He’s made it his life’s last ambition to change that. The John Templeton Foundation spends $16 million to $30 million a year funding studies on whether prayer can heal, whether there is “evidence of universal purpose in the universe,” whether there’s a scientific basis to forgiveness. It’s not that Templeton believes he can answer the big question–does God exist?–though he certainly wouldn’t mind if his efforts turned up some clues. What he really hopes to do is treat theology like medicine, updating and improving it through study and experimentation. If we applied the same principles–and some of the money–to religion that we do to medicine, he says, maybe we could launch a new age of discovery into spirituality, too.
Templeton’s foundation is now the nation’s largest funder of spirituality research. Though his efforts are sometimes controversial–he backs projects from cosmology to faith healing–his grants support scientists who often have no other source of funding. Under Templeton’s influence and cash flow, that’s begun to change. Even the traditional National Institutes of Health–which plans to spend $3.5 million in grants for “mind/body studies” in the next few years alone–has followed suit. Templeton has also gained credibility by attracting leading researchers, including Duke’s Dr. Harold Koenig, Harvard’s Dr. Herbert Benson and Stanford’s Robert Sapolsky.
Some critics worry that Templeton favors research that will affirm his faith. Richard Sloan of Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center says that Templeton has backed “a lot of second-rate research,” though he concedes he’s trying to “notch it up.” But Stanford’s Sapolsky, a self-proclaimed atheist, was won over by the foundation’s scientific standards. He has since accepted funding for studies on how primates exhibit forgiveness and has helped review other Templeton grants. “They were not interested in advocacy,” he says. “They were very solid.”
Templeton has been weighing spiritual questions all his life. Born in Winchester, Tenn., in 1912, he watched the famed Scopes “monkey trial” unfold in a nearby county the summer he was 12–his first exposure to the colliding worlds of science and spirituality. After earning degrees at Yale and Oxford, Templeton headed to Wall Street, where he pioneered the practice of overseas investing and bought underpriced stocks no one else wanted. “He’s always been kind of a contrarian,” says his son Jack, now president of the foundation.
Templeton insists he has no particular stake in the research–his aim is only to advance the study of spirituality. And he knows that science often leads to dead ends. “We expect to have a large fraction of our research prove fruitless,” he says. And what if his work ultimately proves there is no God–or that religion is useless? “It doesn’t worry me,” says Templeton. After all, he’s already found his paradise.
