosopher/ slave from the second century, “for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.” More recently Sir John Templeton has called humility “a gateway to greater understanding that opens the doors to progress.”
Humility and progress are two words often on the lips of Sir John; they are also the twin lights that mark the path sought by the foundation that bears his name. And they are profoundly related to one another.
A special program called the Humble Approach initiative lies at the heart of the Foundation. Serving as a precursor for much larger programs, with multimillion-dollar budgets spread over several years, it is the seed from which great projects grow.
The rapid scientific progress of the last four centuries has been relentlessly reductionist, taking nature apart and looking for explanations at the smallest level of reality. But there are important phenomena that simply disappear when examined too closely. Life for example is strangely absent at the level of protons and electrons. Yet who would deny its reality? And mind is strangely absent at the level of genes, but we cannot deny its reality either.
There are many scholars who, enamored with the remarkable success of reductionism, do deny the reality of higher-level concepts like life and mind, dismissing them as superficial epiphenomena, to be “reduced” to their more mechanical components. What are most fully “real” are the particles and laws of physics. Thus some scientists speak of human beings as “lumbering robots,” controlled by selfish genes; call the brain a “computer made of meat”; or write, “The more the universe is comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.” These assertions presume we know much more than we do. But we should not reject such claims, for they are all made by informed thinkers whose insights are of genuine value. We can however ask if such claims might not be incomplete.
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