John Templeton, 95; Billionaire Invested in Science, Religion

Foundation grants support academic research in such fields as theoretical physics, cosmology, evolutionary biology, cognitive science and social sciences related to love, forgiveness, creativity, purpose and the nature and origin of religious belief. With an endowment of approximately $1.5 billion, the foundation gives out $70 million annually.

Although the notion of spiritual progress evoked skepticism, Mr. Templeton insisted that spiritual advances are just as plausible as scientific advances.

"I formed charity foundations," he told the Saturday Evening Post in 2003, "for the main purpose of persuading people that, with the proper scientific research, it's possible to eventually make discoveries of spiritual realities so that, within a century, humans will know a hundred times more about divinity and spiritual principles as any human has known to date."

He was knighted by Britain's Queen Elizabeth in 1987, years after he gave up his American citizenship and settled in the Bahamas -- not, he said, as much for the tax shelter as for the emotional distance it provided from what he described as Wall Street's crowd mentality.

John Marks Templeton was born Nov. 29, 1912, in Winchester, Tenn. As a 12-year-old, he got his initial exposure to the colliding worlds of science and faith by following the Scopes trial as it unfolded in a nearby county. Like many other Americans at the time, the youngster was enthralled by the debate between lawyer Clarence Darrow -- who, in representing schoolteacher John Scopes was also defending Darwin's theories -- and evolution's impassioned foe, William Jennings Bryan.

Mr. Templeton evinced an early fascination with numbers and with celestial bodies he observed through a telescope he set up on the roof of the family home. He also developed a lifelong passion for butterflies -- for spiritual reasons.

"None of us know what's going to happen after we die, any more than that caterpillar knows what's going to happen after he forms a pupa," he told CNN in 1995, "but the caterpillar is born again into something more magnificent than a caterpillar could imagine, and so maybe you will be, too."

He was one of the first from his town to attend college: Yale University. His father was a lawyer and cotton merchant, and when the family was squeezed by the Depression, Mr. Templeton helped pay for his own tuition, books and board with dormitory poker winnings.

He graduated from Yale in 1934 and won a Rhodes Scholarship to attend Oxford University, where he received a master's degree in law.

"When I got to Balliol, they asked what I would want to read," he told the Times of London in 2003. "I said business management. They looked at me as if I wanted to study garbage." He studied law instead. Five decades later, he endowed the Oxford Centre for Management Studies, which became Templeton College.

Returning to the United States in 1937, he went to work on Wall Street and three years later bought a small investment advisory firm that became Templeton, Dobbrow & Vance. He focused on investing worldwide.

Taking the "buy low, sell high" maxim to an extreme, he often focused on nations, industries and companies that had hit rock bottom; he called them "points of maximum pessimism."