As a pioneer in both financial investments and philanthropy, Sir John Templeton spent a lifetime encouraging open-mindedness. Templeton started his Wall Street career in 1937 and went on to create some of the world's largest and most successful international investment funds, eventually earning the label of "arguably the greatest global stock picker of the century" from Money magazine. In 1972, he established the world's largest annual award given to an individual: the £1,000,000 Templeton Prize. The Prize is intended to recognize exemplary achievement in work related to life's spiritual dimension. Templeton also contributed a sizable amount of his fortune to the John Templeton Foundation, which he established in 1987. Templeton passed away in 2008, but the Foundation that bears his name continues to award millions of dollars in annual grants in pursuit of its mission to serve as a philanthropic catalyst for research on what scientists and philosophers call the "big questions."
Dr. Robert L. Herrmann taught medical school biochemistry for twenty-two years, first at Boston University and later at Oral Roberts University. At the latter he directed a nation-wide recruitment program for medical and dental school faculty interested in a high level Christian mission-oriented teaching program. In 1981 he left medical education to become executive director of the American Scientific Affiliation, a 2,200-member society of Christians interested in integrating Christian faith and science. There he met member John Templeton, and they have since cooperated in writing several books, including The God Who Would Be Known and Is God the Only Reality? In 1998 he wrote Sir John's biography, and a revised edition in 2004. Dr. Herrmann is also a founding member of the John Templeton Foundation.

The God Who Would Be Known

Revelations of the Divine in Contemporary Science

By John M. Templeton, Robert L. Herrmann

Templeton Foundation Press

Copyright © 1998 Templeton Foundation Press and Robert L. Hermann
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-890151-20-1

Contents

1 The God Who Would Be Known,
2 Science Expands Our Understanding of Nature and Reality,
3 Recent Scientific Contributions to Meaning and Purpose in the Universe,
4 God Reveals Himself in the Astronomical and in the Infinitesimal,
5 The Vast Unseen and Genetic Revolution,
6 Deep and Powerful Ordering Forces in the Universe,
7 The Vast Arena OF Worship,
8 Remarkable Evolution of Humankind,
9 Mysteries Multiplied,
10 God and the Future,
Acknowledgments,

CHAPTER 1

THE GOD WHO WOULD BE KNOWN

Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and observed your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: To The Unknown God....

The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And He is not served by human hands, as if He needed anything, because He Himself gives all men life and breath and everything else.

Science and Divinity

This is a book about signals of transcendence, about pointers to the Infinite that are coming to us not from mystics but instead through the most recent findings of science. The God of Scripture, of historic Judaism and Christianity, is essentially unknown to modern humankind. The images of an earlier generation have often seemed to portray God as an indulgent grandfather or an angry judge, and neither seems to have any relevance to a technological society. And science, on its part, purportedly has shown that we are alone in the unfeeling immensity of a universe to which we have come without plan or purpose, a mere accidental assemblage of molecules. But this is not really what the current discoveries of science are telling us. The tight little mechanisms, the clockwork images, the strict following of cause by effect, the tangibility of matter, the gradual evolutionary climb, even our own objectivity, these and many more of the most familiar components of scientism are fading fast. Instead we find an exciting world in dynamic flux, an unexpected universe whose mechanisms are ever more baffling and staggering in their beauty and complexity, where predictability is uncertain instead of deterministic, where matter and energy are interchangeable, and where evolutionary change occurs by leaps and bounds that defy mechanistically simple explanation. And ourselves; what has become of us? The physicists tell us that we are peculiarly situated midway between the immense parameters of the cosmos and the infinitude of the smallest particles of matter and energy. Our arrival on this planet seems remarkable whether looked at in terms of the requirement for a special relationship among the forces controlling elementary particles, or in terms of the mechanisms of biological evolution. What is becoming increasingly obvious is that the evolutionary process that has resulted in humankind is a unique and unidirectional one. And the steps peculiar to Homo sapiens are remarkable in both their timing and their developmental aspects. Most wonderful of all, our journey has just begun.

Phases of Human Development

One of the great benefits of examining the vast development of the cosmos is that by so doing we obtain a sufficiently broad perspective to begin to discern a purpose or plan—an ultimate meaning—in the evolutionary creative process. The alternative, by which science ordinarily functions, is to focus on limited components, detailing the processes and mechanisms involved. The risk of the latter is to see the process but miss the plan. It is for this reason that Sir John Eccles in his Gifford lectures of 1978 begins with the concept of the hierarchical structure of nature, in which higher levels are seen to emerge unpredictably from lower levels. The example he uses is that of the emergence of life, which could not have been predicted even with complete knowledge of all the events of the prebiotic world. As we move on through hierarchies of increasing complexity, life gives rise to humankind, which itself then undergoes a leap to another hierarchy, consciousness. And conscious humankind next bounds to what may be an ultimate hierarchy: spiritual humankind. It is at this level that we see the greatest opportunity for humankind to develop those attributes that will allow the greatest harmony with each other and the greatest communion with the majestic and all-powerful Creator, into whose eternal purposes we fit. Perhaps our supernatural meaning will then be fully perceived. We suspect that if and when that happens, we will have had the holy experience, the vision of the awesome size of God. This book is, we hope, a beginning in that direction.

What we now know of the origins of humankind increasingly hints at the awesome sweep of the Creator's hand. As Eiseley phrases it, this may be "Nature's last great play—the play of man." The role which the central character has assumed is a tremendously challenging one, for it embraces not only the ascent up the evolutionary ladder to a creature with unheard-of powers of mind and intellect, but also the advent of the uniquely human spiritual conception of our Creator in whom we live and move and have our being and purpose.

PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT

The physical phase of human evolution involves two great leaps upward, one at the point some two million years ago when our presumed ancestors—the australopithecines—first walked erect, and the second at the advent of cultural humankind—Homo sapiens—with their greatly enlarged brain, perhaps 150,000 years ago. The period over which the brain increased threefold, from its one-pound weight in the hominid ancestor to three pounds in Homo sapiens, was amazingly brief, a time span totally unlike that in any other creature.

THE APPEARANCE OF INTELLECT

The large brain of Homo sapiens neandertal with its enlarged frontal lobes—in modern humans two times greater than in the chimpanzee—made possible an enormous capacity for cultural and intellectual development. Eccles points out that there were also accompanying qualitative changes in the so-called Broca and Wernicke speech centers of the brain that allowed for the development of language. At this point the evolution of humankind turned a corner. No longer was physical size, even of the brain, a significant factor, as indicated by the fact that brain size has even decreased slightly from Homo sapiens neandertal to modern Homo sapiens. What happened instead was a vast and rapid change in cultural development. This was the phase of the intellect. Primitive humans began to plan their hunts, their defenses, their leadership. And these developments occurred just in the nick of time, for the open, grassy savannah was soon transformed into a sheet of ice as glaciers ground their way inexorably from the north. Toolmaking became sophisticated, symbols were developed for recordkeeping and for rituals associated with a developing social order; people became artists. More than two hundred caves with exquisite drawings attest to the artistic sensitivity of prehistoric humankind.

What followed in civilized times was nothing short of miraculous. The rate of growth of our knowledge of our world was phenomenal. The pyramids of...