Templeton Ponders the Meaning of Life

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 29, 1999 | by James P. Lucier

Philanthropist and dean of global investing Sir John Templeton discusses his theory of `divine creativity' -- the driving force behind escalating human progress and the rise of civilization.

Sir John Templeton is the donor of the annual Templeton Prize, which awards a sum of approximately $1 million to honor an individual who has contributed significantly to progress in religion. Larger than a Nobel Prize, the Templeton has been awarded every year for 27 years.

Sir John is a Winchester, Tenn., boy who made good, a Yale graduate and a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. He started fooling around with mutual funds on Wall Street in 1937, establishing the Templeton Growth Fund at a time when there only were 17 such funds with a total net worth of $1 billion. When he retired in 1992, the various Templeton funds alone managed assets worth about $20 billion, and on a good day would take in about $1 billion. Today there are about 10,000 mutual funds in the United States and about 17, 000 worldwide.

Templeton is a gentle man whose humility belies his accomplishment. He describes himself as "an enthusiastic Presbyterian" who for decades has been engaged in active service on the boards of Presbyterian seminaries and foreign missions.

"The mutual-fund concept was about originality and creativity," says Sir John, "and it has blossomed because of service. Until mutual funds were invented, it was very difficult to get diversification in your investments. It was also very difficult for a small investor to get expert management. People of great wealth could hire a team of experts to find the best investment opportunities. But the mutual fund made it possible for someone with an investment of only $100 to get a selection of wisdom from the best experts on the way that money should be invested. It was a new form of service. It resulted in tens of millions of people being able to participate in the free-enterprise system who could not have done so otherwise."

Sir John also has endowed Templeton College at Oxford University for the promotion of business studies. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1987 for his philanthropic works. Recently he published his 10th book, Is Progress Speeding Up? Insight interviewed him in Washington when the boards of advisers of the Templeton foundations were meeting jointly at the Library of Congress.

Insight: In your latest book you discuss amazing advances in almost every field. A lot of people wonder whether that is progress. Yet in your book, you talk about the advances in invention, in housing, in the quality of what we eat, even in how we get along with each other -- and in every field touched upon you demonstrate the tremendous change that's taken place during the last 50 years. What was your reason for laying out the history of this progress in such great detail?

Sir John Templeton: Atoms coalesced into molecules, and molecules coalesced into cells, and cells coalesced into living creatures. Living creatures coalesced into more and more complicated creatures, and these complicated creatures, which we now call humans, have coalesced into communities and into nations -- and now into what we call civilizations. So creativity is basic. Nobody knows why humanity exists. Nobody knows why we were created. But possibly all of us were created to be helpers in accelerating creativity. The creativity has been here quite possibly before time and space began. But creativity was very slow. Indeed, 99 percent of human existence was before people learned to read and write. And after people learned to read and write, 99 percent of human history occurred before science began to make breakthrough discoveries.

Insight: If you look at the history of physics, for many years it looked as though Newtonian physics corresponded to the actual world that we see and touch and observe. But then we made discoveries in quantum mechanics and quantum theory and found that some of those Newtonian rules didn't match reality. Do you think that the creativity we find in quantum theory always was there, subsisting underneath our Newtonian perceptions?

JT: Let me make it larger. Probably the major influence on my life has been the process of learning humility. Gradually, I have learned to feel more and more humble, to the point where 1 doubt that I know 1 percent -- far less than 1 percent -- of what is known about reality. So I don't presume to describe the unknown. All I can do is raise more and more questions, deeper and deeper questions. Among these deeper questions is: "Do scientists study reality, or have they been egotistical throughout all centuries in thinking that they were studying reality." Quite likely, they were not. They were studying human perceptions. When you stop to think about it deeply, there is no way that a scientist can study anything except through some human perception.

Insight: Are you saying that we know more and more about less?

JT: At the time of Newton, human perceptions were that things visible and tangible were reality. But when you get down to quantum mechanics and quantum science, 80 years ago physicists began to realize that things visible and tangible may be only part of reality -- or maybe only that part of reality which humans have learned to perceive. Now with quantum mechanics and quantum physics we are realizing that reality is vastly more basic and broad than Newton could possibly have imagined. Even so, quantum mechanics represents just a multiplication of human perceptions.