Before there was a prestigious award honoring contributions to religion and science larger in monetary value than the Nobel Prize, John Templeton was known for being a non-contrarian investor. A newly published research paper looks at what led him to become interested in faith and science.
“Templeton’s philanthropies have poured vast sums into science and religion activities, and together they have done much to make the field what it is today. For more than two decades, they have been known — and in some circles, criticized — for bringing science and religion into closer proximity to one another and for promoting harmonious relations between them,” according to the paper, “The Theological Significance of the History of Science: John Templeton and the Promotion of Science and Religion,” published in the March issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.
The author of the paper has his own ties with the Templeton Foundation as a primary researcher on the “Intellectual World of John Templeton” project that is sponsored by the Templeton World Charity Foundation. He is also a research fellow of the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion at the Faculty of Theology and Religion in the University of Oxford in the U.K.
The paper outlines Templeton’s theological vision being comprised of an older image of God as distant and disconnected from nature and the newer outlook with an image of God as intimately present to and involved in nature. Over time the narrative that science and religion can and must learn from another has been criticized and applauded over the years, Jordan points out.
Some of Templeton’s key ideas include that nature viewed as a machine is incomplete and that the invention of quantum mechanics opens up new vistas across science, philosophy and theology. He also in his later years viewed science as giving a new way to think about nature across different scientific disciplines such as physics, chemistry, biology and ecology.
He also saw the interplay of chance vs. necessity as showing a lack of knowledge of connections between events that are not random but constrained. According to Jordan, Templeton saw the world that modern science has delivered to us as not a machine but a “mighty organic whole,” one in which “every single thing is related to everything else.” This leads to the insight that the universe is an organism “building itself up from within.”
Susan Barreto
Susan is an author with a long-time interest in religion and science. She currently edits Covalence, the Lutheran Alliance for Faith, Science and Technology’s online magazine. She has written articles in The Lutheran and the Zygon Center for Religion and Science newsletter. Susan is a board member for the Center for Advanced Study of Religion and Science, the supporting organization for the Zygon Center and the Zygon Journal. She also co-wrote Our Bodies Are Selves with Dr. Philip Hefner and Dr. Ann Pederson.
