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TO mark the death of Sir John Templeton on July 8 in Nassau, Bahamas
at the age of 95, it’s not inappropriate to adumbrate the Big
Questions on science, faith, God, and the purpose of human life on
which he spent a very considerable part of his enormous fortune.
He earned it by shrewd investments in nuclear
energy, chemicals, electronics, and technology always with an eye on
buying low and selling high. He founded the Templeton Growth Fund,
an early pioneer in global investing, that made an average return of
14.5 percent every year from 1954 to 1992. In 1992, he sold it to
devote all his time to philanthropy.
Although he was an elder of the Presbyterian
Church, he espoused a liberal—even iconoclastic—concept of
heaven and hell; believed in a “shared divinity” between man and
God; maintained that there was nothing “known” about God in the
Scriptures as well as in the sacred texts of other religions.
He set up in 1972 the Templeton Foundation to
promote “progress in religion” and to award every year in London
the Templeton Prize. Mother Teresa, the missionary nun in Kolkata,
received in 1973 the first award of $85,000. Today, a Templeton
Prize is worth $1.6 million and is given for “progress toward
research or discoveries about spiritual realities.”
The very notion of progress in religion and
discoveries about spiritual reality was controversial from
inception. Scientists and philosophers thought that
“discoveries” in the nebulous area between science and religion
were not possible because of fundamental incompatibilities between
the methods of science and the purposes of religion.
Sir John was not deterred. He gave large sums of
money to scientists and philosophers who belonged to the Christian,
Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu confessions.
The Templeton Foundation also sponsored national
and international conferences and published tracts on the subjects
that interested it. These did not include the staples of
contemporary religious thought—politics, abortion, environment,
population, gambling and public morality, to name just a few—that
proselytizers in varying styles of clothes and rhetoric preached
to mesmerized crowds.
Instead, the Templeton Foundation sought to
elucidate arcane and old-fashioned matters such as the origin of
life, the source of free will, the conflict between human notions of
purpose and the methods and rules of science, the hypotheses of
intelligent design, and the question of ultimate aims.
The origin of life is a difficult problem more
for the philosopher or the theologian rather than for the scientist.
If extraterrestrial life would one day be discovered, then the
question becomes one of chemistry and cellular self-organization
rather than divine will. But if life includes mind and
consciousness, then the scientist has only the beginnings of an
answer in neuroscience. As the physicist, Eugene Wigner put it:
“Where in the Schrödiñger equations do you put the joy of being
alive?”
Free will involves the age-old problem of faith
and reason. Fundamentalists in both camps are one in their denial of
free will but with different arguments. However, there’s the human
experience of free will. Perhaps it comes from random processes in
the human brain.
Before he died, Edward N. Lorenz, wrote in his
final book, The Essence of Chaos: “We must wholeheartedly believe
in free will. If free will is a reality, we shall have made the
correct choice. If it is not, we shall still not have made an
incorrect choice, because we shall not have made any choice at all,
not having a free will to do so.”
Is there a purpose to life? This is not a good
way of propounding a question to a scientist for all causes of
scientific phenomena are local and instrumental, to borrow Freeman
Dyson’s words. There’s no overarching universal purpose. The fad
today is the Anthropic Principle that, simply put, says that the
laws of nature are as they are in order to allow the existence of
beings that can speculate about them. This is a throwback to
Aristotelian reasoning of the type that a stone falls because it’s
in its nature to be attracted to the ground.
Intelligent design, at least in the US, is the
evangelist’s answer to Darwin’s theory of evolution. The
existence of a watch implies a watchmaker, the argument goes.
Creationism, despite judicial rulings and overwhelming evidence in
genetics, continues to seduce otherwise thoughtful persons.
The problem of final aims is the most difficult
to state in scientific terms. Why are we here? Why is there
something rather than nothing? No philosophizing can settle these
questions and no scientific experiment can be set up that may give a
clue to why the universe is the way it is. Steven Weinberg put it
this way: “The more we know about the universe, the more it seems
pointless.”
These are the Big Questions that the Templeton
Foundation has been throwing money at. It’s possible that I’m
wrong but nevertheless I hazard the guess that these questions
cannot be settled by scientific means in the foreseeable future.
Science and religion have their separate aims
and uses. One cannot be made to fit the mold of the other.
Rest in peace, Sir John.
opinion@manilatimes.net
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