John Templeton's Founding and the Templeton Prize

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The John Templeton Foundation was established in 1987 by the investor John Templeton on the belief that a sustained dialogue between science and religion could enrich both. Templeton's deed of trust explicitly called for spiritual and religious research to be pursued with the same rigor and resourcing the twentieth century gave to medical research, and the foundation has since funded research and public conversation on subjects from cosmology and evolution to forgiveness, purpose and free will, remaining one of the largest funders of the academic study of religion and science anywhere in the world.

The foundation is governed by a board of trustees. John Templeton Jr. served as president from its founding until his death in 2015, when his daughter Heather Templeton Dill became president in his place. It also administers the Templeton Prize, established by John Templeton in 1972 as one of the world's largest annual monetary awards given to an individual, its value set at Templeton's own direction to always exceed the value of the Nobel Prizes, a comparison Templeton intended as a deliberate statement about the importance of the work it honors.