Templeton’s Devolutionary Syncretism
Kolbe Report 5/30/26
Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,
Glory to Jesus Christ!
Tomorrow, Sunday, May 31, at 3 p.m., I will give a presentation at the Parkland Theater, 6550 Parkland Ave, Cincinnati, OH 45233, entitled “Let Us Recognize the Time of Our Visitation” (Creation, Family, and Fatima: God’s Order in an Age of Chaos). As the mass media and large segments of Catholic academia fuel excitement about visits from alleged rational corporeal creatures from other parts of the universe, I will show how the visitation of Our Lady of Fatima has given the lie to that deception and prepared us for the cataclysmic events that will almost certainly precede the advent of the Era of Peace that She infallibly promised. Since the Templeton Foundation stands at the forefront of efforts to promote a belief in theistic evolution and aliens in Catholic institutions, I will use this newsletter to expose some of its principal errors.
Sir John Marks Templeton and the Templeton Foundation
The Templeton Foundation was established by the wealthy investor Sir John Marks Templeton (1912–2008) to promote research into the cross-section of religion and natural science so as to discover the unity that underlies all religions and its scientific basis. Not surprisingly, the Templeton Foundation staff assume that molecules-to-man evolution is a fact and seek to harmonize the religious traditions of the world and the discoveries of modern science within an evolutionary framework. From his evolutionary perspective, Templeton believed that true humility required that human beings not look upon themselves as the goal of creation but rather as “servants of creation,” called to actively participate in the evolution of the cosmos. He wrote:
Although we seem to be the most sophisticated species at present on our planet, perhaps we should not think of our place as the end of cosmogenesis. We must resist the pride that might tempt us to think that we are creation’s final goal, and seek to become “servants of creation or even helpers in divine creativity.” We may be “a new beginning, the first creatures in the history of life on earth to participate consciously in the ongoing creative process.
In this respect, Templeton found himself in perfect agreement with Fr. Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., who also denied the original perfection of the universe and who prophesied utopia in the future through man’s participation in the evolutionary process. Templeton identified himself as a Christian but explicitly singled out the Unity School of Christianity as the community whose views were most compatible with the mission of his foundation. Unfortunately, the Unity School of Christianity has much more in common with Gnosticism than it does with traditional Christianity. According to an excellent analysis of the cult on the Probe Ministry website:
The Unity School of Christianity is recognized as a cult because it exhibits several cultic characteristics. One such characteristic is syncretism. Syncretism is the attempt to combine or reconcile differing beliefs, usually by taking the most attractive features from several sources and combining them into a something new. Unity has taken what some would call “the best qualities” of various religious view points and combined them into a new and more acceptable faith.
Another characteristic of cults that is true of Unity is the denial of the biblical doctrine of salvation by faith in Christ’s person and His finished work on the cross. In Unity, salvation comes by recognizing our inherent divinity and our oneness with God . . .
Unity is the blending of various religions and belief systems into one unified system of thought. The Fillmores [founders of the cult] introduced beliefs into their system that had been commonplace in Eastern religions and occult practices.
The Fillmores introduced a pantheistic view of God to their followers and saw God as being both male and female. God is seen as an energy or force that resides in all things both animate and inanimate. Likewise God is seen as being impersonal and a part of His creation.
Jesus is a principle of “love” that brings oneness to all things. This Christ principle is present within each one of us and ultimately unifies us in a salvation experience.
Unity teaches that man’s primary problem is that he has spiritual amnesia and needs to reconnect with his destiny. He needs to regain the realization that he is evolving toward divinity.
Salvation, according to Unity, comes by recognizing one’s divine nature. Unity does not recognize the Atonement of Christ but rather seeks what Eastern mystics refer to as at-one-ment or realizing oneness with the divine on a spiritual level.
Since Unity does not recognize the work of Christ on the cross (the Atonement), but rather accepts evolution as a positive ingredient in man’s spirituality, it is only logical that they embrace reincarnation as a valid system for spiritual enlightenment. As you can see, then Unity is not based on biblical teaching. To the contrary, it is heavily influenced by Eastern thought and belief. Unity is a classic New Age cult and is not Christian in any aspect of its doctrine or teaching.
Catholic institutions that accept money from the Templeton Foundation contribute to the “diabolical disorientation” that Sister Lucia of Fatima warned us about. In Templeton’s upside-down world-view, the “first perfection of the universe” which St. Thomas Aquinas and every Father of the Church proclaimed is jettisoned and transferred to a mythical “Omega Point” in the future. Instead of being the central focus of creation, in Templeton’s inverted world-view Man is reduced to a lowly instrument, subordinated to the divinization of the cosmos, the new “Body of Christ.” And whereas Divine Revelation identifies the Earth as the physical and spiritual capital of the universe, Templeton re-casts the site of the Incarnation of the Son of God and the Immaculate Conception of His Mother as an insignificant “planet.”
The English word “planet” is derived from the Greek πλανήται (planḗtai) meaning “wanderers” with reference to celestial bodies that moved across the sky. The word “planet” was never used to refer to the Earth in the Greek or Hebrew Scriptures. Indeed, how many Catholics realize that the phrase “Planet Earth” was first used in the 1850s, with the earliest known evidence dating to 1858 in the Hamilton (Ohio) Weekly Telegraph, the first recorded use of the specific term in its modern astronomical sense. Surely, it is no coincidence that the blasphemous phrase “planet earth” was coined on the very eve of the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species!
Infiltration of Catholic Institutions
The Templeton Foundation donates 70 million dollars each year to various institutions to advance its gnostic agenda. Besides being a major donor to the Biologos Foundation, the leading promoter of theistic evolution in the protestant world, the Templeton Foundation has also given substantial amounts of money to Catholic institutions. Biologos itself funded the Thomistic Evolution website to promote theistic evolution to Catholics using arguments that have been rebutted in the “Replies to Critics” section of the Kolbe Center website and in the article by Fr. Thomas Hickey and Eric Bermingham at this link. A recent article published by Creation Ministries International identified some other recipients of Templeton funding:
Vatican Observatory Foundation— “Building a bridge between faith and astronomy”
John Carroll University— “Integrating science into college and pre-theology programs in US Roman Catholic seminaries”
Union Theological Seminary— “Project to develop a spiritual worldview compatible with and informed by science”
Cambridge Muslim College— “Developing religious leaders with scientific awareness”
American Association for the Advancement of Science— “Engaging scientists in the science and religion dialogue”
Luther Seminary— “Science for youth ministry: The plausibility of transcendence”
Christianity Today— “Building an audience for science and faith”
And an examination of the nature of the grants that the foundation provides, as well as the purpose behind these grants, is telling indeed.
Other grants have been made to train Roman Catholic teachers and preachers to engage the dialogue between science and religion, to promote ‘science’ engagement in rabbinic training, and to measure science engagement in Roman Catholic high schools and seminaries. Further investigation into the nature and purpose of these grants reveals a common thread. For example, La Jolla Presbyterian Church received a grant from the Templeton Foundation for a program that “seeks to engage young adults (college and post-graduate) in a discussion of science and faith with leading scientists who are Christians.”
The McGrath Institute for Church Life at Notre Dame University received a $1.675 million grant for their Science and Religion Initiative, which “seeks to frame science education within the broader context of Catholic theology.” According to the institute’s director, “The perceived conflict between science and religion is one of the main reasons young people say they leave the Catholic church… this grant allows us to address this misperception and help high school teachers create pedagogies that show that science and religion—far from being incompatible—are partners in the search for truth.”
It is bitterly ironic that an Institute at Notre Dame University should receive more than one and a half million dollars from the Templeton Foundation to help check the mass exodus of Catholic young people out of the Church with more evolutionary indoctrination. In reality, evolution-based accounts of origins have been main-stream in Catholic schools, universities, and seminaries for more than 60 years and are directly responsible for destroying the foundations of the Faith for generations of Catholics. For Catholic intellectuals to argue that more evolution-based teaching will stop the flood of young Catholics out of the Church is like Planned Parenthood executives arguing that more sex education will reduce teen pregnancy. In both cases, the proposed cure is actually the primary cause of the disease—the loss of supernatural faith in the “whole counsel of God,“ on the one hand, and the destruction of modesty and innocence on the other.
Through the prayers of the Mother of God and of all the Holy Angels and Saints, may the Holy Ghost guide us all into all the Truth!
Yours in Christ through the Immaculata in union with St. Joseph,
Hugh Owen